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Nov 6

QJL: 1-Bit Quantized JL Transform for KV Cache Quantization with Zero Overhead

Serving LLMs requires substantial memory due to the storage requirements of Key-Value (KV) embeddings in the KV cache, which grows with sequence length. An effective approach to compress KV cache is quantization. However, traditional quantization methods face significant memory overhead due to the need to store quantization constants (at least a zero point and a scale) in full precision per data block. Depending on the block size, this overhead can add 1 or 2 bits per quantized number. We introduce QJL, a new quantization approach that consists of a Johnson-Lindenstrauss (JL) transform followed by sign-bit quantization. In contrast to existing methods, QJL eliminates memory overheads by removing the need for storing quantization constants. We propose an asymmetric estimator for the inner product of two vectors and demonstrate that applying QJL to one vector and a standard JL transform without quantization to the other provides an unbiased estimator with minimal distortion. We have developed an efficient implementation of the QJL sketch and its corresponding inner product estimator, incorporating a lightweight CUDA kernel for optimized computation. When applied across various LLMs and NLP tasks to quantize the KV cache to only 3 bits, QJL demonstrates a more than fivefold reduction in KV cache memory usage without compromising accuracy, all while achieving faster runtime. Codes are available at https://github.com/amirzandieh/QJL.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 5, 2024

KHRONOS: a Kernel-Based Neural Architecture for Rapid, Resource-Efficient Scientific Computation

Contemporary models of high dimensional physical systems are constrained by the curse of dimensionality and a reliance on dense data. We introduce KHRONOS (Kernel Expansion Hierarchy for Reduced Order, Neural Optimized Surrogates), an AI framework for model based, model free and model inversion tasks. KHRONOS constructs continuously differentiable target fields with a hierarchical composition of per-dimension kernel expansions, which are tensorized into modes and then superposed. We evaluate KHRONOS on a canonical 2D, Poisson equation benchmark: across 16 to 512 degrees of freedom (DoFs), it obtained L_2-square errors of 5e-4 down to 6e-11. This represents a greater than 100-fold gain over Kolmogorov Arnold Networks (which itself reports a 100 times improvement on MLPs/PINNs with 100 times fewer parameters) when controlling for the number of parameters. This also represents a 1e6-fold improvement in L_2-square error compared to standard linear FEM at comparable DoFs. Inference complexity is dominated by inner products, yielding sub-millisecond full-field predictions that scale to an arbitrary resolution. For inverse problems, KHRONOS facilitates rapid, iterative level set recovery in only a few forward evaluations, with sub-microsecond per sample latency. KHRONOS's scalability, expressivity, and interpretability open new avenues in constrained edge computing, online control, computer vision, and beyond.

  • 2 authors
·
May 25, 2025

Generalizing the Convolution Operator in Convolutional Neural Networks

Convolutional neural networks have become a main tool for solving many machine vision and machine learning problems. A major element of these networks is the convolution operator which essentially computes the inner product between a weight vector and the vectorized image patches extracted by sliding a window in the image planes of the previous layer. In this paper, we propose two classes of surrogate functions for the inner product operation inherent in the convolution operator and so attain two generalizations of the convolution operator. The first one is the class of positive definite kernel functions where their application is justified by the kernel trick. The second one is the class of similarity measures defined based on a distance function. We justify this by tracing back to the basic idea behind the neocognitron which is the ancestor of CNNs. Both methods are then further generalized by allowing a monotonically increasing function to be applied subsequently. Like any trainable parameter in a neural network, the template pattern and the parameters of the kernel/distance function are trained with the back-propagation algorithm. As an aside, we use the proposed framework to justify the use of sine activation function in CNNs. Our experiments on the MNIST dataset show that the performance of ordinary CNNs can be achieved by generalized CNNs based on weighted L1/L2 distances, proving the applicability of the proposed generalization of the convolutional neural networks.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 14, 2017

LordNet: An Efficient Neural Network for Learning to Solve Parametric Partial Differential Equations without Simulated Data

Neural operators, as a powerful approximation to the non-linear operators between infinite-dimensional function spaces, have proved to be promising in accelerating the solution of partial differential equations (PDE). However, it requires a large amount of simulated data, which can be costly to collect. This can be avoided by learning physics from the physics-constrained loss, which we refer to it as mean squared residual (MSR) loss constructed by the discretized PDE. We investigate the physical information in the MSR loss, which we called long-range entanglements, and identify the challenge that the neural network requires the capacity to model the long-range entanglements in the spatial domain of the PDE, whose patterns vary in different PDEs. To tackle the challenge, we propose LordNet, a tunable and efficient neural network for modeling various entanglements. Inspired by the traditional solvers, LordNet models the long-range entanglements with a series of matrix multiplications, which can be seen as the low-rank approximation to the general fully-connected layers and extracts the dominant pattern with reduced computational cost. The experiments on solving Poisson's equation and (2D and 3D) Navier-Stokes equation demonstrate that the long-range entanglements from the MSR loss can be well modeled by the LordNet, yielding better accuracy and generalization ability than other neural networks. The results show that the Lordnet can be 40times faster than traditional PDE solvers. In addition, LordNet outperforms other modern neural network architectures in accuracy and efficiency with the smallest parameter size.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 19, 2022

SMASH: Sparse Matrix Atomic Scratchpad Hashing

Sparse matrices, more specifically SpGEMM kernels, are commonly found in a wide range of applications, spanning graph-based path-finding to machine learning algorithms (e.g., neural networks). A particular challenge in implementing SpGEMM kernels has been the pressure placed on DRAM memory. One approach to tackle this problem is to use an inner product method for the SpGEMM kernel implementation. While the inner product produces fewer intermediate results, it can end up saturating the memory bandwidth, given the high number of redundant fetches of the input matrix elements. Using an outer product-based SpGEMM kernel can reduce redundant fetches, but at the cost of increased overhead due to extra computation and memory accesses for producing/managing partial products. In this thesis, we introduce a novel SpGEMM kernel implementation based on the row-wise product approach. We leverage atomic instructions to merge intermediate partial products as they are generated. The use of atomic instructions eliminates the need to create partial product matrices. To evaluate our row-wise product approach, we map an optimized SpGEMM kernel to a custom accelerator designed to accelerate graph-based applications. The targeted accelerator is an experimental system named PIUMA, being developed by Intel. PIUMA provides several attractive features, including fast context switching, user-configurable caches, globally addressable memory, non-coherent caches, and asynchronous pipelines. We tailor our SpGEMM kernel to exploit many of the features of the PIUMA fabric. This thesis compares our SpGEMM implementation against prior solutions, all mapped to the PIUMA framework. We briefly describe some of the PIUMA architecture features and then delve into the details of our optimized SpGEMM kernel. Our SpGEMM kernel can achieve 9.4x speedup as compared to competing approaches.

