FlexAttention: A Programming Model for Generating Fused Attention Variants.

Juechu Dong, BOYUAN FENG, Driss Guessous, Yanbo Liang, Horace He

Keywords: compiler, attention, sparsity

TL;DR: Flexible and fast attention.

Abstract:

Over the past 7 years, attention has become one of the most important primitives in deep learning. The primary approach to optimize attention is FlashAttention, which fuses the operation together, drastically improving both the runtime and the memory consumption. However, the importance of FlashAttention combined with its monolithic nature poses a problem for researchers aiming to try new attention variants --- a "software lottery".
This problem is exacerbated by the difficulty of writing efficient fused attention kernels, resisting traditional compiler-based approaches.
We introduce FlexAttention, a novel compiler-driven programming model that allows implementing the majority of attention variants in a few lines of idiomatic PyTorch code. We demonstrate that many existing attention variants (e.g. Alibi, Document Masking, PagedAttention, etc.) can be implemented via FlexAttention, and that we achieve competitive performance compared to these handwritten kernels. Finally, we demonstrate how FlexAttention allows for easy compsition of attention variants, solving the "hypercube problem" of attention variants.

Submission Number: 278