Tensor Programs

Recent momentum

-75%

2 papers in the last 28 days · 0.1% of indexed attention

Twelve weeks of publication activity for this topic as it is defined today.

Weekly history

Recent digests

What was published in this topic, kept on the site without email delivery.

Period ending 2026-09-07

2 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Tensor Programs.

54 papers

Latest in Tensor Programs

Sep 3, 2026cs.LG

Hardware-Aware FP4 FlashAttention-4

Blackwell's 4-bit floating-point (FP4) tensor cores do not automatically make attention faster because softmax conversion and on-chip dependencies dominate once its matrix products shrink. We address this with \emph{Direct-P} for noncausal inference and a causal path that passes the forward quantization directly into backward. Direct-P maps scores directly to FP4 probabilities and reaches up to 2.13×\times the bfloat16 (BF16) forward throughput on an NVIDIA GB200. The causal path reconstructs probabilities from saved quantized queries and keys and uses 8-bit floating-point (FP8) gradient operands, accelerating a complete single-GPU 8-billion-parameter update by up to 1.14×\times. Matched distributed training retains FP8 probabilities and values; every tested MXFP4 probability/value training trajectory diverges.
Robert Hu
Sep 1, 2026cs.LG

Superposed Latent Autoencoder

Autoencoders typically meet tight latent-memory budgets by making each latent representation smaller, sacrificing representational capacity. We ask a different question: can multiple wider latents be stored together instead? We introduce the Superposed Latent Autoencoder (SLAE), which preserves high-capacity latent representations while sharing storage through learned superposition. SLAE transforms latents into storage-friendly codes, binds them with randomized keys, superposes multiple codes into a single memory tensor, and learns to recover each latent before decoding. Under the same storage budget, SLAE replaces irreversible dimensional bottlenecks with structured interference that can be suppressed. Across CIFAR-10/100, SVHN, STL-10, Tiny ImageNet, and a wide range of memory budgets, SLAE substantially improves the reconstruction--memory tradeoff, reducing reconstruction error by up to 56% over conventional autoencoders at matched storage. Further analysis shows that SLAE's advantage comes from making wider representations usable under the same storage budget. These gains also extend beyond reconstruction: the information preserved by SLAE improves downstream classification by up to 16.79 percentage points under the same memory budget. Our results suggest a new principle for representation compression: instead of making every latent smaller, keep representations wide and let them share memory.
Quanling Zhao, Jiaying Yang, Tianqi Zhang +4
Aug 10, 2026cs.DC

Hand-Written PTX Tensor-Core GEMM Kernels: A Multi-Precision Study on NVIDIA L4

High-performance Tensor Core kernels rely on a low-level PTX pipeline built from asynchronous data movement with cp.async, warp-level matrix loads with ldmatrix, and matrix multiply-accumulate operations with mma.sync. However, most application code accesses Tensor Cores indirectly through the WMMA C++ API. This paper asks a focused, practical question: when does replacing WMMA with hand-written PTX actually pay off? To answer this question, we conduct a controlled, single-GPU study on an NVIDIA L4 GPU (Ada, SM89), comparing double-buffered WMMA baselines with a family of hand-written PTX GEMM kernels across FP16, INT8, and INT4 arithmetic and square problem sizes from N=512N=512 to N=8192N=8192. Every kernel is profiled with Nsight Compute across the full metric set, and PTX speedups are reported relative to the corresponding same-precision WMMA baseline. Hand-written PTX provides no end-to-end speedup for FP16, because its instruction-level gains are offset by operand-packing overhead. In contrast, the PTX kernels achieve consistent speedups of 1.4x-1.8x for INT8, driven primarily by lower instruction counts and better global-memory coalescing, and 2.9x-4.3x for INT4, where native mma.sync.m16n8k64.s4 execution avoids the software-emulated sequence used by the WMMA path. Relative to the FP16 WMMA baseline, the best quantized kernels reach 34.4x (INT8) and 98.7x (INT4) at N=8192N=8192. Across these experiments, occupancy is a poor predictor of throughput. For large matrices, performance instead tracks memory-system behavior -- particularly global-load coalescing and DRAM-active cycles -- more closely than Tensor Core utilization. These results identify the precisions and operating regimes in which the additional complexity of hand-written PTX is justified.
Matt J. Borowski, Blazej Osinski
Aug 10, 2026cs.LG

SwiftQK: Fast and Communication-Efficient Tensor Parallelism for Query-Key Normalization

Query-Key Normalization (QK-Norm) improves the training stability and quality of modern Large Language Models (LLMs). However, under Tensor Parallelism (TP), layerwise QK-Norm introduces additional cross-GPU communication because the normalization factor depends on the full hidden vector. We present SwiftQK, a multi-GPU RMSNorm kernel that exchanges only scalar normalization statistics and overlaps the remaining Peer-to-Peer reduction with independent element-wise computation in a deadlock-safe persistent kernel. Evaluations on recent LLMs show that SwiftQK reduces QK-Norm latency by 81.4--93.9% relative to the standard TP QK-Norm using full-vector All-Gather. In end-to-end serving, SwiftQK reduces TPOT on average by 29.5% over the All-Gather-based baseline and by 14.3% over an optimized scalar-aggregation implementation.
Gyudong Kim, Wonjun Han, Young Geun Kim
Aug 1, 2026cs.LO

Tensor Probabilistic Model Checking of Finite-Horizon Markov Chains (Extended Version)

We reexamine the problem of verifying Markov chains with respect to step-bounded reachability probabilities. Prevailing approaches rely on encoding the state-transition matrix using either explicit or symbolic representations. While these approaches are effective for sparse transition dynamics, they scale less favorably in the dense regime. Our insight is to cast probabilistic model checking of Markov chains as computations over dense tensors. This methodology enables the use of off-the-shelf compiler toolchains for optimized execution of these tensor computations on hardware accelerators. We prove the soundness of the methodology of mapping probabilistic model checking to tensor computations. We implement our approach in a tool called Tessa . Empirical evaluation shows that Tessa unlocks massive speedups over state-of-theart methods on selected benchmarks from the literature.
Jianlin Li, Nick Guo, Peter Ye +1
Jul 30, 2026cs.LG

It's All Just Vectorization: einx, a Universal Notation for Tensor Operations

Tensor operations represent a cornerstone of modern scientific computing. However, the Numpy-like notation adopted by predominant tensor frameworks is often difficult to read and write and prone to so-called shape errors, i.a., due to following inconsistent rules across a large, complex collection of operations. Alternatives like einsum and einops have gained popularity, but are inherently restricted to few operations and lack the generality required for a universal model of tensor programming. To derive a better paradigm, we revisit vectorization as a function for transforming tensor operations, and use it to both lift lower-order operations to higher-order operations, and conceptually decompose higher-order operations to lower-order operations and their vectorization. Building on the universal nature of vectorization, we introduce einx, a universal notation for tensor operations. It uses declarative, pointful expressions that are defined by analogy with loop notation and represent the vectorization of tensor operations. The notation reduces the large APIs of existing frameworks to a small set of elementary operations, applies consistent rules across all operations, and enables a clean, readable and writable representation in code. We provide an implementation of einx that is embedded in Python and integrates seamlessly with existing tensor frameworks: https://github.com/fferflo/einx
Florian Fervers, Sebastian Bullinger, Christoph Bodensteiner +1
Jul 28, 2026cs.AR

At-the-Roofline Sparse Tensor Contractions on Vector Processors for Transformer Inference

Fine-grained weight pruning and activation sparsification have emerged as effective approaches for reducing the compute and memory cost of inference for Transformer models. In the moderate-sparsity regime, Gustavson's dataflow provides a natural execution model for exploiting both activation and weight sparsity on vector processors through metadata-driven indexed accumulation. However, existing RVV architectures lack native support for this pattern, forcing kernels to rely on software index decoding and L1-backed indexed memory operations that keep sparse tensor contractions far below their roofline performance bound. We present Ventaglio, a runtime-configurable sparse execution unit coupled with RVV ISA extensions that drives sparse tensor contractions toward their roofline through indexed gather-accumulate-scatter support. Integrated into an open-source vector processing cluster and implemented in 12nm FinFET, Ventaglio accelerates sparse tensor contraction kernels by 6.97.4×6.9\text{--}7.4\times over optimized RVV baselines, with only 3.1%3.1\% area overhead for a cluster of tightly-L1 coupled vector processing elements. We build a performance-accurate instruction-level model of the Ventaglio extension, calibrate it against RTL implementation, and leverage it for scale-out performance analysis on a large 4×44\times4 multi-cluster system. Using a DuoGPT-pruned LLaMA-3-8B model with practical 4060%40\text{--}60\% dual sparsity, Ventaglio achieves 2.405.25×2.40\text{--}5.25\times and 2.063.16×2.06\text{--}3.16\times speedup over dense baselines during prefill and autoregressive decoding, respectively.
Bowen Wang, Chi Zhang, Diyou Shen +3
Jul 25, 2026cs.DC

X-Stage: Modeling Post-Issue Backpressure in GPU Communication--Computation Fusion