  • 1 authors
·
May 28, 2021

Principled Approaches for Extending Neural Architectures to Function Spaces for Operator Learning

A wide range of scientific problems, such as those described by continuous-time dynamical systems and partial differential equations (PDEs), are naturally formulated on function spaces. While function spaces are typically infinite-dimensional, deep learning has predominantly advanced through applications in computer vision and natural language processing that focus on mappings between finite-dimensional spaces. Such fundamental disparities in the nature of the data have limited neural networks from achieving a comparable level of success in scientific applications as seen in other fields. Neural operators are a principled way to generalize neural networks to mappings between function spaces, offering a pathway to replicate deep learning's transformative impact on scientific problems. For instance, neural operators can learn solution operators for entire classes of PDEs, e.g., physical systems with different boundary conditions, coefficient functions, and geometries. A key factor in deep learning's success has been the careful engineering of neural architectures through extensive empirical testing. Translating these neural architectures into neural operators allows operator learning to enjoy these same empirical optimizations. However, prior neural operator architectures have often been introduced as standalone models, not directly derived as extensions of existing neural network architectures. In this paper, we identify and distill the key principles for constructing practical implementations of mappings between infinite-dimensional function spaces. Using these principles, we propose a recipe for converting several popular neural architectures into neural operators with minimal modifications. This paper aims to guide practitioners through this process and details the steps to make neural operators work in practice. Our code can be found at https://github.com/neuraloperator/NNs-to-NOs

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 12, 2025

Enabling Efficient Equivariant Operations in the Fourier Basis via Gaunt Tensor Products

Developing equivariant neural networks for the E(3) group plays an important role in modeling 3D data across real-world applications. Enforcing this equivariance primarily involves the tensor products of irreducible representations (irreps). However, the computational complexity of such operations increases significantly as higher-order tensors are used. In this work, we propose a systematic approach to substantially accelerate the computation of the tensor products of irreps. We mathematically connect the commonly used Clebsch-Gordan coefficients to the Gaunt coefficients, which are integrals of products of three spherical harmonics. Through Gaunt coefficients, the tensor product of irreps becomes equivalent to the multiplication between spherical functions represented by spherical harmonics. This perspective further allows us to change the basis for the equivariant operations from spherical harmonics to a 2D Fourier basis. Consequently, the multiplication between spherical functions represented by a 2D Fourier basis can be efficiently computed via the convolution theorem and Fast Fourier Transforms. This transformation reduces the complexity of full tensor products of irreps from O(L^6) to O(L^3), where L is the max degree of irreps. Leveraging this approach, we introduce the Gaunt Tensor Product, which serves as a new method to construct efficient equivariant operations across different model architectures. Our experiments on the Open Catalyst Project and 3BPA datasets demonstrate both the increased efficiency and improved performance of our approach.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 18, 2024

The Price of Freedom: Exploring Expressivity and Runtime Tradeoffs in Equivariant Tensor Products

E(3)-equivariant neural networks have demonstrated success across a wide range of 3D modelling tasks. A fundamental operation in these networks is the tensor product, which interacts two geometric features in an equivariant manner to create new features. Due to the high computational complexity of the tensor product, significant effort has been invested to optimize the runtime of this operation. For example, Luo et al. (2024) recently proposed the Gaunt tensor product (GTP) which promises a significant speedup. In this work, we provide a careful, systematic analysis of a number of tensor product operations. In particular, we emphasize that different tensor products are not performing the same operation. The reported speedups typically come at the cost of expressivity. We introduce measures of expressivity and interactability to characterize these differences. In addition, we realized the original implementation of GTP can be greatly simplified by directly using a spherical grid at no cost in asymptotic runtime. This spherical grid approach is faster on our benchmarks and in actual training of the MACE interatomic potential by 30%. Finally, we provide the first systematic microbenchmarks of the various tensor product operations. We find that the theoretical runtime guarantees can differ wildly from empirical performance, demonstrating the need for careful application-specific benchmarking. Code is available at https://github.com/atomicarchitects/PriceofFreedom.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 16, 2025

Solving High Frequency and Multi-Scale PDEs with Gaussian Processes

Machine learning based solvers have garnered much attention in physical simulation and scientific computing, with a prominent example, physics-informed neural networks (PINNs). However, PINNs often struggle to solve high-frequency and multi-scale PDEs, which can be due to spectral bias during neural network training. To address this problem, we resort to the Gaussian process (GP) framework. To flexibly capture the dominant frequencies, we model the power spectrum of the PDE solution with a student t mixture or Gaussian mixture. We apply the inverse Fourier transform to obtain the covariance function (by Wiener-Khinchin theorem). The covariance derived from the Gaussian mixture spectrum corresponds to the known spectral mixture kernel. Next, we estimate the mixture weights in the log domain, which we show is equivalent to placing a Jeffreys prior. It automatically induces sparsity, prunes excessive frequencies, and adjusts the remaining toward the ground truth. Third, to enable efficient and scalable computation on massive collocation points, which are critical to capture high frequencies, we place the collocation points on a grid, and multiply our covariance function at each input dimension. We use the GP conditional mean to predict the solution and its derivatives so as to fit the boundary condition and the equation itself. As a result, we can derive a Kronecker product structure in the covariance matrix. We use Kronecker product properties and multilinear algebra to promote computational efficiency and scalability, without low-rank approximations. We show the advantage of our method in systematic experiments. The code is released at https://github.com/xuangu-fang/Gaussian-Process-Slover-for-High-Freq-PDE.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 8, 2023

A Deep Conjugate Direction Method for Iteratively Solving Linear Systems

We present a novel deep learning approach to approximate the solution of large, sparse, symmetric, positive-definite linear systems of equations. These systems arise from many problems in applied science, e.g., in numerical methods for partial differential equations. Algorithms for approximating the solution to these systems are often the bottleneck in problems that require their solution, particularly for modern applications that require many millions of unknowns. Indeed, numerical linear algebra techniques have been investigated for many decades to alleviate this computational burden. Recently, data-driven techniques have also shown promise for these problems. Motivated by the conjugate gradients algorithm that iteratively selects search directions for minimizing the matrix norm of the approximation error, we design an approach that utilizes a deep neural network to accelerate convergence via data-driven improvement of the search directions. Our method leverages a carefully chosen convolutional network to approximate the action of the inverse of the linear operator up to an arbitrary constant. We train the network using unsupervised learning with a loss function equal to the L^2 difference between an input and the system matrix times the network evaluation, where the unspecified constant in the approximate inverse is accounted for. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on spatially discretized Poisson equations with millions of degrees of freedom arising in computational fluid dynamics applications. Unlike state-of-the-art learning approaches, our algorithm is capable of reducing the linear system residual to a given tolerance in a small number of iterations, independent of the problem size. Moreover, our method generalizes effectively to various systems beyond those encountered during training.

