LASP-2: Rethinking Sequence Parallelism for Linear Attention and Its
  Hybrid
Authors: name: Weigao Sun; name: Disen Lan; name: Yiran Zhong; name: Xiaoye Qu; name: Yu Cheng
Published: 2025-02-11 14:01:39

Abstract: Linear sequence modeling approaches, such as linear attention, provide
advantages like linear-time training and constant-memory inference over
sequence lengths. However, existing sequence parallelism (SP) methods are
either not optimized for the right-product-first feature of linear attention or
use a ring-style communication strategy, which results in lower computation
parallelism, limits their scalability for longer sequences in distributed
systems. In this paper, we introduce LASP-2, a new SP method to enhance both
communication and computation parallelism when training linear attention
transformer models with very-long input sequences. Compared to previous work
LASP, LASP-2 rethinks the minimal communication requirement for SP on linear
attention layers, reorganizes the whole communication-computation workflow of
LASP. In this way, only one single AllGather collective communication is needed
on intermediate memory states, whose sizes are independent of the sequence
length, leading to significant improvements of both communication and
computation parallelism, as well as their overlap. Additionally, we extend
LASP-2 to LASP-2H by applying similar communication redesign to standard
attention modules, offering an efficient SP solution for hybrid models that
blend linear and standard attention layers. Our evaluation on a Linear-Llama3
model, a variant of Llama3 with linear attention replacing standard attention,
demonstrates the effectiveness of LASP-2 and LASP-2H. Specifically, LASP-2
achieves training speed improvements of 15.2% over LASP and 36.6% over Ring
Attention, with a sequence length of 2048K across 64 GPUs. The Code is released
as a part of: https://github.com/OpenSparseLLMs/Linear-MoE.