Fine-grained, device-initiated communication allows fused GPU kernels to issue remote stores directly from their compute pipelines, a pattern increasingly used in expert parallelism (EP), tensor parallelism (TP), and Ulysses-style sequence parallelism (UP). Existing designs reason about where communication is issued and when remote data becomes ready, but lack a quantitative model of the sender-side interval after a remote store is accepted and before it becomes visible at the destination. This interval determines whether communication remains decoupled from computation or backpressures it. We identify X-Stage, a software-visible post-issue stage with finite decoupling. Downstream pressure can dissipate while the issuer resumes useful work, whereas sustained injection consumes X-Stage headroom and eventually stalls the compute pipeline. We characterize this behavior and build a calibrated model that predicts whether remote-store arrivals accumulate backpressure or recover during intervening computation. Guided by the model, we reshape bursty arrivals when they would exhaust X-Stage headroom and exploit natural compute windows when headroom can recover concurrently. Evaluation across representative EP, TP, and UP workloads shows up to 1.62x fused-kernel, 1.75x end-to-end, and 1.43x sender-visible speedup, respectively. Microbenchmarks further validate the model's predictions of backlog accumulation, recovery, and sender-side backpressure.
Jianwen Xian, Zhiyuan Xu, Yuchen Li +9
Jul 21, 2026cs.AR

BaseRT: Advancing Best-in-Class LLM Inference with Apple M5 Neural Accelerators

Apple's M5 generation introduces a redesigned GPU architecture in which every core carries a dedicated Neural Accelerator: on-die matrix units exposed through the Metal4 tensor API. We show that BaseRT, our native Metal inference runtime for large language models on Apple Silicon, exploits these units to push inference throughput on Apple hardware substantially beyond both llama.cpp and MLX. Building on BaseRT's framework-free design, we add a family of hand-written Metal4 tensor-core kernels (including dense and mixture-of-experts GEMM and flash-attention prefill kernels) that route the compute-bound matrix multiplications of inference through the M5 Neural Accelerators while leaving the memory-bound decode path on our existing specialised kernels. On an Apple M5 Pro, across fifteen model configurations spanning the Qwen3, Qwen3.5/3.6, Llama3.2, and Gemma4 families from sub-1B to 35B parameters, BaseRT delivers up to 6.4×6.4\times higher prompt-processing throughput than llama.cpp and 3.9×3.9\times higher than MLX, with the largest margins on the mixture-of-experts models where matrix multiplication dominates, while maintaining its lead on decode of up to 1.75×1.75\times over llama.cpp and 1.33×1.33\times over MLX. These results establish a new performance ceiling for on-device LLM inference and show that the M5's tensor cores are the decisive lever for prompt processing on Apple Silicon. BaseRT is publicly available at https://github.com/basecompute/baseRT.
Fabian Waschkowski, Prabod Rathnayaka, Lukas Wesemann
Jul 20, 2026cs.LG

Sobek: Streaming Equivariant Tensor Product Convolutions

Equivariant graph neural networks repeatedly apply edge-conditioned tensor-product convolutions over graph edges. Conventional implementations materialize edge-specific weights, messages, and adjoints, causing tensor-product workspace and memory traffic to grow rapidly with graph size and operator width. This limits feasible workloads and can prevent larger problems from fully utilizing the GPU. We show that these edge-sized intermediates are artifacts of the execution schedule, not requirements of the equivariant operator. By reassociating radial projection, spherical-harmonic coupling, and graph aggregation, edge-local products can be consumed directly into bounded receiver-side state. The resulting streaming formulation preserves fully connected multiplicity mixing and extends through forward, backward, and double backward. We implement this formulation in Sobek, a generated-CUDA backend, and evaluate it across edge-scaling regimes and varied feature structures. Across two operator families and all three differentiation orders, Sobek is faster in all 75 capacity-matched comparisons, with speedups ranging from 1.2×1.2\times to 49.7×49.7\times, and reduces peak allocated memory by up to 99%. It also executes workloads up to two orders of magnitude beyond OpenEquivariance's capacity while retaining near-peak throughput. These results show that edge-scaled tensor-product workspace is a property of the conventional schedule, not of equivariant convolution itself.
Vladimir Chorošajev, Cédric Bény
Jul 7, 2026cs.LG

Quantitative Gaussian-Process limits of Tensor Programs

We study the infinite-width Gaussian-process limit of random neural networks through the lens of tensor programs, and we provide a quantitative convergence theory in Wasserstein distance. Our main result gives explicit finite-width error bounds, of order inverse square-root of the widths between finite-network executions and their Gaussian-process limits. The framework is architecture-agnostic and covers feed-forward models together with weight-sharing schemes relevant for recurrent and transformer-type architectures.
Andrea Agazzi, Eloy Mosig García, Dario Trevisan
Jun 30, 2026cs.DC

From Tensor Buffer to Distributed Memory Hierarchy: A Survey of KV Cache Management for LLM Serving

The key-value (KV) cache has become a first-order memory object in LLM serving rather than a temporary per-request tensor. This survey classifies more than thirty KV-management systems and frameworks using four axes: locality, lifetime, ownership, and substrate. The axes reveal five architectural archetypes -- local-paged, disaggregated-pipeline, shared-store, memory-pool, and hybrid-tier. Once workload and hardware are fixed, ownership accounts for much of the remaining design variance among distributed systems. The survey also audits current evaluations and identifies seven missing KV-specific measurements, linking them to open problems in fault tolerance, isolation, tiered eviction, speculative decoding, MoE serving, and shared-cache semantics.
Jie Li, Tongyang Wang, Yong Chen
Jun 30, 2026math.NA

Online TT-ALS for Streaming Tensor Decomposition with Incremental Orthogonalization

Tensor Train (TT) decomposition is a powerful technique for analyzing high-dimensional data. Existing algorithms for computing TT decompositions can be categorized into two main types: conventional batch-based approaches and recursive online methods. In the context of streaming data, batch methods typically achieve higher reconstruction accuracy but often suffer from memory exhaustion, while online methods provide greater computational efficiency. In this work, we introduce Online TT-ALS (Alternating Least Squares), an algorithm that sequentially enforces orthogonality constraints. This approach allows for efficient and exact updates of the core tensor while maintaining high reconstruction accuracy. Theoretically, we prove that enforcing these orthogonal gauge constraints guarantees monotonic decrease of the local objective function and temporal smoothness. Computationally, our deterministic single-sweep update reduces the rank dependence from quadratic to linear, achieving an overall complexity of O(In1r)\mathcal{O}(I^{n-1} r). Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing online techniques not only in terms of mathematical approximation accuracy but also in human perception-based video quality metrics. Furthermore, compared to recent deep learning-based paradigms, our algebraic approach achieves speedups of several orders of magnitude. Consequently, our method exhibits high computational efficiency and is suitable for low-latency real-time processing applications.
Hiroki Takeda, Yuto Miyatake, Daisuke Furihata
Jun 24, 2026cs.PL

Axon: A Synthesizing Superoptimizer for Tensor Programs

Writing high performance kernels for AI accelerators requires deep expertise in tiling, instruction selection, data layout, and operator fusion placing a significant burden on programmers. In this paper, we focus on tile based AI accelerator programs and present Axon, a synthesizing superoptimizer for tensor programs: it uses program synthesis to automatically generate target instructions from semantics specifications, and explores semantically equivalent program variants to select the best performing kernel empirically. Axon discovers algebraic transformations by propagating operators through computation graphs and uses SMT over unbounded tensors to guarantee that all transformations preserve semantics without requiring hand crafted rewrite rules. It then lowers tensor operations to target ISA instructions, explores tiling configurations constrained by hardware descriptions, and fuses operators and instructions to minimize memory traffic.
Akash Kothari, Shaowei Zhu, Daniel Kroening +1
Jun 23, 2026cs.SE

Test-Input Generation for Tensor Programs: What Actually Finds Kernel Bugs

Test-input generation for tensor kernels is folkloric. Most projects pick a representative shape and dtype, run a fixed-shape allclose-style check, and ship. We make the choices explicit and measure them. Using the gpuemu op-schema-aware seeded fuzzer (arXiv:2606.20128), we evaluate seven test-generation strategies across a 26-op corpus (16 correct controls and 10 LLM-style buggy variants seeded with documented transcription patterns) on an RTX 3060 GPU instance. Strategies vary the shape candidate set, the dtype mix, and the input value distribution. We report each strategy on two axes: bug recall and control false-positive (FP) rate. Boundary-only shape sampling is the operationally safe winner: 78% recall on the 10 buggy kernels with 0% FP on the 16 controls. Adversarial value sampling reaches higher recall (99%) but inflates control FP to 94% because the strategy injects NaN and Inf inputs and the validator's NaN check fires on every kernel that propagates them, not only on buggy kernels. On the two softmax tail-mask bugs the "regular" strategy (no boundary shapes) catches 0%, while boundary raises recall to 100% and 62% respectively. That gap is the clearest single signal in the data. The corpus result is about which seeded bug patterns each strategy catches, not about the bug rate of any specific deployed LLM.
Dipankar Sarkar
Jun 22, 2026cs.LG