  • 6 authors
·
May 22, 2022

Learning Orthonormal Bases for Function Spaces

Infinite-dimensional orthonormal basis expansions play a central role in representing and computing with function spaces due to their favorable linear algebraic properties. However, common bases such as Fourier or wavelets are fixed and do not adapt to the structure of a given problem or dataset. In this paper, we aim to represent these bases with neural networks and optimize them. Our key idea is that any target infinite-dimensional orthonormal basis can be viewed either as a point on the Lie manifold of the orthogonal group, or equivalently, as the endpoint of a continuous path on that manifold that connects a reference basis, e.g. Fourier, to that target. Paths on the Lie manifold satisfy ordinary differential equations (ODEs) governed by skew-adjoint integral operators. Using neural networks to define finite-rank generators of such ODEs allows us to parameterize and optimize orthonormal bases in function space. While relying on finite-rank generators to model infinite operators might seem restrictive, we prove a universality result: even with a rank-2 generator, the integrated solutions of the ODE are dense in the orthogonal group under the appropriate operator topology. In other words, for any target orthonormal basis, there exists a path originating from a reference basis and driven by finite-rank generators that gets arbitrarily close to that target basis. We demonstrate the flexibility of our framework by transforming the Fourier basis into the principal components of a functional dataset, eigenfunctions of linear operators, or dynamic modes of energy-preserving physical simulations.

  • 3 authors
·
May 18

Towards Atoms of Large Language Models

The fundamental units of internal representations in large language models (LLMs) remain undefined, limiting further understanding of their mechanisms. Neurons or features are often regarded as such units, yet neurons suffer from polysemy, while features face concerns of unreliable reconstruction and instability. To address this issue, we propose the Atoms Theory, which defines such units as atoms. We introduce the atomic inner product (AIP) to correct representation shifting, formally define atoms, and prove the conditions that atoms satisfy the Restricted Isometry Property (RIP), ensuring stable sparse representations over atom set and linking to compressed sensing. Under stronger conditions, we further establish the uniqueness and exact ell_1 recoverability of the sparse representations, and provide guarantees that single-layer sparse autoencoders (SAEs) with threshold activations can reliably identify the atoms. To validate the Atoms Theory, we train threshold-activated SAEs on Gemma2-2B, Gemma2-9B, and Llama3.1-8B, achieving 99.9% sparse reconstruction across layers on average, and more than 99.8% of atoms satisfy the uniqueness condition, compared to 0.5% for neurons and 68.2% for features, showing that atoms more faithfully capture intrinsic representations of LLMs. Scaling experiments further reveal the link between SAEs size and recovery capacity. Overall, this work systematically introduces and validates Atoms Theory of LLMs, providing a theoretical framework for understanding internal representations and a foundation for mechanistic interpretability. Code available at https://github.com/ChenhuiHu/towards_atoms.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 25, 2025

Accelerating Data Generation for Neural Operators via Krylov Subspace Recycling

Learning neural operators for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) has attracted great attention due to its high inference efficiency. However, training such operators requires generating a substantial amount of labeled data, i.e., PDE problems together with their solutions. The data generation process is exceptionally time-consuming, as it involves solving numerous systems of linear equations to obtain numerical solutions to the PDEs. Many existing methods solve these systems independently without considering their inherent similarities, resulting in extremely redundant computations. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel method, namely Sorting Krylov Recycling (SKR), to boost the efficiency of solving these systems, thus significantly accelerating data generation for neural operators training. To the best of our knowledge, SKR is the first attempt to address the time-consuming nature of data generation for learning neural operators. The working horse of SKR is Krylov subspace recycling, a powerful technique for solving a series of interrelated systems by leveraging their inherent similarities. Specifically, SKR employs a sorting algorithm to arrange these systems in a sequence, where adjacent systems exhibit high similarities. Then it equips a solver with Krylov subspace recycling to solve the systems sequentially instead of independently, thus effectively enhancing the solving efficiency. Both theoretical analysis and extensive experiments demonstrate that SKR can significantly accelerate neural operator data generation, achieving a remarkable speedup of up to 13.9 times.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 17, 2024

Expressivity of IQP Feature-Map Quantum Kernels via Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces

Quantum kernels are among the most promising methods in quantum machine learning, providing a natural way to embed data into high-dimensional Hilbert spaces via quantum circuits and capturing non-linear relationships in data. Their learning behaviour is governed by the function class they represent, which is formally characterized by the structure of the associated Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS). However, a theoretical characterization of this function class, and of how it depends on the choice of feature map and its hyperparameters, is still lacking. In this work, we focus on the Instantaneous Quantum Polynomial (IQP) feature map and derive a Fourier representation of the associated RKHS generators as finite sums of trigonometric functions evaluated on polynomially transformed input variables, with a finite set of accessible frequencies determined by the circuit construction and scaled by the bandwidth hyperparameter. This representation identifies three bandwidth regimes with qualitatively distinct expressive properties from localised, through multimodal, to periodic. Numerical experiments on synthetic datasets with controlled periodic and multimodal structure, across data dimensions and feature-map configurations, reproduce the three regimes in both supervised classification and unsupervised anomaly detection, benchmarked against a classical Gaussian kernel. These results make the relationship between expressivity and data structure explicit for IQP kernels: expressive power translates into a practical benefit only when the accessible frequencies match with the structure of the data, which provides a criterion for selecting the bandwidth when the periodic or multimodal structure of data is known.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 16

Addition is All You Need for Energy-efficient Language Models

Large neural networks spend most computation on floating point tensor multiplications. In this work, we find that a floating point multiplier can be approximated by one integer adder with high precision. We propose the linear-complexity multiplication L-Mul algorithm that approximates floating point number multiplication with integer addition operations. The new algorithm costs significantly less computation resource than 8-bit floating point multiplication but achieves higher precision. Compared to 8-bit floating point multiplications, the proposed method achieves higher precision but consumes significantly less bit-level computation. Since multiplying floating point numbers requires substantially higher energy compared to integer addition operations, applying the L-Mul operation in tensor processing hardware can potentially reduce 95% energy cost by element-wise floating point tensor multiplications and 80% energy cost of dot products. We calculated the theoretical error expectation of L-Mul, and evaluated the algorithm on a wide range of textual, visual, and symbolic tasks, including natural language understanding, structural reasoning, mathematics, and commonsense question answering. Our numerical analysis experiments agree with the theoretical error estimation, which indicates that L-Mul with 4-bit mantissa achieves comparable precision as float8_e4m3 multiplications, and L-Mul with 3-bit mantissa outperforms float8_e5m2. Evaluation results on popular benchmarks show that directly applying L-Mul to the attention mechanism is almost lossless. We further show that replacing all floating point multiplications with 3-bit mantissa L-Mul in a transformer model achieves equivalent precision as using float8_e4m3 as accumulation precision in both fine-tuning and inference.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 1, 2024 17

Quantifying and Expanding the Theoretical Capacity of Late-Interaction Retrieval Models

Late-interaction retrieval models that use the MaxSim similarity function have shown strong empirical performance, often outperforming single-vector dense and sparse retrieval models. Despite these empirical findings, little is known about the theoretical representation power of MaxSim and how it compares to other retrieval approaches. This paper shows by construction that MaxSim similarity can exactly replicate the inner product between any two non-negative k-sparse vectors with possibly infinite dimension, requiring only O(k) representation space. Moreover, there exist similarities that MaxSim can express while standard vector inner products with the same representation space cannot. Leveraging our theoretical framework, we introduce Signed MaxSim which allows late-interaction models to exactly replicate any real-valued inner product, something we prove standard MaxSim is not capable of. We also show that MaxSim can act as an aggregation of soft-OR operations and as an evaluator of logical expressions in positive Conjunctive Normal Form. Our findings show that MaxSim is at least as capable as standard vector inner products for any non-negative vectors and our extension, Signed MaxSim, is as capable for any vectors. Both similarities possess additional capabilities that inner product cannot replicate, marking one of the first theoretical justifications and quantifications of late-interaction methods. Our theoretical findings are supported empirically: on a retrieval task featuring queries with negations, Signed MaxSim improves out-of-domain performance significantly over a standard ColBERT/MaxSim baseline with nDCG@10 increasing from 0.597 to 1.000 under a vocabulary shift and from 0.008 to 0.788 on negation-only queries.

