Yuanbo Wen
2025
QiMeng-Attention: SOTA Attention Operator is generated by SOTA Attention Algorithm
Qirui Zhou
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Shaohui Peng
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Weiqiang Xiong
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Haixin Chen
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Yuanbo Wen
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Haochen Li
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Ling Li
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Qi Guo
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Yongwei Zhao
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Ke Gao
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Ruizhi Chen
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Yanjun Wu
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Zhao Chen
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Yunji Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
The attention operator remains a critical performance bottleneck in large language models (LLMs), particularly for long-context scenarios. While FlashAttention is the most widely used and effective GPU-aware acceleration algorithm, it must require time-consuming and hardware-specific manual implementation, limiting adaptability across GPU architectures. Existing LLMs have shown a lot of promise in code generation tasks, but struggle to generate high-performance attention code. The key challenge is it cannot comprehend the complex data flow and computation process of the attention operator and utilize low-level primitive to exploit GPU performance.To address the above challenge, we propose an LLM-friendly Thinking Language (LLM-TL) to help LLMs decouple the generation of high-level optimization logic and low-level implementation on GPU, and enhance LLMs’ understanding of attention operator.Along with a 2-stage reasoning workflow, TL-Code generation and translation, the LLMs can automatically generate FlashAttention implementation on diverse GPUs, establishing a self-optimizing paradigm for generating high-performance attention operators in attention-centric algorithms.Verified on A100, RTX8000, and T4 GPUs, the performance of our methods significantly outshines that of vanilla LLMs, achieving a speed-up of up to 35.16×.Besides, our method not only surpasses human-optimized libraries (cuDNN and official library) in most scenarios but also extends support to unsupported hardware and data types, reducing development time from months to minutes compared with human experts.
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- Haixin Chen 1
- Ruizhi Chen 1
- Zhao Chen (陈钊) 1
- Yunji Chen 1
- Ke Gao 1
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