FORGE: Fused On-Register Gradient Elimination for Memory-Efficient LLM Training

Reverse-mode differentiation computes every weight gradient, writes it to memory, and only then lets the optimizer read it back. This two-phase schedule sets the memory ceiling of modern training: at the seam between the phases, every layer's gradient is live at once. We argue that this materialized gradient is an artifact of how differentiation is staged, not a quantity that learning requires -- and we eliminate it. FORGE folds the optimizer step into the backward pass and applies it one tile at a time, entirely in registers, so each gradient tile is consumed the instant it is produced and never becomes a tensor. The fusion changes only when the update happens, not what it computes: in full precision the fused step is provably exact -- the identical optimizer update, for every element-wise rule -- and that exactness survives tensor- and sequence-parallel sharding; in the bf16 and 8-bit regimes used in practice it is faithful rather than bit-identical, its deviation bounded and, for the weight store, rendered unbiased by stochastic rounding. Because each gradient tile is born and consumed in the same registers, it is never converted down to bf16 to be stored and read back; FORGE thus preserves the full-precision fidelity that both bf16 and 8-bit optimizers lose to that conversion. Nor is the method tied to one architecture or one optimizer: linear layers are ubiquitous, and FORGE reclaims the gradient memory of any of them under any element-wise rule. Empirically FORGE more than halves the memory of an optimizer step and, at the small batch sizes typical of fine-tuning and continued pretraining, runs about 1.5x faster; integrated into tensor-parallel Megatron-LM it fits 8B training at four times the micro-batch a standard optimizer allows on the same GPUs.
Dikshant Kukreja, Kritarth Prasad, Avinash Anand +6
Jun 19, 2026cs.LG

Demystifying Numerical Instability in LLM Inference: Achieving Reproducible Inference for Mission-Critical Tasks with HEAL

As Large Language Models (LLMs) deploy into mission-critical domains (e.g., finance, medicine, and law), output reproducibility has become a strict system requirement. While practitioners use greedy decoding to eliminate algorithmic stochasticity, empirical deployments with 16-bit precisions still exhibit catastrophic output divergence across heterogeneous GPUs. Through SASS-level profiling, we reveal that this inconsistency is fundamentally driven by truncation errors introduced during downcasting at kernel boundaries. However, achieving reproducibility via a global FP32 pipeline incurs prohibitive system penalties: bypassing 16-bit hardware accelerators hurts compute efficiency, while upcasting the KV cache doubles memory overhead. To bridge this gap, we propose Hybrid Error ALleviation (HEAL), a targeted intervention that approximates FP32 precision while resolving hardware constraints through two targeted mechanisms. First, recognizing that floating-point formats underutilize their bit-width for Q, K, V tensors, HEAL applies INT16 quantization that preserves numerical stability without expanding the KV cache footprint. Second, HEAL synthesizes high-precision matrix multiplications via an algebraic error compensation strategy, executing entirely on high-throughput 16-bit Tensor Cores. To evaluate our approach practically, we introduce MCR-Bench, a benchmark targeting reproducibility in mission-critical tasks. HEAL achieves the same level of reproducibility on downstream tasks as the FP32 baseline while reducing the performance overhead by up to 7.1x.
Zhenting Zhu, Lucas Thai, Shan Yu +5
Jun 12, 2026cs.LG

Realizing Native INT8 Compute for Diffusion Transformers on Consumer GPUs: A Fused INT8 GEMM Kernel for Ideogram 4.0

Post-training INT8 (W8A8) quantization of diffusion transformers is widely deployed as a speed optimization, yet on consumer Ampere GPUs it is frequently slower than the FP8 and NF4 alternatives it is meant to beat. We trace this to a software artifact: the production "INT8" forward quantizes weights and activations only to immediately dequantize them back to bf16 and run a bf16 matrix multiply, never engaging the GPU's INT8 tensor cores, so the hardware's compute advantage is left entirely unrealized. We close this gap with a single fused Triton INT8 GEMM (int8xint8->int32 on Ampere tensor cores, with per-token x per-channel dequantization and bias folded into the epilogue, autotuned per GEMM shape) dropped into the Ideogram 4.0 diffusion transformer's linear layers in place of the dequantize-to-bf16 path. In the kernel, the int8xint8->int32 accumulation is bit-exact against torch._int_mm and the dequantized output matches the reference at cosine similarity 1.0 with no NaNs, running 2.8-4.2x faster than bf16 per GEMM. End to end it delivers a ~1.1x (~9-10%) speedup at 768px, and at 1024px it generates an image in 156.5 s on a single RTX 3090, faster than the single-card NF4 (164.5 s) and FP8 (172.9 s) baselines, at no measurable quality cost on these point estimates (PickScore/CLIPScore). INT8 thus goes from the slowest variant to the fastest, and 1024px becomes single-GPU feasible. The primary speed criterion (beat FP8, by ~9.5%) is comfortably met; the NF4 margin (~4.9%, single-run n=4) is within run-to-run variance we did not quantify and is best read as consistent with meeting the stretch target. We close with an honest deployment map: the win is specific to consumer Ampere, and on A100 and B200 the same kernel loses to those cards' fast native bf16/FP8 paths.
Ali Asaria, Tony Salomone, Deep Gandhi
Jun 11, 2026cs.LG

Performance Analysis and Optimization of 3D Generative Diffusion Models across GPU Architectures

Diffusion models have become essential for high-fidelity 3D MRI synthesis, yet their deployment remains constrained by substantial GPU resource demands arising from hundreds of U-Net evaluations per sample and a highly heterogeneous kernel behavior. This paper performs a comprehensive performance analysis of the state-of-the-art medical diffusion model, Med-DDPM, across three generations of NVIDIA architectures to study kernel-level runtime breakdowns, instruction-mix characteristics, memory system utilization, warp-level activities, and profiler priority-score estimates. We show that training is overwhelmingly dominated by cuDNN convolution and implicit-GEMM kernels, with inefficiencies arising from memory-access patterns, tensor-layout conversions, and limited Tensor Core utilization. Guided by these insights, we evaluate two architecture-aware optimizations TF32 Tensor Core activation and a 3D channels-last layout and demonstrate that they reduce SM cycles by up to 100x, cut dynamic instructions by 100x, raise Tensor Core utilization from 1.45 to 9.98x, and increase IPC by 7% on A100, all without degrading synthesis quality.
Jeeho Ryoo, Yongchan Jung, Muhammad Ali Khaliq +3
Jun 9, 2026cs.LG

Recursive Binding on a Budget: Subspace Carving in Order-p Tensor Memories

Tensor Product Representations provide the structural fidelity required for symbolic reasoning in models but suffer from exponential dimensionality growth when encoding deep recursive structures. Conversely, Vector Symbolic Architectures maintain constant dimensionality but sacrifice capacity and fidelity due to noisy compression via superposition. In this work, we propose Orthogonal Subspace Carving (OSC), a memory architecture that binds fillers to roles by projecting onto the null space of the role basis before aggregating into a fixed order-p tensor. OSC uses projections to enforce geometric orthogonality between bound structures within a static memory trace. We show that this mechanism decouples the tensor order from the structural depth, enabling deep recursive binding within a constant memory footprint. By performing retrieval via recognition, this construction allows for component vectors that are orders of magnitude smaller than the memory tensor, giving superior memory efficiency in settings involving high superposition. We also show that TPR is a special case of binding in Clifford algebra, and give a Clifford formulation of OSC.
Travis Pence, Daisuke Yamada, Vikas Singh
Jun 8, 2026cs.LG

Toward Compiler World Models: Learning Latent Dynamics for Efficient Tensor Program Search

Tensor program optimization is essential for modern machine learning systems, but its search space is enormous. Existing auto-schedulers reduce measurement cost with learned cost models, yet they usually evaluate each candidate as a static code snapshot, ignoring the schedule trajectory that produced it. This makes them insensitive to action dependencies and vulnerable to superficial code variations. We propose a \emph{world-model-inspired} evaluator that models schedule evaluation as action-conditioned latent dynamics over program states. Starting from the initial program, it rolls out scheduling actions in a continuous latent space with a lightweight transition model, avoiding expensive AST mutation and repeated code encoding. The final dynamic representation is combined with action and hardware features to rank candidates. Implemented in TVM AutoScheduler, our method improves representative-subgraph latency over Ansor by 1.37×\times on GPU and 1.54×\times on CPU under the same 64-trial budget. It also matches Ansor-10K within 2.2% geometric mean using 10×\times fewer measurements, and accelerates full-model inference over PyTorch/PyTorch-opt(cuDNN) by 4.61×\times/3.67×\times geometric mean.
Haolin Pan, Lianghong Huang, Xvlin Zhou +2
Jun 7, 2026cs.DC

APEX4: Efficient Pure W4A4 LLM Inference via Intra-SM Compute Rebalancing

W4A4 quantization promises full utilization of INT4 Tensor Cores, yet group dequantization overhead on CUDA Cores has driven existing systems to mixed-precision fallbacks. We present the first systematic study of how intra-SM compute balance governs this bottleneck. Through controlled benchmarks across four GPUs from Ampere and Ada architectures, we identify the Tensor Cores to CUDA Cores throughput ratio (ρρ) as the primary hardware indicator: the W4A4-g128 kernel yields 2.02.0--2.5×2.5\times speedup on RTX3090 (ρ=16ρ=16) yet degrades to 0.430.43--0.47×0.47\times on A100 (ρ=64ρ=64) in compute-bond scenarios, establishing W4A4 viability as platform-dependent rather than universally infeasible. Guided by this finding, we build \textbf{APEX4}, which co-designs pure INT4 GEMM kernels with ρρ-aware granularity adaptation to mitigate the CUDA Cores dequantization bottleneck. APEX4 achieves perplexity within 0.63 of FP16 on LLaMA-2-70B and outperforms W4Ax Atom-g128 by 4.0%--4.4% in zero-shot accuracy. Deployed as a drop-in replacement in unmodified vLLM, it delivers up to 1.66×1.66\times end-to-end speedup on L40S (ρ=8ρ=8), and 1.78×1.78\times on RTX3090 (ρ=16ρ=16), 2.09×2.09\times on A40 (ρ=16ρ=16), while recovering A100 (ρ=64ρ=64) to 1.201.20--1.40×1.40\times via the mixed-granularity mode. Our code is available at https://github.com/APEX4-W4A4/APEX4-W4A4.
Hong Guo, Nianhui Guo, Weixing Wang +3
Jun 3, 2026cs.CV