The Importance of Being Scalable: Improving the Speed and Accuracy of Neural Network Interatomic Potentials Across Chemical Domains

Scaling has been critical in improving model performance and generalization in machine learning. It involves how a model's performance changes with increases in model size or input data, as well as how efficiently computational resources are utilized to support this growth. Despite successes in other areas, the study of scaling in Neural Network Interatomic Potentials (NNIPs) remains limited. NNIPs act as surrogate models for ab initio quantum mechanical calculations. The dominant paradigm here is to incorporate many physical domain constraints into the model, such as rotational equivariance. We contend that these complex constraints inhibit the scaling ability of NNIPs, and are likely to lead to performance plateaus in the long run. In this work, we take an alternative approach and start by systematically studying NNIP scaling strategies. Our findings indicate that scaling the model through attention mechanisms is efficient and improves model expressivity. These insights motivate us to develop an NNIP architecture designed for scalability: the Efficiently Scaled Attention Interatomic Potential (EScAIP). EScAIP leverages a multi-head self-attention formulation within graph neural networks, applying attention at the neighbor-level representations. Implemented with highly-optimized attention GPU kernels, EScAIP achieves substantial gains in efficiency--at least 10x faster inference, 5x less memory usage--compared to existing NNIPs. EScAIP also achieves state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of datasets including catalysts (OC20 and OC22), molecules (SPICE), and materials (MPTrj). We emphasize that our approach should be thought of as a philosophy rather than a specific model, representing a proof-of-concept for developing general-purpose NNIPs that achieve better expressivity through scaling, and continue to scale efficiently with increased computational resources and training data.

Berkeley UC Berkeley
·
Oct 31, 2024

Contraction-Gauge Preconditioning for Quantized Matrix Multiplication

We study low-precision computation of C=AB with both factors quantized. We derive an exact finite-dimensional identity for the expected squared product error under independent, zero-mean entrywise errors with known variance fields; it holds exactly for non-overloading subtractive dither and for independent stochastic rounding, and we empirically assess deterministic round-to-nearest (RTN). Using the product-preserving equivalence AB=(AT)(T^{-1}B), we formulate contraction-gauge preconditioning: jointly choosing a factor representation and its sharing pattern before quantization. Preconditioning can reduce product error but may require extra transformed, quantized copies of the opposite operand: a shared transform needs one copy, a block-specific transform up to one per block. Within the bounded family of positive diagonal gauges (folds), a geometric program computes a globally optimal shared fold and a linear program decides whether the identity fold is already optimal. For other families we derive computable selection statistics -- tail index for scaling, profile spread for partitioning, coherence and weighted-Gram energy for rotations, slice-energy covariance for hierarchy depth -- with upper bounds for ranking heuristic candidates. Across twelve linear products from a trained three-block image classifier, median within-product rank correlations between dither-model predictions and deterministic-RTN errors are 0.937 at 8 bits and 0.918 at 4 bits. The GP fold cuts held-out product error over the identity fold by 18.0% (8-bit) and 20.5% (4-bit) in geometric mean, beats a SmoothQuant-style grid baseline at both precisions and on ten of twelve products, and lowers composed logit MSE by 15.4% and 26.4%. We thus provide exact stochastic product-error accounting, certified selection within the diagonal family, and a common objective for evaluating reusable transform candidates under RTN.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 20

Learning Fast Algorithms for Linear Transforms Using Butterfly Factorizations

Fast linear transforms are ubiquitous in machine learning, including the discrete Fourier transform, discrete cosine transform, and other structured transformations such as convolutions. All of these transforms can be represented by dense matrix-vector multiplication, yet each has a specialized and highly efficient (subquadratic) algorithm. We ask to what extent hand-crafting these algorithms and implementations is necessary, what structural priors they encode, and how much knowledge is required to automatically learn a fast algorithm for a provided structured transform. Motivated by a characterization of fast matrix-vector multiplication as products of sparse matrices, we introduce a parameterization of divide-and-conquer methods that is capable of representing a large class of transforms. This generic formulation can automatically learn an efficient algorithm for many important transforms; for example, it recovers the O(N log N) Cooley-Tukey FFT algorithm to machine precision, for dimensions N up to 1024. Furthermore, our method can be incorporated as a lightweight replacement of generic matrices in machine learning pipelines to learn efficient and compressible transformations. On a standard task of compressing a single hidden-layer network, our method exceeds the classification accuracy of unconstrained matrices on CIFAR-10 by 3.9 points -- the first time a structured approach has done so -- with 4X faster inference speed and 40X fewer parameters.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 28, 2020

Decode Late, Multiply Once: Rethinking the Dot Product for Quantized Weights

Large neural networks are increasingly deployed with 1-4 bit weights and 16- or 32-bit activations, yet their dot products still use one multiplier per element. We show that a length-n dot product with k-bit weight codes can be computed with n+2^k additions and at most 2^k decodes and 2^k multiplications. Each weight code is used directly as an address offset that selects one of 2^k accumulators; each activation is added into the selected accumulator; and the accumulated sums are decoded and multiplied only once, at the end, in a fused decode-and-multiply step. The decoded weight vector is never formed. The refactoring is exact for integer arithmetic, works with integer or floating-point operands and with arbitrary, including nonlinear, decoders, and extends to group-wise scales and to matrix and tensor products. The multiplier count falls by n/2^k, while total arithmetic energy improves by a smaller, bounded factor that we quantify with a cost model. We describe a scatter-accumulate processing element (SA-PE) that replaces the MAC unit in a weight-stationary systolic array, with a load/stream/reduce/drain schedule in which a small, time-shareable multiplier runs only 2^k times per tile. Because decoded weights are not stored, local weight memory shrinks by up to w_d/k for w_d-bit decoded weights. An RTL implementation synthesized for FPGA and compared with a matched MAC array shows that an unshared SA-PE is larger than a MAC PE, and that the saving appears when the reduction multiplier is shared across PEs. Software models confirm exact integer equivalence and floating-point error no worse than the conventional pipeline. We do not claim the underlying identity is new, and we discuss related work on weight sharing and lookup-based kernels.

