# A Survey of Techniques for Optimizing Transformer Inference

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.07982 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07982/

## Key facts

- Cited by 35 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 207 of its 272 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 207)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15556/) (2022)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [Deep Compression: Compressing Deep Neural Networks with Pruning, Trained Quantization and Huffman Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.00149/) (2015)
- [Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons for Conditional Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3432/) (2013)
- [Learning both Weights and Connections for Efficient Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02626/) (2015)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [QuEST: Low-bit Diffusion Model Quantization via Efficient Selective Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03666/) (2024)
- [Accurate LoRA-Finetuning Quantization of LLMs via Information Retention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05445/) (2024)
- [LLM-Inference-Bench: Inference Benchmarking of Large Language Models on AI Accelerators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00136/) (2024)
- [MPQ-DM: Mixed Precision Quantization for Extremely Low Bit Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11549/) (2024)
- [Memory Is All You Need: An Overview of Compute-in-Memory Architectures for Accelerating Large Language Model Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08413/) (2024)
- [Demystifying AI Platform Design for Distributed Inference of Next-Generation LLM models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01698/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Inference Engines for Large Language Models: Perspectives on Optimization and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01658/) (2025)
- [MPQ-DMv2: Flexible Residual Mixed Precision Quantization for Low-Bit Diffusion Models with Temporal Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04290/) (2025)
- [The Languini Kitchen: Enabling Language Modelling Research at Different Scales of Compute](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11197/) (2023)
- [Inference Optimization of Foundation Models on AI Accelerators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09111/) (2024)
- [Nightjar: Dynamic Adaptive Speculative Decoding for Large Language Models Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22420/) (2025)
- [Accelerating ViT Inference on FPGA through Static and Dynamic Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14047/) (2024)
- [Optimising TinyML with Quantization and Distillation of Transformer and Mamba Models for Indoor Localisation on Edge Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09289/) (2024)
- [A Proximal Operator for Inducing 2:4-Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18015/) (2025)
- [Prune-then-Quantize or Quantize-then-Prune? Understanding the Impact of Compression Order in Joint Model Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18426/) (2026)
- [LLM-Rank: A Graph Theoretical Approach to Pruning Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13299/) (2024)
- [Energy-Efficient Transformer Inference: Optimization Strategies for Time Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16627/) (2025)
- [Private Transformer Inference in MLaaS: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10315/) (2025)
- [From Large-scale Audio Tagging to Real-Time Explainable Emergency Vehicle Sirens Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23437/) (2025)
- [Resource-aware Mixed-precision Quantization for Enhancing Deployability of Transformers for Time-series Forecasting on Embedded FPGAs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03294/) (2024)
- [BATON: Enhancing Batch-wise Inference Efficiency for Large Language Models via Dynamic Re-batching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18701/) (2024)
- [Systolic Arrays and Structured Pruning Co-design for Efficient Transformers in Edge Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10285/) (2024)
- [A Comparative Study of Pruning Methods in Transformer-based Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12883/) (2024)
- [LinDeps: A Fine-tuning Free Post-Pruning Method to Remove Layer-Wise Linear Dependencies with Guaranteed Performance Preservation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21573/) (2025)
- [I-Segmenter: Integer-Only Vision Transformer for Efficient Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10334/) (2025)
- [Keeping it Local, Tiny and Real: Automated Report Generation on Edge Computing Devices for Mechatronic-Based Cognitive Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02507/) (2025)
- [Unsupervised Modular Adaptive Region Growing and RegionMix Classification for Wind Turbine Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04065/) (2026)
- [Prefill/Decode-Aware Evaluation of LLM Inference on Emerging AI Accelerators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.17104/) (2026)
- [PHEONA: An Evaluation Framework for Large Language Model-based Approaches to Computational Phenotyping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19265/) (2025)
- [Dynamic Rank Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Low-Rank Multi-Head Self Attention in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15973/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent years have seen a phenomenal rise in performance and applications of transformer neural networks. The family of transformer networks, including Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer (BERT), Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) and Vision Transformer (ViT), have shown their effectiveness across Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV) domains. Transformer-based networks such as ChatGPT have impacted the lives of common men. However, the quest for high predictive performance has led to an exponential increase in transformers' memory and compute footprint. Researchers have proposed techniques to optimize transformer inference at all levels of abstraction. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of techniques for optimizing the inference phase of transformer networks. We survey techniques such as knowledge distillation, pruning, quantization, neural architecture search and lightweight network design at the algorithmic level. We further review hardware-level optimization techniques and the design of novel hardware accelerators for transformers. We summarize the quantitative results on the number of parameters/FLOPs and accuracy of several models/techniques to showcase the tradeoff exercised by them. We also outline future directions in this rapidly evolving field of research. We believe that this survey will educate both novice and seasoned researchers and also spark a plethora of research efforts in this field.