MusaCoder: Native GPU Kernel Generation with Full-Stack Training on Moore Threads GPU

Native GPU kernel generation turns high-level tensor programs into executable, efficient low-level code. Existing Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with this task, while execution-based reinforcement learning suffers from sparse rewards, reward hacking, and training instability. We present MusaCoder, a full-stack training framework for native GPU kernel generation on CUDA and MUSA backends. MusaCoder combines progressive kernel-oriented data synthesis, diversity-preserving rejection fine-tuning, and execution-feedback Reinforcement Learning (RL) through MooreEval, a distributed verifier and reward environment. To stabilize RL, MusaCoder introduces PrimeEcho for first-turn-anchored multi-turn rewards, Buffered Dynamic Retry for recovering signals from all-failed hard samples, and MirrorPop for off-policy sequence filtering. Experiments on KernelBench and a MUSA-ported variant show that MusaCoder outperforms strong open-source and proprietary baselines in both correctness and empirical speedup, with the 9B model matching or exceeding frontier closed-source models and the 27B model establishing a new state of the art. These results demonstrate not only the effectiveness of full-stack execution-feedback training for native kernel generation, but also the capability of Moore Threads GPUs to support the complete LLM post-training stack, providing a practical foundation for large-model training and optimization on emerging accelerators.
Kun Cheng, Songshuo Lu, Sicong Liao +7
Jun 3, 2026cs.LG

Operator Fusion for LLM Inference on the Tensix Architecture

This study addresses on-device inference bottlenecks of Transformer models on Tenstorrent's Tensix architecture and proposes an operator fusion strategy that enhances data locality. RMSNorm is fused with matrix multiplication in self-attention and in the FFN, enabling back-to-back execution of memory-bound and compute-bound operators in on-chip SRAM to significantly reduce DRAM reads/writes of intermediate results and scheduling overhead. To support multi-core parallelism, a NoC-based multicast mechanism is leveraged in which row/column master nodes efficiently distribute inputs and weights across the core mesh, alleviating DRAM bandwidth contention. Experiments on the Wormhole platform with Qwen2.5-0.5B, Qwen3-0.6B, and Qwen3-4B show up to 37.44% latency reduction for attention and 15.89% for MLP, with up to 7.91% reduction per decoder layer, while Pearson Correlation Coefficient (PCC) remains above 98.75%, confirming significant end-to-end efficiency gains under numerical consistency.
Qingbo Wu, Ke Li, Wenzhu Wang +3
May 29, 2026cs.LG

On Efficient Scaling of GNNs via IO-Aware Layers Implementations

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are bottlenecked by sparse, irregular memory access. Popular frameworks such as DGL and PyTorch Geometric support general message passing, but complex layers often materialize edge-wise intermediates, increasing memory traffic and limiting scalability on large graphs. We take an I/O- and arithmetic-intensity--centric view and show that widely used layers fall into three kernel families: SpMM-based convolutions, reduction-based aggregations, and attention-based layers (GATv2/Graph Transformer). For each family, we develop GPU kernels that reduce data movement, improve locality, and remain robust across realistic graphs. We also study graph reordering and find that its impact depends on the kernel mapping: it benefits neighbor-parallel (gather-dominated) kernels more consistently than feature-parallel designs. Empirically, our fused attention kernels reach up to 3.9×\textbf{3.9}\times speedup for Graph Transformer (median 1.6×\textbf{1.6}\times), with Tensor Core (block-sparse) variants up to 7.3×\textbf{7.3}\times on locally dense graphs; for GATv2 we reach up to 8.5×\textbf{8.5}\times speedup (median 2.0×\textbf{2.0}\times) while reducing peak memory by up to 76×\textbf{76}\times (median 6×\textbf{6}\times). Our degree-aware reduction kernels achieve up to 10×\textbf{10}\times speedup (median 2.6×\textbf{2.6}\times). For SpMM-based layers, properly cached cuSPARSE achieves up to 8×\textbf{8}\times speedup over DGL and outperforms evaluated custom baselines in the majority of evaluations. We release our implementations as drop-in replacements to support reproducible, hardware-aware GNN acceleration.
Daria Fomina, Daniil Krasylnikov, Alexey Boykov +3
May 29, 2026cs.LG

Graphical einops: bridging tensor networks and computation graphs

Architecture diagrams are ubiquitous in deep learning, but they are usually only representational: the tensor-program identities they suggest are still proved by prose and tensor-axis manipulation. We introduce a formal graphical calculus for the structural fragment of tensor programming underlying einops, making such diagrams proof-enabling. Our calculus represents tensor axes as nested graded tubes around a base type. The tube boundary recovers the undirected tensor-network view of axes, while the directed interior retains the operational reading of computation graphs. The key rewrite is grade-naturality: sliding spectacles over tubes. Standard equivariance proofs become short diagrammatic derivations. We additionally demonstrate how our rewrite system may be applied to convert attention masks into pre-processing operations, recovering efficient implementations of sparse attention blocks.
Vincent Wang-Maścianica, Nikhil Khatri
May 28, 2026cs.LG

Revisiting Padded Transformer Expressivity: Which Architectural Choices Matter and Which Don't

Recent work describes what transformers can and cannot compute through connections to boolean circuits, but existing results lack exact characterizations and are sensitive to modeling choices. Padded transformers -- to whose input filler symbols such as ``...'' are appended -- emerge as a useful gadget for establishing equivalences to circuit classes by providing polynomial space for adaptive parallel computation. However, only a limited set of padded transformer idealizations has been studied, leaving open how robustly these equivalences hold under changes to attention type, model width, and uniformity. We find that, under practical assumptions, padded transformers are surprisingly robust to all of these, and identify numeric precision and model depth as the main factors affecting expressivity. Concretely, we prove that polynomially padded L-uniform\text{L-uniform} constant-precision transformers are equivalent to L-uniform AC0\text{L-uniform AC}^0, while growing-precision ones achieve L-uniform TC0\text{L-uniform TC}^0 regardless of width. Furthermore, looping enables sequential processing analogous to circuits: logdN\log^d N-looped constant-precision transformers reach FO-uniform ACd\text{FO-uniform AC}^d, and growing-precision ones reach FO-uniform TCd\text{FO-uniform TC}^d. Interestingly, growing width or precision beyond logarithmic does not increase expressivity, and all our results hold for both softmax and average hard attention transformers.
Anej Svete, William Merrill, Ryan Cotterell +1
May 28, 2026cs.CV

SANA-Streaming: Real-time Streaming Video Editing with Hybrid Diffusion Transformer

Real-time streaming video-to-video editing (V2V) is critical for interactive applications such as live broadcasting and gaming, yet it remains a formidable challenge due to the stringent requirements for temporal consistency and inference throughput. In this paper, we present SANA-Streaming, a system-algorithm co-designed framework for high-resolution, real-time streaming video editing on consumer GPUs, with the following three core designs: (1) Hybrid Diffusion Transformer architecture introduces softmax attention in part of the blocks to improve local modeling capabilities while preserving the efficiency of linear layers. (2) Cycle-Reverse Regularization is a novel training strategy that enforces semantic consistency by predicting source frames from generated content via flow matching, improving temporal consistency without requiring paired long edited videos. (3) Efficient System Co-design combines fused GDN kernels and Mixed-Precision Quantization (MPQ) optimized for the NVIDIA Blackwell (RTX 5090) architecture. By profiling real-world throughput, our MPQ maximizes Tensor Core utilization while maintaining generation quality. The resulting system achieves real-time 1280 x 704 resolution editing at 24 end-to-end FPS on a single RTX 5090 GPU, with the DiT core running at 58 FPS. Experimental results demonstrate that our co-design approach significantly outperforms existing SOTA methods in both temporal coherence and system throughput.
Yuyang Zhao, Yicheng Pan, Qiyuan He +6
May 27, 2026cs.LG

RW-TTT: Batched Serving for Request-Owned Test-Time Training State

Test-time training (TTT) adapts an LLM during generation by reading and updating request-owned state, such as fast weights, low-rank deltas, or streaming learner state. This breaks batched LLM serving, which assumes shared static weights: serial execution is correct but slow, while naive batching can corrupt request state. We formulate this problem as read-write TTT serving and present RW-TTT , which tags each decode step with its owner, version, and READ/WRITE effect, batches only compatible phases, and commits updates only to the owner. On one GPU with eight fast-weight InPlace-TTT streams, RW-TTT reaches 274.61 aggregate tok/s, 9.31x over sequential serving and 3.44x over per-stream replicas under the same memory budget. It preserves behavior on RULER, a long-context benchmark, and passes owner/version checks.
Jian Yang, Zhizhuo Kou, Yao Tian +4
May 26, 2026cs.CV

