Block Transformer: Global-to-Local Language Modeling for Fast Inference
Authors: name: Namgyu Ho, name: Sangmin Bae, name: Taehyeon Kim, name: Hyunjik Jo, name: Yireun Kim, name: Tal Schuster, name: Adam Fisch, name: James Thorne, name: Se-Young Yun

This paper presents the Block Transformer architecture which adopts
hierarchical global-to-local modeling to autoregressive transformers to
mitigate the inference bottlenecks of self-attention. To apply self-attention,
the key-value (KV) cache of all previous sequences must be retrieved from
memory at every decoding step. Thereby, this KV cache IO becomes a significant
bottleneck in batch inference. We notice that these costs stem from applying
self-attention on the global context, therefore we isolate the expensive
bottlenecks of global modeling to lower layers and apply fast local modeling in
upper layers. To mitigate the remaining costs in the lower layers, we aggregate
input tokens into fixed size blocks and then apply self-attention at this
coarse level. Context information is aggregated into a single embedding to
enable upper layers to decode the next block of tokens, without global
attention. Free of global attention bottlenecks, the upper layers can fully
utilize the compute hardware to maximize inference throughput. By leveraging
global and local modules, the Block Transformer architecture demonstrates
10-20x gains in inference throughput compared to vanilla transformers with
equivalent perplexity. Our work introduces a new approach to optimize language
model inference through novel application of global-to-local modeling. Code is
available at https://github.com/itsnamgyu/block-transformer.