  • 1 authors
·
Oct 21

Solving High-Dimensional PDEs with Latent Spectral Models

Deep models have achieved impressive progress in solving partial differential equations (PDEs). A burgeoning paradigm is learning neural operators to approximate the input-output mappings of PDEs. While previous deep models have explored the multiscale architectures and various operator designs, they are limited to learning the operators as a whole in the coordinate space. In real physical science problems, PDEs are complex coupled equations with numerical solvers relying on discretization into high-dimensional coordinate space, which cannot be precisely approximated by a single operator nor efficiently learned due to the curse of dimensionality. We present Latent Spectral Models (LSM) toward an efficient and precise solver for high-dimensional PDEs. Going beyond the coordinate space, LSM enables an attention-based hierarchical projection network to reduce the high-dimensional data into a compact latent space in linear time. Inspired by classical spectral methods in numerical analysis, we design a neural spectral block to solve PDEs in the latent space that approximates complex input-output mappings via learning multiple basis operators, enjoying nice theoretical guarantees for convergence and approximation. Experimentally, LSM achieves consistent state-of-the-art and yields a relative gain of 11.5% averaged on seven benchmarks covering both solid and fluid physics. Code is available at https://github.com/thuml/Latent-Spectral-Models.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 29, 2023

Continuum Attention for Neural Operators

Transformers, and the attention mechanism in particular, have become ubiquitous in machine learning. Their success in modeling nonlocal, long-range correlations has led to their widespread adoption in natural language processing, computer vision, and time series problems. Neural operators, which map spaces of functions into spaces of functions, are necessarily both nonlinear and nonlocal if they are universal; it is thus natural to ask whether the attention mechanism can be used in the design of neural operators. Motivated by this, we study transformers in the function space setting. We formulate attention as a map between infinite dimensional function spaces and prove that the attention mechanism as implemented in practice is a Monte Carlo or finite difference approximation of this operator. The function space formulation allows for the design of transformer neural operators, a class of architectures designed to learn mappings between function spaces. In this paper, we state and prove the first universal approximation result for transformer neural operators, using only a slight modification of the architecture implemented in practice. The prohibitive cost of applying the attention operator to functions defined on multi-dimensional domains leads to the need for more efficient attention-based architectures. For this reason we also introduce a function space generalization of the patching strategy from computer vision, and introduce a class of associated neural operators. Numerical results, on an array of operator learning problems, demonstrate the promise of our approaches to function space formulations of attention and their use in neural operators.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 19, 2025

INR-Arch: A Dataflow Architecture and Compiler for Arbitrary-Order Gradient Computations in Implicit Neural Representation Processing

An increasing number of researchers are finding use for nth-order gradient computations for a wide variety of applications, including graphics, meta-learning (MAML), scientific computing, and most recently, implicit neural representations (INRs). Recent work shows that the gradient of an INR can be used to edit the data it represents directly without needing to convert it back to a discrete representation. However, given a function represented as a computation graph, traditional architectures face challenges in efficiently computing its nth-order gradient due to the higher demand for computing power and higher complexity in data movement. This makes it a promising target for FPGA acceleration. In this work, we introduce INR-Arch, a framework that transforms the computation graph of an nth-order gradient into a hardware-optimized dataflow architecture. We address this problem in two phases. First, we design a dataflow architecture that uses FIFO streams and an optimized computation kernel library, ensuring high memory efficiency and parallel computation. Second, we propose a compiler that extracts and optimizes computation graphs, automatically configures hardware parameters such as latency and stream depths to optimize throughput, while ensuring deadlock-free operation, and outputs High-Level Synthesis (HLS) code for FPGA implementation. We utilize INR editing as our benchmark, presenting results that demonstrate 1.8-4.8x and 1.5-3.6x speedup compared to CPU and GPU baselines respectively. Furthermore, we obtain 3.1-8.9x and 1.7-4.3x lower memory usage, and 1.7-11.3x and 5.5-32.8x lower energy-delay product. Our framework will be made open-source and available on GitHub.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 10, 2023

Low-Interaction-Rank Learning: Unifying Multiplicative Dual-Encoder Heads

A multiplicative dual-encoder network computes a real-valued output for a pair of inputs as the inner product of their separate encodings. This architecture has been developed independently in operator learning, bipartite matching, contrastive vision-language models, retrieval, and other areas, yet no unified theory guides the basic design decisions: how many interaction modes to represent, how to normalize the encoders, and when the architecture should be avoided. We provide such a foundation by introducing the class of functions of low interaction rank, a class whose intrinsic complexity is measured by its interaction spectrum. Within this framework, approximation error decomposes into a spectral truncation term and an encoder-realization term; sample complexity is governed by the sum of the two encoder complexities rather than their product; and a usability criterion based on spectral decay determines when the architecture can succeed. The same framework exposes a central identifiability problem: the encoders are defined only up to a linear gauge symmetry that leaves the learned coordinates arbitrary. We show that normalization is gauge fixing and that whitening pins the interaction modes up to permutation and sign, thereby explaining the uninterpretability of contrastive dimensions and providing a constructive remedy. Experiments on synthetic kernels, operator learning, and CLIP models validate the theoretical predictions: spectral decay rates match the predicted scaling, whitening recovers the true modes, and independently trained CLIP models are related by a single rotation which, after removal by whitening, exposes interpretable concept axes. The code of this paper is provided at https://github.com/RS2002/Mul-Net .

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 11

Fast and Stable Triangular Inversion for Delta-Rule Linear Transformers

Linear attention has emerged as a cornerstone for efficient long-context architectures, as evidenced by its integration into state-of-the-art open-source models including Qwen3.5/3.6, Kimi Linear, and RWKV-7. Models that incorporate linear attention layers with the so-called Delta-Rule involve the inversion of triangular matrices as a core sub-routine. This operation often forms a performance bottleneck, and, due to its high-sensitivity to numerical errors, it can significantly deteriorate end-to-end model accuracy if it is not carefully implemented. This work provides a systematic analysis of both direct and iterative triangular inversion algorithms, targeting methods that are rich in matrix products, and, therefore, have the potential to efficiently utilize modern hardware. To that end, our analysis covers a broad spectrum of mathematical and practical aspects, with a heavy focus on numerical stability, computational complexity, and, ultimately, hardware efficiency and practical considerations. We provide a rigorous experimental evaluation to verify these properties in practical scenarios, and in low-precision floating-point representations, highlighting the strengths and limitations of each method. Performance benchmarks on NPUs reveal up to 4.3times speed-up against the state-of-the-art implementations of SGLang for triangular matrix inversion, leading to significant performance improvements on the entire layer level, while maintaining full end-to-end model accuracy.

  • 7 authors
·
May 19

Tensor Decomposition Networks for Fast Machine Learning Interatomic Potential Computations

SO(3)-equivariant networks are the dominant models for machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs). The key operation of such networks is the Clebsch-Gordan (CG) tensor product, which is computationally expensive. To accelerate the computation, we develop tensor decomposition networks (TDNs) as a class of approximately equivariant networks in which CG tensor products are replaced by low-rank tensor decompositions, such as the CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) decomposition. With the CP decomposition, we prove (i) a uniform bound on the induced error of SO(3)-equivariance, and (ii) the universality of approximating any equivariant bilinear map. To further reduce the number of parameters, we propose path-weight sharing that ties all multiplicity-space weights across the O(L^3) CG paths into a single shared parameter set without compromising equivariance, where L is the maximum angular degree. The resulting layer acts as a plug-and-play replacement for tensor products in existing networks, and the computational complexity of tensor products is reduced from O(L^6) to O(L^4). We evaluate TDNs on PubChemQCR, a newly curated molecular relaxation dataset containing 105 million DFT-calculated snapshots. We also use existing datasets, including OC20, and OC22. Results show that TDNs achieve competitive performance with dramatic speedup in computations. Our code is publicly available as part of the AIRS library (https://github.com/divelab/AIRS/tree/main/OpenMol/TDN{https://github.com/divelab/AIRS/}).