Tensor Memory: Fixed-Size Recurrent State for Long-Horizon Transformers

Transformers process images and videos by flattening space and time into long token sequences. While attention and KV caching preserve past features, their memory grows with sequence length and they lack an explicit, persistent spatial state, making long-horizon video understanding and occlusion-sensitive reasoning difficult. We propose Tensor Memory, a lightweight module that augments Transformer blocks with a fixed-size recurrent 3D memory tensor: tokens write into a voxel grid via a differentiable soft write that deposits content as a Gaussian-weighted volume around a predicted continuous 3D location, the memory is updated with an efficient local interaction operator and gated recurrent dynamics, and tokens read back context via continuous sampling with gated residual fusion. Because the memory tensor has a constant size, Tensor Memory decouples state capacity from input length while preserving a spatial inductive bias. We evaluate the module on standard language, image, and video benchmarks and on a controlled toy diagnostic suite designed to isolate when persistent state is beneficial; it integrates with standard Transformer training pipelines and can be attached to or removed from existing blocks without other architectural changes.
Kabir Swain, Sijie Han, Daniel Karl I. Weidele +2
May 25, 2026cs.LG

Step-TP: A Grounded, Step-Level Dataset with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for LLM-Guided Tensor Program Optimization

Despite the strong reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), optimizing the execution efficiency of tensor programs remains challenging due to the need for precise, composable transformation decisions. Recent LLM-guided approaches frame tensor program optimization as an iterative decision process, but existing datasets provide only end-to-end optimized program pairs using token-inefficient representations, lacking verifiable step-level supervision and interpretability. As a result, LLMs struggle to make reliable single-step decisions in large combinatorial optimization spaces. We introduce Step-TP, a post-training dataset for tensor program optimization that provides grounded, atomic, step-level supervision with structured chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. Step-TP forms a closed reasoning loop over intermediate program states, enabling reliable multi-step optimization rather than outcome imitation. Its design is guided by four principles: (i) a token-efficient, verifiable intermediate representation (IR) that deterministically lowers to TVM TIR; (ii) atomic and composable optimization strategies that decompose complex trajectories into interpretable single-step decisions; (iii) structured CoT supervision coupled with explicit IR-to-IR state transitions; and (iv) strategy filtering to balance coverage while preventing shortcut exploitation. The dataset and implementation are available at a GitHub link, https://github.com/LIUMENGFAN-gif/StepTP.
Mengfan Liu, Da Zheng, Junwei Su +1
May 21, 2026cs.LG

Tensor Cache: Eviction-conditioned Associative Memory for Transformers

Autoregressive Transformer KV caches grow linearly with context length; sliding-window caching bounds memory but discards evicted tokens entirely, so relevant evidence outside the window becomes inaccessible. We introduce \emph{Tensor Cache}, a two-level cache that pairs sliding-window softmax attention as a first-level cache (L1) with a fixed-size outer-product fast-weight memory as a second-level cache (L2) fed by KV pairs evicted from the window. Recent tokens remain in exact local attention; evicted pairs are compressed into a per-layer matrix AA and read by future queries through a single matrix multiplication, exploiting the linear-attention identity qt(kivi)=qt,kiviq_t(k_i \otimes v_i)=\langle q_t,k_i\rangle v_i. A learned scalar gate fuses the L1 and L2 outputs, and per-head decay and write-rate parameters are trained end-to-end. The outer-product memory and the read identity are well-known; our contribution is their use as an L2 cache fed exclusively by sliding-window evictions, plus identifying that the common chunked-mean training shortcut A ⁣ ⁣λA ⁣+ ⁣η(kˉ ⁣ ⁣vˉ)A\!\leftarrow\!λA\!+\!η(\bar k\!\otimes\!\bar v) silently introduces C2CC^2{-}C spurious cross-token outer products per chunk, and closing the gap with a parallel weighted-sum scan equivalent to per-token writes within float32 epsilon. Across systems scaling, controlled associative recall, long-context language modeling, and memory-capacity diagnostics, Tensor Cache improves the memory--quality frontier over bounded-state baselines.
Kabir Swain, Sijie Han, Daniel Karl I. Weidele +2
May 20, 2026cs.LG

A Typed Tensor Language for Federated Learning

Federated learning and analytics are often described as collections of separate protocols, even when they share the same mathematical form: client-local tensor computation, mergeable aggregation into shared state, and shared-only post-processing. We introduce a typed tensor language that formalizes this structure. The language distinguishes federated tensors, whose records are partitioned across clients along a tracked record axis, from shared tensors, which are available globally. Its semantics are defined by comparison with a virtual global tensor, used only as a reference object. The main result is a shared-state factorization theory. We show that typed one-round programs factor through fixed-dimensional shared state whose size is independent of the number of clients and records, computed from client-local tensor expressions and merged across clients. We also prove a converse representability result; factorizations whose encoders and decoders are expressible in the language are realized by typed one-round programs, and the correspondence extends to iterative programs whose cross-round state is shared. This gives a formal account of the computations in the language that can be expressed as encode, merge, and decode procedures. We then develop a differentiable fragment for learning. If a per-record loss and its per-record gradient are represented by client-local tensor expressions, the global gradient is represented by record-axis summation of the federated gradient tensor. This yields typed iterative programs for server-side gradient descent and shared-linear-algebra second-order updates. The framework characterizes a broad class of federated learning computations whose communication passes through fixed-dimensional shared state.
Theofilos Mailis, Kalliopi-Christina Despotidou, Konstantinos Filippopolitis +6
May 20, 2026cs.LG

Sutra: Tensor-Op RNNs as a Compilation Target for Vector Symbolic Architectures

Sutra is a typed, purely functional programming language whose compiled forward pass is a PyTorch neural network. The compiler beta-reduces the whole program -- primitives, control flow, string I/O -- to one fused tensor-op graph over a frozen embedding substrate. Rotation binding, unbind, bundle, polynomial Kleene three-valued logic, and tail-recursive loops all lower to tensor operations; the Kleene connectives are Lagrange-interpolated polynomials exact on the {-1, 0, +1} truth grid. Validation is one fact tested two ways. (1) The same program runs on four frozen embeddings spanning two modalities -- three text encoders (nomic-embed-text, all-minilm, mxbai-embed-large) and one protein language model (ESM-2) -- and decodes bundles at 100% accuracy through width k=8 on every substrate, where the textbook Hadamard product has already collapsed (2.5% on mxbai-embed-large, 7.5% on all-minilm). (2) PyTorch autograd flows through the actually compiled graph: a fuzzy-rule classifier written in .su trains from random init (18.7 +/- 9.5%; chance = 20%, five classes) to 100.0 +/- 0.0% (three seeds) by backpropagating through the emitted graph, the symbolic source unmodified. A weighted variant additionally trains a scalar cosine gain and writes it back into the .su source as a numeric literal; recompiling reproduces the trained behaviour to ~2e-7 per logit, so the trained model is itself legible, recompilable code. The same artifact is therefore both a logic program and a trainable neural network.
Emma Leonhart
May 20, 2026cs.DC

Instant GPU Efficiency Visibility at Fleet Scale

We present Overall FLOP Utilization (OFU), a hardware-level, precision-agnostic GPU efficiency metric for AI workloads on HPC systems, derived from two on-chip performance counters: Tensor Pipe Activity and SM clock frequency. OFU requires no application instrumentation and works across GPU generations and numeric precisions. We characterize five properties of the OFU approximation -- tile quantization, floating-point precision scaling, clock sampling noise, Tensor Core clock domains, and non-tensor undercounting -- through controlled GEMM experiments on H100 and GB200 across FP16, TF32, FP8, and NVFP4. After tile-quantization correction, OFU predicts application-level MFU to within <=2 percentage points. Against 608 production training jobs, OFU achieves r = 0.78 correlation with application-level MFU and surfaces two framework-level FLOPs miscalculations. Deployed across large-scale GPU fleets, OFU has detected a 2.5x efficiency regression and tracked precision-dependent utilization changes in mixed-precision pretraining. Our evaluation and operational experience suggest OFU is a practical, deployment-ready complement to application-level MFU for continuous fleet-wide efficiency monitoring.
Connor Pedersen, Dong H. Ahn, Michel Migdal +2
May 13, 2026stat.ML

Multi-Scale Dequant: Eliminating Dequantization Bottleneck via Activation Decomposition for Efficient LLM Inference

Quantization is essential for efficient large language model (LLM) inference, yet the dequantization step-converting low-bit weights back to high-precision for matrix multiplication has become a critical bottleneck on modern AI accelerators. On architectures with decoupled compute units (e.g., Ascend NPUs), dequantization operations can consume more cycles than the matrix multiplication itself, leaving the high-throughput tensor cores underutilized. This paper presents Multi-Scale Dequant (MSD), a quantization framework that removes weight/KV dequantization from the GEMM critical path. Instead of lifting low-bit weights to BF16 precision, MSD decomposes high-precision BF16 activations into multiple low-precision components, each of which can be multiplied directly with quantized weights via native hardware-accelerated GEMM. This approach shifts the computational paradigm from precision conversion to multi-scale approximation, avoiding INT8-to-BF16 weight conversion before GEMM. We instantiate MSD for two weight formats and derive tight error bounds for each. For INT8 weights (W4A16), two-pass INT8 decomposition achieves near 16 effective bits. For MXFP4 weights (W4A16), two-pass MXFP4 decomposition yields near 6.6 effective bits with error bound 1/64 per block surpassing single-pass MXFP8(5.24 bits) while maintaining the same effective GEMM compute time. We further derive closed-form latency and HBM traffic models showing that MSD avoids the Vector-Cube pipeline stall caused by dequantization and reduces KV cache HBM traffic by up to 2.5 times in attention. Numerical simulations on matrix multiplication and Flash Attention kernels confirm that MSD does not degrade accuracy compared to dequantization baselines, and in many settings achieves lower L2 error.
Lingchao Zheng, Yuwei Fan, Jun Li +5
May 8, 2026cs.MA

