Title: Multi-Head Low-Rank Attention
Primary area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs
Keywords: ML System, Efficient Decoding

Abstract: Long-context inference in large language models is bottlenecked by Key-Value (KV) cache loading during the decoding stage, where the sequential nature of generation requires repeatedly transferring the KV cache from off-chip to on-chip memory at each step. Recent architectures like Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA) significantly reduce the KV cache size to $4.5d_h$ per token per layer while maintaining high model quality. However, when using tensor parallelism (TP) with sufficient devices for inference, MLA still decodes slower than Grouped-Query Attention (GQA) because its single latent vector cannot be sharded, forcing each device to load $4.5 d_h$ versus $2 d_h$ for GQA. In this work, we propose Multi-Head Low-Rank Attention (MLRA), a TP-friendly attention mechanism that slashes the per-device KV cache under TP to just $1.5 d_h$. Extensive experiments show that MLRA achieves state-of-the-art perplexity and downstream task performance, while also delivering a 2.8$\times$ decoding speedup over MLA.