  • 9 authors
·
Jul 1, 2025

MgNO: Efficient Parameterization of Linear Operators via Multigrid

In this work, we propose a concise neural operator architecture for operator learning. Drawing an analogy with a conventional fully connected neural network, we define the neural operator as follows: the output of the i-th neuron in a nonlinear operator layer is defined by mathcal O_i(u) = sigmaleft( sum_j mathcal W_{ij} u + mathcal B_{ij}right). Here, mathcal W_{ij} denotes the bounded linear operator connecting j-th input neuron to i-th output neuron, and the bias mathcal B_{ij} takes the form of a function rather than a scalar. Given its new universal approximation property, the efficient parameterization of the bounded linear operators between two neurons (Banach spaces) plays a critical role. As a result, we introduce MgNO, utilizing multigrid structures to parameterize these linear operators between neurons. This approach offers both mathematical rigor and practical expressivity. Additionally, MgNO obviates the need for conventional lifting and projecting operators typically required in previous neural operators. Moreover, it seamlessly accommodates diverse boundary conditions. Our empirical observations reveal that MgNO exhibits superior ease of training compared to other CNN-based models, while also displaying a reduced susceptibility to overfitting when contrasted with spectral-type neural operators. We demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of our method with consistently state-of-the-art performance on different types of partial differential equations (PDEs).

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 16, 2023

TurboQuant: Online Vector Quantization with Near-optimal Distortion Rate

Vector quantization, a problem rooted in Shannon's source coding theory, aims to quantize high-dimensional Euclidean vectors while minimizing distortion in their geometric structure. We propose TurboQuant to address both mean-squared error (MSE) and inner product distortion, overcoming limitations of existing methods that fail to achieve optimal distortion rates. Our data-oblivious algorithms, suitable for online applications, achieve near-optimal distortion rates (within a small constant factor) across all bit-widths and dimensions. TurboQuant achieves this by randomly rotating input vectors, inducing a concentrated Beta distribution on coordinates, and leveraging the near-independence property of distinct coordinates in high dimensions to simply apply optimal scalar quantizers per each coordinate. Recognizing that MSE-optimal quantizers introduce bias in inner product estimation, we propose a two-stage approach: applying an MSE quantizer followed by a 1-bit Quantized JL (QJL) transform on the residual, resulting in an unbiased inner product quantizer. We also provide a formal proof of the information-theoretic lower bounds on best achievable distortion rate by any vector quantizer, demonstrating that TurboQuant closely matches these bounds, differing only by a small constant (approx 2.7) factor. Experimental results validate our theoretical findings, showing that for KV cache quantization, we achieve absolute quality neutrality with 3.5 bits per channel and marginal quality degradation with 2.5 bits per channel. Furthermore, in nearest neighbor search tasks, our method outperforms existing product quantization techniques in recall while reducing indexing time to virtually zero.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 28, 2025 1

LLM.int8(): 8-bit Matrix Multiplication for Transformers at Scale

Large language models have been widely adopted but require significant GPU memory for inference. We develop a procedure for Int8 matrix multiplication for feed-forward and attention projection layers in transformers, which cut the memory needed for inference by half while retaining full precision performance. With our method, a 175B parameter 16/32-bit checkpoint can be loaded, converted to Int8, and used immediately without performance degradation. This is made possible by understanding and working around properties of highly systematic emergent features in transformer language models that dominate attention and transformer predictive performance. To cope with these features, we develop a two-part quantization procedure, LLM.int8(). We first use vector-wise quantization with separate normalization constants for each inner product in the matrix multiplication, to quantize most of the features. However, for the emergent outliers, we also include a new mixed-precision decomposition scheme, which isolates the outlier feature dimensions into a 16-bit matrix multiplication while still more than 99.9% of values are multiplied in 8-bit. Using LLM.int8(), we show empirically it is possible to perform inference in LLMs with up to 175B parameters without any performance degradation. This result makes such models much more accessible, for example making it possible to use OPT-175B/BLOOM on a single server with consumer GPUs. We open-source our software.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 15, 2022 1

Evolving Normalization-Activation Layers

Normalization layers and activation functions are fundamental components in deep networks and typically co-locate with each other. Here we propose to design them using an automated approach. Instead of designing them separately, we unify them into a single tensor-to-tensor computation graph, and evolve its structure starting from basic mathematical functions. Examples of such mathematical functions are addition, multiplication and statistical moments. The use of low-level mathematical functions, in contrast to the use of high-level modules in mainstream NAS, leads to a highly sparse and large search space which can be challenging for search methods. To address the challenge, we develop efficient rejection protocols to quickly filter out candidate layers that do not work well. We also use multi-objective evolution to optimize each layer's performance across many architectures to prevent overfitting. Our method leads to the discovery of EvoNorms, a set of new normalization-activation layers with novel, and sometimes surprising structures that go beyond existing design patterns. For example, some EvoNorms do not assume that normalization and activation functions must be applied sequentially, nor need to center the feature maps, nor require explicit activation functions. Our experiments show that EvoNorms work well on image classification models including ResNets, MobileNets and EfficientNets but also transfer well to Mask R-CNN with FPN/SpineNet for instance segmentation and to BigGAN for image synthesis, outperforming BatchNorm and GroupNorm based layers in many cases.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 6, 2020

No 3D Matrices: A Unified Tensor-Product View of Matrix-Free Cartesian PDE Solvers

Every Cartesian three-dimensional PDE solver hides a structural secret that production CFD codes have used for half a century and that graduate-level textbooks rarely state plainly. The derivative matrices, the compact Padé line solves, the Galerkin mass inversions, the alternating-direction-implicit substeps, and even the fast Poisson and Helmholtz diagonalization transforms all factor along the coordinate axes and collapse into repeated one-dimensional banded kernels executed along the grid lines. The three-dimensional operator exists only on paper; it is never assembled, factored, or stored. This paper is the manual for that collapse. We derive the Kronecker-product algebra that makes it exact, carry it cleanly through central differences, compact schemes, tensor-product Galerkin, B-spline and isogeometric methods, collocation, ADI time stepping, and direct Poisson and Helmholtz solves, and bring into the open the three production tricks that turn the reduction into hardware-conscious floating-point throughput on real machines: the multi-right-hand-side reshape that exposes a sweep as one batched line kernel (a dense BLAS-3 GEMM when the line factor is dense or element-local, a banded or stencil kernel when it is not), the sum factorization that rescues high-order Galerkin from the O(p^{2d}) quadrature trap, and the pencil decomposition that keeps every direction contiguous across an MPI cluster. For fixed stencil width or fixed polynomial degree, the compute cost stays O(N) in the total number of unknowns N = N_x N_y N_z; the operator storage drops to O(N_x + N_y + N_z) up to bandwidth constants; direct separable Poisson and Helmholtz solvers add the expected transform cost; the line kernels are embarrassingly parallel. These facts are familiar to practitioners but rarely assembled in one place; this paper collects them and shows how to use them.