SceneFactory: GPU-Accelerated Multi-Agent Driving Simulation with Physics-Based Vehicle Dynamics

Autonomous-driving simulators typically trade physical fidelity for scalable parallelism. Physics-based platforms such as CARLA and MetaDrive provide articulated vehicle dynamics and contact, but their non-vectorized interfaces make batched training difficult. GPU-batched systems such as Waymax and GPUDrive scale to hundreds of scenarios by replacing rigid-body physics with simplified kinematic models, omitting tire--road interaction, suspension, contact dynamics, and road-condition-dependent friction. We introduce SceneFactory, a GPU-vectorized platform for procedural scene construction, physics-based multi-agent simulation, and RL in autonomous-driving environments. Built on NVIDIA Isaac Sim + Isaac Lab, SceneFactory represents worlds and agents as batched tensors: control, observations, rewards, resets, and policy inference run as GPU tensor operations over the Isaac Lab tensor API. SceneFactory converts Waymo Open Motion Dataset road topologies into simulation-ready USD worlds, runs many worlds concurrently on one GPU, populates each with multiple articulated PhysX vehicles, and maps precipitation and road-surface type to PhysX material friction coefficients. With GPU vectorization, SceneFactory achieves up to 127×\times higher throughput than a non-vectorized PhysX baseline on the same GPU and physics solver, reaching 19,250 controlled-agent simulation steps per second at 256 worlds ×\times 16 agents. Cross-simulator transfer reveals an asymmetric dynamics gap: physics-grounded RL policies transfer to a simplified kinematic bicycle model with 99.5% success, whereas reverse transfer drops to 47.3%. Under wet-road friction, friction-aware policies reduce mean peak DRAC from 58.7 to 27.8,m/s2^2 without sacrificing goal reach. SceneFactory shows that scalable autonomous-driving training need not discard articulated rigid-body dynamics or physically grounded road-condition variation.
Yicheng Zhu, Yang Chen, Tao Li +1
May 4, 2026cs.LG

StreamIndex: Memory-Bounded Compressed Sparse Attention via Streaming Top-k

DeepSeek-V3.2 and V4 introduce Compressed Sparse Attention (CSA): a lightning indexer (a learned scoring projection over compressed keys) scores them, the top-k are selected per query, and a sparse attention kernel reads only those. Public CSA implementations materialize a [B, S, H_I, T] FP32 score tensor before the top-k reduction. With H_I=64 indexer heads and the V4-Flash compression ratio m=4, that intermediate is 256 GB at sequence length S=65,536, exceeding any single-GPU high-bandwidth-memory (HBM) budget. We present StreamIndex, a Triton implementation of the CSA pipeline whose central component is a chunked partition-merge top-k driver that never materializes the full intermediate. On synthetic-but-realistic V4-shaped inputs at the indexer-step (layer) level on a single NVIDIA H200, the materialize path runs out of memory (OOMs) at S=65,536 with V4-Flash dimensions; StreamIndex runs the same indexer to S=1,048,576 with 6.21 GB peak HBM, a 32x regime extension. Set-overlap recall against the materialize ground truth is bit-exact at small S where both fit; across three 5-point design-space sweeps (chunk size, key-tile size, top-k), mean recall rounds to 1.0000 with min recall at least 0.9980 in every cell. The chunked driver composes with TileLang's pipelined attention kernel: at S=262,144 with V4-Flash dimensions, the materialize indexer paired with TileLang attention OOMs while the chunked indexer paired with the same attention runs in 1.97 s at 18.56 GB peak. Our contribution targets the indexer step; we make no claim of a faster attention kernel or of real-checkpoint end-to-end behavior. Code: https://github.com/RightNow-AI/StreamIndex.
Jaber Jaber, Osama Jaber
Apr 29, 2026cs.CL

Folding Tensor and Sequence Parallelism for Memory-Efficient Transformer Training & Inference

We present tensor and sequence parallelism (TSP), a parallel execution strategy that folds tensor parallelism and sequence parallelism onto a single device axis. In conventional multi-dimensional parallelism layouts, tensor parallelism (TP) shards model weights while sequence parallelism (SP) shards tokens, reducing per-device parameter or activation memory, respectively. Traditionally, each scheme is assigned its own mesh dimension. TSP instead assigns each rank both a weight shard and a sequence shard, reducing both parameter and activation memory along the same device axis. We implement this design with two runtime schedules. For attention, ranks iterate over broadcast parameter shards and reconstruct context through a sequence-wise key/value exchange. For gated MLPs, weight shards circulate in a ring while partial outputs accumulate locally. By sharding both weights and activations across the same devices, TSP trades additional communication volume for reduced memory overhead. We provide a theoretical communication and memory analysis, describe our implementation of TSP attention and gated MLP blocks, and benchmark TSP against TP, SP, and TP+SP. These results position TSP as a hardware-aware alternative for long-context and memory-constrained model training, and as a viable axis of parallelism in concert with existing parallelism schemes such as pipeline and expert parallelism for dense and mixture-of-expert models.
Vasu Shyam, Anna Golubeva, Quentin Anthony
Apr 28, 2026cs.LG

Block-Wise Differentiable Sinkhorn Attention: Tail-Refinement Gradients with a Gap-Aware Dustbin Bridge

We study long-context balanced entropic optimal transport (OT) attention on TPU hardware through a stopped-base, fixed-depth tail-refinement surrogate. After a stopped TT-step Sinkhorn solve, we unroll a short refinement tail and differentiate that surrogate exactly. For the reported R=2R=2 TPU path, the backward pass contains four staircase plan factors. We prove an exact one-reference-tile schedule: the R=2R=2 score cotangent is a single reference plan tile times an explicit modifier field built from vector cotangents and dual differences. This yields block-wise cost O((T+R)LW)O((T+R)LW), O(Ld)O(Ld) input storage, and O(L)O(L) additional HBM usage for fixed head dimension dd and band width WW on the balanced fixed-support path. We also formalize the current \texttt{dustbin_block} path as the same unit-target surrogate on an augmented support, so the adjoint schedule lifts to the single-active-dustbin path used in our TPU runs; this bridge is algebraic and does not claim a general KL-unbalanced or arbitrary-capacity gap model. We provide a local surrogate-bias bound, an a posteriori bias certificate, and a projective contraction certificate for strictly positive active blocks. On synthetic masked problems, the optimized kernel matches exact autodiff of the same centered surrogate to within 10510^{-5}--101010^{-10}. On TPU v6e-8, a four-configuration Pfam screen completes end-to-end, and a promoted balanced R=2R=2 run sustains roughly 8.58.5 examples per second through a three-hour budget, reaching step 14371437. Held-out Pfam test shards improve reconstruction from 5.575.57 to 2.052.05 and sparse CE from 5.535.53 to 5.305.30 relative to step 00, with CE logged diagnostically rather than optimized directly; target-barycenter alignment metrics do not materially improve, and a deterministic diagonal reference remains stronger on those metrics.
Dylan Forde
Apr 28, 2026cs.LG

QFlash: Bridging Quantization and Memory Efficiency in Vision Transformer Attention

FlashAttention improves efficiency through tiling, but its online softmax still relies on floating-point arithmetic for numerical stability, making full quantization difficult. We identify three main obstacles to integer-only FlashAttention: (1) scale explosion during tile-wise accumulation, (2) inefficient shift-based exponential operations on GPUs, and (3) quantization granularity constraints requiring uniform scales for integer comparison. To address these challenges, we propose \textit{QFlash}, an end-to-end integer FlashAttention design that performs softmax entirely in the integer domain and runs as a single Triton kernel. On seven attention workloads from ViT, DeiT, and Swin models, QFlash achieves up to 6.73×\times speedup over I-ViT and up to 8.69×\times speedup on Swin, while reducing energy consumption by 18.8% compared to FP16 FlashAttention, without sacrificing Top-1 accuracy on ViT/DeiT and remaining competitive on Swin under per-tensor quantization. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/EfficientCompLab/qflash.
Sehyeon Oh, Yongin Kwon, Jemin Lee
Apr 27, 2026cs.DC

TACO: Efficient Communication Compression of Intermediate Tensors for Scalable Tensor-Parallel LLM Training

