Efficient Transformer Inference

Overview

The field aims to make Transformer serving faster and cheaper, especially for autoregressive decoding and long contexts where attention, KV caches, memory movement, and hardware utilization are bottlenecks. Approaches include linear, sparse, windowed, or phase-aware attention; cache compression and sharing; quantization, pruning, and early exits; and optimized kernels, compilers, accelerators, and distributed or encrypted execution. Many methods adapt computation by token, layer, or workload, while others co-design model structure with hardware such as GPUs, CPUs, NPUs, and FPGAs. The central tension is turning theoretical savings into measured end-to-end speed and energy gains without unacceptable quality loss, since results depend on the model, workload, and hardware.

Latest papers

CardsList

122 papers15 papers in the last four weeks, up 7% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Pianist Transformer: Towards Expressive Piano Performance Rendering via Scalable Self-Supervised Pre-Training

    Dec 2, 2025Hong-Jie You, Jie-Jing Shao, Xiao-Wen Yang +3Efficient Transformer InferenceSelf-Supervised Pre-Training

  2. Controllably Efficient Language Models

    Nov 7, 2025Jatin Prakash, Aahlad Puli, Rajesh RanganathEfficient Transformer InferenceLong-Context Language Modeling