  • 2 authors
·
Jun 22

DeepONet: Learning nonlinear operators for identifying differential equations based on the universal approximation theorem of operators

While it is widely known that neural networks are universal approximators of continuous functions, a less known and perhaps more powerful result is that a neural network with a single hidden layer can approximate accurately any nonlinear continuous operator. This universal approximation theorem is suggestive of the potential application of neural networks in learning nonlinear operators from data. However, the theorem guarantees only a small approximation error for a sufficient large network, and does not consider the important optimization and generalization errors. To realize this theorem in practice, we propose deep operator networks (DeepONets) to learn operators accurately and efficiently from a relatively small dataset. A DeepONet consists of two sub-networks, one for encoding the input function at a fixed number of sensors x_i, i=1,dots,m (branch net), and another for encoding the locations for the output functions (trunk net). We perform systematic simulations for identifying two types of operators, i.e., dynamic systems and partial differential equations, and demonstrate that DeepONet significantly reduces the generalization error compared to the fully-connected networks. We also derive theoretically the dependence of the approximation error in terms of the number of sensors (where the input function is defined) as well as the input function type, and we verify the theorem with computational results. More importantly, we observe high-order error convergence in our computational tests, namely polynomial rates (from half order to fourth order) and even exponential convergence with respect to the training dataset size.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 7, 2019

Neural Integral Equations

Nonlinear operators with long distance spatiotemporal dependencies are fundamental in modeling complex systems across sciences, yet learning these nonlocal operators remains challenging in machine learning. Integral equations (IEs), which model such nonlocal systems, have wide ranging applications in physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering. We introduce Neural Integral Equations (NIE), a method for learning unknown integral operators from data using an IE solver. To improve scalability and model capacity, we also present Attentional Neural Integral Equations (ANIE), which replaces the integral with self-attention. Both models are grounded in the theory of second kind integral equations, where the indeterminate appears both inside and outside the integral operator. We provide theoretical analysis showing how self-attention can approximate integral operators under mild regularity assumptions, further deepening previously reported connections between transformers and integration, and deriving corresponding approximation results for integral operators. Through numerical benchmarks on synthetic and real world data, including Lotka-Volterra, Navier-Stokes, and Burgers' equations, as well as brain dynamics and integral equations, we showcase the models' capabilities and their ability to derive interpretable dynamics embeddings. Our experiments demonstrate that ANIE outperforms existing methods, especially for longer time intervals and higher dimensional problems. Our work addresses a critical gap in machine learning for nonlocal operators and offers a powerful tool for studying unknown complex systems with long range dependencies.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 29, 2022

Supervised learning with quantum enhanced feature spaces

Machine learning and quantum computing are two technologies each with the potential for altering how computation is performed to address previously untenable problems. Kernel methods for machine learning are ubiquitous for pattern recognition, with support vector machines (SVMs) being the most well-known method for classification problems. However, there are limitations to the successful solution to such problems when the feature space becomes large, and the kernel functions become computationally expensive to estimate. A core element to computational speed-ups afforded by quantum algorithms is the exploitation of an exponentially large quantum state space through controllable entanglement and interference. Here, we propose and experimentally implement two novel methods on a superconducting processor. Both methods represent the feature space of a classification problem by a quantum state, taking advantage of the large dimensionality of quantum Hilbert space to obtain an enhanced solution. One method, the quantum variational classifier builds on [1,2] and operates through using a variational quantum circuit to classify a training set in direct analogy to conventional SVMs. In the second, a quantum kernel estimator, we estimate the kernel function and optimize the classifier directly. The two methods present a new class of tools for exploring the applications of noisy intermediate scale quantum computers [3] to machine learning.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 30, 2018

Reasoning Algorithmically in Graph Neural Networks

The development of artificial intelligence systems with advanced reasoning capabilities represents a persistent and long-standing research question. Traditionally, the primary strategy to address this challenge involved the adoption of symbolic approaches, where knowledge was explicitly represented by means of symbols and explicitly programmed rules. However, with the advent of machine learning, there has been a paradigm shift towards systems that can autonomously learn from data, requiring minimal human guidance. In light of this shift, in latest years, there has been increasing interest and efforts at endowing neural networks with the ability to reason, bridging the gap between data-driven learning and logical reasoning. Within this context, Neural Algorithmic Reasoning (NAR) stands out as a promising research field, aiming to integrate the structured and rule-based reasoning of algorithms with the adaptive learning capabilities of neural networks, typically by tasking neural models to mimic classical algorithms. In this dissertation, we provide theoretical and practical contributions to this area of research. We explore the connections between neural networks and tropical algebra, deriving powerful architectures that are aligned with algorithm execution. Furthermore, we discuss and show the ability of such neural reasoners to learn and manipulate complex algorithmic and combinatorial optimization concepts, such as the principle of strong duality. Finally, in our empirical efforts, we validate the real-world utility of NAR networks across different practical scenarios. This includes tasks as diverse as planning problems, large-scale edge classification tasks and the learning of polynomial-time approximate algorithms for NP-hard combinatorial problems. Through this exploration, we aim to showcase the potential integrating algorithmic reasoning in machine learning models.

  • 1 authors
·
Feb 20, 2024

A Resource Efficient Quantum Kernel

Quantum processors may enhance machine learning by mapping high-dimensional data onto quantum systems for processing. Conventional feature maps, for encoding data onto a quantum circuit are currently impractical, as the number of entangling gates scales quadratically with the dimension of the dataset and the number of qubits. In this work, we introduce a quantum feature map designed to handle high-dimensional data with a significantly reduced number of qubits and entangling operations. Our approach preserves essential data characteristics while promoting computational efficiency, as evidenced by extensive experiments on benchmark datasets that demonstrate a marked improvement in both accuracy and resource utilization when using our feature map as a kernel for characterization, as compared to state-of-the-art quantum feature maps. Our noisy simulation results, combined with lower resource requirements, highlight our map's ability to function within the constraints of noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices. Through numerical simulations and small-scale implementation on a superconducting circuit quantum computing platform, we demonstrate that our scheme performs on par or better than a set of classical algorithms for classification. While quantum kernels are typically stymied by exponential concentration, our approach is affected with a slower rate with respect to both the number of qubits and features, which allows practical applications to remain within reach. Our findings herald a promising avenue for the practical implementation of quantum machine learning algorithms on near future quantum computing platforms.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 4, 2025

