∫ntegrabℓε ∂iﬀerentiαℓs · unorganised notes, code, and writings of random topics

Ainslie et al (2023) GQA: Training Generalized Multi-Query Transformer Models from Multi-Head Checkpoints

February 1, 2025 paper

This is the paper that proposed the Grouped-Query Attention (GQA). While MQA, by sharing the $K,V$ tensors in attention, speeds up the decoder inference, it is found to degrade in quality. GQA is a generalization of MQA. Just like group norm is a generalization between instance norm and layer norm,... [more]

Shazeer (2019) Fast Transformer Decoding. One Write-Head is All You Need

January 31, 2025 paper

This is the paper that proposed the Multi-Query Attention (MQA). The author of is from Google and the idea was explained in detail using TensorFlow code. Firstly, the traditional dot-product attention (single head) is like this: [more]

Normalization Zoo

January 30, 2025 blog math

Normalization in deep learning is to shift and scale a tensor such that the activation will run at the sweet spot. This helps to solve the problems such as vanishing/exploding gradients, weight initialization, training stability, and convergence. [more]

Black and White

September 27, 2024 blog math

There is no black and white. Human perceived black for no visible light, and some composition of light wavelengths is perceived as white. To measure the grayscale, we want to quantify what is black and what is white. [more]

Timezone in Python

April 19, 2024 blog code

The UNIX epoch is always in UTC. There’s no such thing as local epoch. To get the epoch in command line, you do date +%s, or in Python, time.time(). It doesn’t matter if time.localtime() and time.gmtime() are different, the epoch is universally consistent across timezone. [more]