Handling communication overhead in large-scale tensor-parallel training remains a critical challenge due to the dense, near-zero distributions of intermediate tensors, which exacerbate errors under frequent communication and introduce significant computational overhead during compression. To this end, we propose TACO (Tensor-parallel Adaptive COmmunication compression), a robust FP8-based framework for compressing TP intermediate tensors. First, we employ a data-driven reshaping strategy combined with an Adaptive Scale-Hadamard Transform to enable high-fidelity FP8 quantization, while its Dual-Scale Quantization mechanism ensures numerical stability throughout training. Second, we design a highly fused compression operator to reduce memory traffic and kernel launch overhead, allowing efficient overlap with communication. Finally, we integrate TACO with existing state-of-the-art methods for Data and Pipeline Parallelism to develop a compression-enabled 3D-parallel training framework. Detailed experiments on GPT models and Qwen model demonstrate up to 1.87X end-to-end throughput improvement while maintaining near-lossless accuracy, validating the effectiveness and efficiency of TACO in large-scale training.
Man Liu, Xingchen Liu, Xingjian Tian +8
Apr 25, 2026cs.LG

Evaluating CUDA Tile for AI Workloads on Hopper and Blackwell GPUs

NVIDIA's CUDA Tile (CuTile) introduces a Python-based, tile-centric abstraction for GPU kernel development that aims to simplify programming while retaining Tensor Core and Tensor Memory Accelerator (TMA) efficiency on modern GPUs. We present the first independent, cross-architecture evaluation of CuTile against established approaches such as cuBLAS, Triton, WMMA, and raw SIMT on three NVIDIA GPUs spanning Hopper and Blackwell: H100 NVL, B200, and RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition. We benchmark representative AI workloads, including GEMM, fused multi-head attention, and end-to-end LLM inference in BF16/FP16 precision, to assess both performance and portability. Our results show that CuTile effectiveness is strongly workload- and architecture-dependent. On datacenter-class Blackwell (B200), CuTile achieves up to 1007 TFLOP/s for fused attention, outperforming FlashAttention-2 by 2.5x while requiring only 60 lines of Python kernel code. For GEMM, CuTile reaches 52-79% of cuBLAS performance in 22 lines of code (versus 123 for WMMA), making it a practical replacement for hand-written CUDA kernels but not yet for vendor-optimized libraries. However, the same CuTile attention kernel achieves only 53% of FlashAttention-2 throughput on RTX PRO 6000 (sm_120), exposing significant cross-architecture optimization gaps. In contrast, Triton sustains 62-101% of cuBLAS performance across all tested platforms without architecture-specific tuning, demonstrating substantially stronger portability.
Divakar Kumar Yadav, Tian Zhao, Deepak Kumar
Apr 24, 2026cs.AR

HGQ-LUT: Fast LUT-Aware Training and Efficient Architectures for DNN Inference

Lookup-table (LUT) based neural networks can deliver ultra-low latency and excellent hardware efficiency on FPGAs by mapping arithmetic operations directly onto the logic primitives. However, state-of-the-art LUT-aware training (LAT) approaches remain difficult to use in practice: they are often orders of magnitude slower to train than conventional networks, require non-trivial manual tuning for hardware efficiency, and lack an end-to-end workflow. This work presents HGQ-LUT, integrated in https://github.com/calad0i/HGQ2, a new LAT approach that achieves state-of-the-art hardware efficiency while accelerating training by over 100 times on modern GPUs. HGQ-LUT introduces LUT-Dense and LUT-Conv layers that are implemented with regular, accelerator-efficient tensor operations during training, which are then compiled into logic LUTs for hardware. By combining these layers with fine-grained, element-wise heterogeneous quantization (including zero-bit pruning) and a LUT-aware resource surrogate, HGQ-LUT enables the automatic exploration of accuracy-resource trade-offs without manual bit-width tuning. We further integrate HGQ-LUT into open-source toolchains, enabling unified design, compilation, and bit-exact verification of hybrid architectures that mix LUT-based with conventional arithmetic blocks. These features make LAT-based DNNs practical for real-world deployment, such as at the CERN Large Hadron Collider's experiments.
Chang Sun, Zhiqiang Que, Bakhtiar Zadeh +4
Apr 20, 2026cs.LG

How Much Cache Does Reasoning Need? Depth-Cache Tradeoffs in KV-Compressed Transformers

The key-value (KV) cache is the dominant memory bottleneck during Transformer inference, yet little is known theoretically about how aggressively it can be compressed before multi-step reasoning degrades. We study this through kk-hop pointer chasing on nn tokens under a shared KV cache of size ss, attention dimension mm, HH heads, pp-bit precision, and a locality-respecting cache controller (satisfied by all standard KV-compression methods). We give three results. (1) Product depth lower bound (conjectured). We conjecture that any such Transformer (n4kn \geq 4k, sn/4s \leq \sqrt{n}/4) requires depth L=Ω(k/slog2n/(Hmp))L = Ω(\lceil k/s \rceil \cdot \lceil \log_2 n/(Hmp) \rceil), and isolate the sole remaining gap as a probabilistic step on the joint distribution of cache trace and pointer chain. Unconditionally, we prove a matching upper bound L=O(min(k,k/slogs)logn/(mp))L = O(\min(k, \lceil k/s \rceil \log s) \cdot \log n/(mp)) via windowed pointer doubling, and a max-bound L=Ω(max(k/s,logn/(Hmp)))L = Ω(\max(\lceil k/s \rceil, \log n/(Hmp))). Closing the conjecture amounts to upgrading max to product. (2) Bandwidth barrier. The product bound binds only when HmplognHmp \lesssim \log n. Any lower bound provable via per-window distinguishability counting -- including reachability, bandwidth, and combinations -- cannot exceed k/s\lceil k/s \rceil once Hmplog2nHmp \geq \log_2 n. Breaking this requires lifting unconditional communication-complexity bounds for pointer chasing to Cache-Transformer depth. (3) Adaptive vs oblivious error scaling. Under random cache over T=log2kT = \lceil \log_2 k \rceil doubling stages, oblivious caches give Pr[E](s/(nT))T+2T3/n\Pr[\mathcal{E}] \leq (s/(n-T))^T + 2T^3/n (exponential in TT), while adaptive locality-respecting caches achieve Pr[E]=s/n\Pr[\mathcal{E}] = s/n exactly, independent of TT. The Ω((n/s)T1)Ω((n/s)^{T-1}) separation explains why heavy-hitter eviction empirically dominates random eviction for multi-hop reasoning.
Xiao Wang
Apr 16, 2026cs.PF

Ragged Paged Attention: A High-Performance and Flexible LLM Inference Kernel for TPU

Large Language Model (LLM) deployment is increasingly shifting to cost-efficient accelerators like Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), prioritizing both performance and total cost of ownership (TCO). However, existing LLM inference kernels and serving systems remain largely GPU-centric, and there is no well-established approach for efficiently mapping LLM workloads onto TPU architectures--particularly under the dynamic and ragged execution patterns common in modern serving. In this paper, we present Ragged Paged Attention (RPA), a high-performance and flexible attention kernel for TPUs, implemented using Pallas and Mosaic. RPA addresses these challenges through three key techniques: (1) fine-grained tiling to enable efficient dynamic slicing over ragged memory, (2) a custom software pipeline that fuses KV cache updates with attention computation, and (3) a distribution-aware compilation strategy that generates specialized kernels for decode, prefill, and mixed workloads. Evaluated on Llama 3 8B on TPU7x, RPA achieves up to 86% memory bandwidth utilization (MBU) in decode and 73% model FLOPs utilization (MFU) in prefill. Integrated as the primary TPU backend in vLLM and SGLang, RPA provides a production-grade foundation for efficient TPU inference and offers practical insights into kernel design.
Jevin Jiang, Ying Chen, Blake A. Hechtman +2
Apr 16, 2026cs.PL

Prism: Symbolic Superoptimization of Tensor Programs

This paper presents Prism, the first symbolic superoptimizer for tensor programs. The key idea is sGraph, a symbolic, hierarchical representation that compactly encodes large classes of tensor programs by symbolically representing some execution parameters. Prism organizes optimization as a two-level search: it constructs symbolic graphs that represent families of programs, and then instantiates them into concrete implementations. This formulation enables structured pruning of provably suboptimal regions of the search space using symbolic reasoning over operator semantics, algebraic identities, and hardware constraints. We develop techniques for efficient symbolic graph generation, equivalence verification via e-graph rewriting, and parameter instantiation through auto-tuning. Together, these components allow Prism to bridge the rigor of exhaustive search with the scalability required for modern ML workloads. Evaluation on five commonly used LLM workloads shows that Prism achieves up to 2.2×2.2\times speedup over best superoptimizers and 4.9×4.9\times over best compiler-based approaches, while reducing end-to-end optimization time by up to 3.4×3.4\times.
Mengdi Wu, Xiaoyu Jiang, Oded Padon +1
Apr 16, 2026cs.PL

Nautilus: An Auto-Scheduling Tensor Compiler for Efficient Tiled GPU Kernels

We present Nautilus, a novel tensor compiler that moves toward fully automated math-to-kernel optimization. Nautilus compiles a high-level algebraic specification of tensor operators into efficient tiled GPU kernels. Nautilus's successive lowering design allows high-level optimizations, expression rewrites, and tile optimizations to be jointly applied in a single end-to-end system. Nautilus presents a novel auto-scheduler that discovers sequences of high-level optimizations, while preserving the regular program structure needed by tile optimizers. Nautilus's auto-scheduler captures complex interactions and trade-offs in the high-level optimizations, including aggressive global transformations like advanced reduction fusion. Nautilus is the first end-to-end tensor compiler capable of starting from a math-like description of attention and automatically discovering FlashAttention-3-like kernels, offloading the entire burden of optimization from the programmer to the compiler. Across five transformer-based models and 150 evaluation configurations on NVIDIA GH200 and RTX 5090 GPUs, Nautilus achieves up to 23% higher throughput than state-of-the-art compilers on GH200 and up to 42% on RTX 5090, while matching or exceeding manually written cuDNN kernels on many long-sequence configurations.
Yifan Zhao, Yuchen Yang, Matei Budiu +1
Feb 11, 2026cs.DC

