# FLuRKA: Fast and accurate unified Low-Rank & Kernel Attention

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.15799 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15799/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Pointer Sentinel Mixture Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07843/) (2016)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)
- [Transformers are RNNs: Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16236/) (2020)
- [Big Bird: Transformers for Longer Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14062/) (2020)
- [Reformer: The Efficient Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04451/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Attention with Performers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14794/) (2020)
- [Generating Long Sequences with Sparse Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10509/) (2019)
- [GQA: Training Generalized Multi-Query Transformer Models from Multi-Head Checkpoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13245/) (2023)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [Aligning Books and Movies: Towards Story-like Visual Explanations by Watching Movies and Reading Books](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06724/) (2015)
- [Efficient Transformers: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06732/) (2020)
- [Long Range Arena: A Benchmark for Efficient Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04006/) (2020)
- [Efficient Content-Based Sparse Attention with Routing Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05997/) (2020)
- [Nystr"omformer: A Nystr"om-Based Algorithm for Approximating Self-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03902/) (2021)
- [Random Feature Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02143/) (2021)
- [Sparse Sinkhorn Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11296/) (2020)
- [Synthesizer: Rethinking Self-Attention in Transformer Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00743/) (2020)
- [Blockwise Self-Attention for Long Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02972/) (2019)
- [Adaptively Sparse Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00015/) (2019)
- [Scatterbrain: Unifying Sparse and Low-rank Attention Approximation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15343/) (2021)
- [Long-Short Transformer: Efficient Transformers for Language and Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02192/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [A Survey on Efficient Inference for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14294/) (2024)
- [Efficient Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03863/) (2023)
- [A Survey: Collaborative Hardware and Software Design in the Era of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07265/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Many efficient textitapproximate self-attention techniques have become prevalent since the inception of the transformer architecture. Two popular classes of these techniques are low-rank and kernel methods. Each of these methods has its strengths. We observe these strengths synergistically complement each other and exploit them to fuse low-rank and kernel methods, producing a new class of transformers: FLuRKA (Fast Low-Rank & Kernel Attention). FLuRKA are highly textittraining-efficient with faster model speeds textitand similar model qualities compared to constituent low-rank and kernel methods. We theoretically and empirically evaluate the speed and quality of FLuRKA. Our model speed analysis posits a variety of parameter configurations where FLuRKA exhibit speedups over low-rank and kernel approximations and our model quality analysis bounds the error of FLuRKA with respect to full-attention. Empirically, we instantiate three FLuRKA variants which experience speedups of up to 3.3x and 1.7x over low-rank and kernel methods respectively. This translates to speedups of up to 20x over models with flash-attention. Across a diverse set of tasks spanning language modeling, language understanding, long sequence modeling, machine translation, and image classification, FLuRKA achieve comparable accuracy with underlying low-rank and kernel approximations, occasionally surpassing both.