VTC: DNN Compilation with Virtual Tensors for Data Movement Elimination

With the widening gap between compute and memory operation latencies, data movement optimizations have become increasingly important for DNN compilation. Current optimizations such as layout transformations and operator fusion only target a subset of tensor operators and consequently miss important opportunities for reducing data movement in contemporary DNN workloads, including large language models. We introduce VTC, a novel tensor compilation framework that for the first time eliminates all unnecessary data movement by targeting the full spectrum of data movement operators. VTC proposes the concept of virtual tensors to track data movement between compute operators via index mappings rather than expensive physical data transfers to and from global memory, which can seamlessly interoperate with existing computation kernels and handle arbitrary tensor operator compositions. We also introduce a novel data movement elimination algorithm to automatically identify a profitable virtual tensor creation strategy. Evaluation on a variety of DNNs shows that VTC can outperform existing ML compilers by up to 1.93x (1.28x on average) on NVIDIA GPUs with up to 60% (17.5% on average) inference memory savings.
Muyan Hu, Ahan Gupta, Jiachen Yuan +7
Feb 9, 2026cs.LG

DynamiQ: Accelerating Gradient Synchronization using Compressed Multi-hop All-reduce

Multi-hop all-reduce is the de facto backbone of large model training. As the training scale increases, the network often becomes a bottleneck, motivating the reduction of the volume of transmitted data. Accordingly, recent systems have demonstrated significant acceleration of the training process using gradient quantization. However, these systems are not optimized for multi-hop aggregation, where entries are partially summed multiple times along their aggregation topology. We present DynamiQ, a quantization framework that bridges the gap between quantization best practices and multi-hop aggregation. DynamiQ introduces novel techniques to better represent partial sums, codesigned with a decompress accumulate recompress fused kernel to facilitate fast execution. We extend PyTorch DDP to support DynamiQ over NCCL P2P, and across different LLMs, tasks, and scales, we demonstrate consistent improvement of up to 34.2% over the best among state-of-the-art methods such as Omni-Reduce, THC, and emerging standards such as MXFP4, MXFP6, and MXFP8. Further, DynamiQ is the only evaluated method that consistently reaches near-baseline accuracy (e.g., 99.9% of the BF16 baseline) and does so while significantly accelerating the training.
Wenchen Han, Shay Vargaftik, Michael Mitzenmacher +1
Nov 13, 2025cs.DC

Scalable Synthesis of distributed LLM workloads through Symbolic Tensor Graphs

Optimizing the performance of large language models (LLMs) on large-scale AI training and inference systems requires a scalable and expressive mechanism to model distributed workload execution. Such modeling is essential for pre-deployment system-level optimizations (e.g., parallelization strategies) and hardware design-space explorations. While recent efforts have proposed collecting execution traces from real systems, access to large-scale infrastructure remains limited to major cloud providers. Moreover, traces capturing execution on a specific platform cannot be easily adapted to study alternate software and/or hardware configurations, especially at scale. We introduce STAGE, a framework that synthesizes high-fidelity execution graphs to accurately model distributed AI workloads (including LLMs and MoEs). STAGE supports a comprehensive set of parallelization strategies, allowing users to systematically explore a wide spectrum of model architectures and system configurations. STAGE demonstrates its scalability by synthesizing high-fidelity LLM traces spanning over 128K GPUs, while preserving tensorlevel accuracy in compute, memory, and communication. STAGE is publicy available at https://github.com/astra-sim/stage
Changhai Man, Joongun Park, Hanjiang Wu +3
Oct 26, 2025cs.CL

Correctness Forensics for Batch Speculative Decoding: Diagnosing the Ragged Tensor Problem

Inference optimizations are routinely evaluated by throughput alone, without verifying output correctness. We conduct a forensic analysis of batch speculative decoding and find that several widely-used implementations silently produce corrupted outputs (repetitive tokens, <unk> symbols) while reporting competitive speed; failures invisible to metrics like ROUGE. We trace the root cause to the ragged tensor problem: variable token acceptance desynchronizes position IDs, attention masks, and KV-cache across a batch. We formalize the synchronization invariants (rectangular alignment and position-ID contiguity) that valid batched inference must preserve and show that maintaining them incurs superlinear alignment overhead under contiguous layouts. EQSPEC enforces the invariants without custom kernels; EXSPEC schedules same-length sequences to bypass realignment. On SpecBench across three model families, EXSPEC reaches 3 x throughput at batch size 8 with 95% exact match to standard decoding; residual divergence traces to floating-point non-determinism, not synchronization error. Code:https://github.com/eBay/spec_dec
Ranran Haoran Zhang, Soumik Dey, Ashirbad Mishra +3
Date pendingcs.AR

FP8 is All You Need (Part 1): Debunking Hardware FP64 as the HPC Holy Grail (Sep 3rd version)

We argue that on AI-optimised GPUs of the NVIDIA B300 generation and beyond, the FP8 tensor-core matrix operation, composed through CRT-based Ozaki Scheme II, can serve as the dominant matrix-work substrate for the surveyed matrix-dominated FP64 kernel classes at FP64-grade accuracy, with native FP64 recast from a hardware requirement into a derived accuracy guarantee. The claim is conditional: the FP8 op is the candidate dominant multiplication substrate, with a bounded auxiliary set of integer deconstruction/reconstruction work, FP32/Kulisch reductions, data movement and a native-FP64 fallback, organised as a hierarchy from the FP8 op through Ozaki II and the Berkeley dwarfs to applications. The instrument is the Tensor-Memory Equilibrium (TME) model, a Roofline extension with four parameters (compute multiplier α=3r+1\alpha=3r+1, bandwidth multiplier β\beta, reconstruction cost γ\gamma, and the per-input deconstruction cost cqc_q identified in an NVIDIA review) under which, at its upper bound, the reduction to FP8 costs no performance against an ideal native-FP64 machine of equal bandwidth. On-chip tile fusion drives β1\beta \to 1; the deconstruction term sets a threshold intensity below which emulation is conversion-bound. At the fused, engineered-cqc_q bound every surveyed class reaches the memory roof, with two priced exceptions: large dense-square DGEMM sits at a deconstruction floor near 0.50 of the FP8 arithmetic roof (about 235 of 473 TFLOPS on the NVIDIA Rubin GPU), a liftable co-design coordinate, and the 3-D FFT is walled by a per-output integer epilogue at 4.94.9-6.7×6.7\times its roof in software, recoverable with minor hardware and one moderate ask. Ozaki II lifts the emulated FP64 ceiling from 1.3\approx 1.3 to 135\approx 135 TFLOPS on B300 and 473\approx 473 on Rubin; three deconstruction-path hardware options are given; constants are engine-checked.
Satoshi Matsuoka
Date pendingcs.MS

FP8 is All You Need (Part 2): Full-FP64 3-D FFT on FP8-Generation Tensor CoresThe Integer-Epilogue Wall and the Minimal Hardware That Would Remove It

The NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra (B300) GPU cuts FP64 vector throughput 30×\sim 30\times while multiplying FP8 tensor throughput. After the recovery of FP64 GEMM via Ozaki Scheme II on FP8 tensor cores and the Tensor-Memory Equilibrium model of the companions ("FP8 is All You Need, Part 1" and "Ozaki 2.5") we ask whether the fifth canonical HPC primitive, the full-FP64 102431024^3 3-D FFT, can be carried by the same substrate, and answer with a design and its limit. It is a Bailey six-step transform with no FP64 arithmetic: FP8-tensor DFT GEMMs with fused twiddles, residue-domain Karatsuba combines and exact CRT reconstruction whose bulk is a small GEMM on the FP16 tensor path and whose remainder is a Kulisch fixed-point accumulation with a two-sided modulo-MM lift, so the only rounding is the final conversion; constants are machine-generated and verified bit-exactly. The central finding: the binding resource is not floating point but a per-output integer epilogue with floor (cepi/8),Bmem(c_{\rm epi}/8),B_{\rm mem}, cepi203c_{\rm epi} \approx 203-281281 instructions per output: on B300 it holds the transform at 63-87 ms against a 12.9 ms roof (4.94.9-6.7×6.7\times short); at most 1.31.3-1.9×1.9\times faster than the collapsed native path, possibly no faster at realised issue rates; no software route reaches the roof; on the NVIDIA Rubin GPU emulation loses 88-11×11\times. An FP32 variant meets the same wall: the cause is per-scalar reconstruction, not FP64. Each floor term names its remedy: the NVIDIA B200 GPU's INT8 tensor core restored with a position-weighted cross-column accumulation primitive, a load-path deconstruction datapath shared with the companions, two ISA idioms and modular reduction at the MMA output give 16.0-23.5 ms with minor hardware and 12.9-15.0 ms with one moderate ask. All figures are projected floors, not measurements, with sensitivities and the FP8 layout condition given.
Satoshi Matsuoka