A Survey of Quantization Methods for Efficient Neural Network Inference

As soon as abstract mathematical computations were adapted to computation on digital computers, the problem of efficient representation, manipulation, and communication of the numerical values in those computations arose. Strongly related to the problem of numerical representation is the problem of quantization: in what manner should a set of continuous real-valued numbers be distributed over a fixed discrete set of numbers to minimize the number of bits required and also to maximize the accuracy of the attendant computations? This perennial problem of quantization is particularly relevant whenever memory and/or computational resources are severely restricted, and it has come to the forefront in recent years due to the remarkable performance of Neural Network models in computer vision, natural language processing, and related areas. Moving from floating-point representations to low-precision fixed integer values represented in four bits or less holds the potential to reduce the memory footprint and latency by a factor of 16x; and, in fact, reductions of 4x to 8x are often realized in practice in these applications. Thus, it is not surprising that quantization has emerged recently as an important and very active sub-area of research in the efficient implementation of computations associated with Neural Networks. In this article, we survey approaches to the problem of quantizing the numerical values in deep Neural Network computations, covering the advantages/disadvantages of current methods. With this survey and its organization, we hope to have presented a useful snapshot of the current research in quantization for Neural Networks and to have given an intelligent organization to ease the evaluation of future research in this area.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 25, 2021

Hierarchical Attention via Domain Decomposition

We propose a hierarchical attention mechanism based on two-level overlapping Schwarz domain decomposition. The method is motivated by the observation that two-level Schwarz domain decomposition methods combine local subdomain corrections with a coarse level that communicates global, long-range information. We test its usefulness in the context of finite-dimensional operator learning using a simple, one-dimensional diffusion problem with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. Although elementary, this problem provides a controlled sequence-to-sequence setting in which the exact nonlocal solution operator is known. After discretization, learning the solution operator amounts to approximating the inverse of a symmetric positive definite matrix. As a baseline, we use a global softmax-free low-rank attention operator of the form QK^T. The proposed construction replaces this dense global factorization by a two-level additive structure: local low-rank attention blocks on overlapping subdomains are combined with a coarse attention block. The resulting operator has the form $M_θ^{-1} = ΦQ_0 K_0^T Φ^T + sum_{i=1}^{N} R_i^T D_i^{1/2} Q_i K_i^T D_i^{1/2} R_i. Here R_i restricts to an overlapping subdomain, D_i is a partition-of-unity weight, and Φ$ is a coarse interpolation (or prolongation) matrix. Numerical experiments for synthetic Fourier right-hand sides indicate that the domain-decomposition attention operator is able to train faster and can give more accurate approximations than a global low-rank attention baseline while using significantly fewer parameters.

  • 2 authors
·
Jun 15

Higher-Order Fourier Neural Operator: Explicit Mode Mixer for Nonlinear PDEs

Neural operators provide deep neural networks for learning mappings between function spaces. Among them, the Fourier Neural Operator (FNO) is particularly effective: its spectral convolution relies on low-dimensional Fourier-domain representations and can handle inputs at different resolutions. This design aligns well with settings where the Fourier basis diagonalizes the underlying operator, such as linear, constant-coefficient PDEs on periodic domains, in which Fourier modes evolve independently. However, nonlinear PDEs may benefit from an additional inductive bias, as they exhibit structured interactions between modes, governed by polynomial nonlinearities. To capture this inductive bias, we introduce the Higher-Order Spectral Convolution, a spectral mixer that extends FNO from diagonal modulation to explicit n-linear mode mixing, aligned with the dynamics of nonlinear PDEs. Our experiments on standard benchmarks show that the proposed Higher-Order FNO (HO-FNO) retains the efficiency of FNO-based architectures and consistently improves over other spectral neural operators. HO-FNO also performs on par with or better than state-of-the-art transformers and state-space models on several datasets, with stronger gains in highly nonlinear regimes, such as the Poisson equation with polynomial forcing, where a single HO-FNO layer outperforms FNO models with up to 16 layers. We open-source our code for reproducibility at: https://github.com/AlexColagrande/HO-FNO.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 25

Neural Circuit Diagrams: Robust Diagrams for the Communication, Implementation, and Analysis of Deep Learning Architectures

Diagrams matter. Unfortunately, the deep learning community has no standard method for diagramming architectures. The current combination of linear algebra notation and ad-hoc diagrams fails to offer the necessary precision to understand architectures in all their detail. However, this detail is critical for faithful implementation, mathematical analysis, further innovation, and ethical assurances. I present neural circuit diagrams, a graphical language tailored to the needs of communicating deep learning architectures. Neural circuit diagrams naturally keep track of the changing arrangement of data, precisely show how operations are broadcast over axes, and display the critical parallel behavior of linear operations. A lingering issue with existing diagramming methods is the inability to simultaneously express the detail of axes and the free arrangement of data, which neural circuit diagrams solve. Their compositional structure is analogous to code, creating a close correspondence between diagrams and implementation. In this work, I introduce neural circuit diagrams for an audience of machine learning researchers. After introducing neural circuit diagrams, I cover a host of architectures to show their utility and breed familiarity. This includes the transformer architecture, convolution (and its difficult-to-explain extensions), residual networks, the U-Net, and the vision transformer. I include a Jupyter notebook that provides evidence for the close correspondence between diagrams and code. Finally, I examine backpropagation using neural circuit diagrams. I show their utility in providing mathematical insight and analyzing algorithms' time and space complexities.

  • 1 authors
·
Feb 8, 2024 1

A Reproducible Software Workflow for Unanchored Approximate MUB Optimization: A Case Study in Dimension Six

We present a reproducible, parameter-driven software workflow for optimizing approximate mutually unbiased basis (AMUB) configurations in arbitrary dimensions d using a Lie-algebra unitary parameterization. The workflow is designed for portable execution across CPU, Apple MPS, CUDA-capable GPU, and HPC backends, using a Taylor-series matrix exponential layer as an accelerator compatibility pathway. As a dimension-six case study, we optimize unanchored configurations across 100 random seeds for basis counts n = 3, 4, 5, 6 in complex128 and complex64 arithmetic. The workflow recovers exact three-basis configurations, identifies a recurrent four-basis partial-exact hub-and-triangle structure, and finds no near-exact pairs for n = 5 or n = 6 in the reported campaigns under the primary tolerance. As a hardware-execution check, we embed the representative d = 6, n = 4 transition unitaries into three-qubit 8x8 unitaries and execute the resulting circuits on the 156-qubit Heron processor ibm-marrakesh using subspace post-selection. The measured QPU pairwise losses are dominated by a hardware and compilation noise floor of approximately 0.02-0.08, associated with compiled circuits averaging 37 native CZ gates, which obscures the distinction between classically near-exact and defective pairs. The results provide a reproducible computational framework for exploring AMUB landscapes, together with an initial assessment of the challenges involved in executing optimized dimension-six unitaries on current quantum hardware.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 11

Can Transformers Do Enumerative Geometry?

How can Transformers model and learn enumerative geometry? What is a robust procedure for using Transformers in abductive knowledge discovery within a mathematician-machine collaboration? In this work, we introduce a Transformer-based approach to computational enumerative geometry, specifically targeting the computation of psi-class intersection numbers on the moduli space of curves. By reformulating the problem as a continuous optimization task, we compute intersection numbers across a wide value range from 10^{-45} to 10^{45}. To capture the recursive nature inherent in these intersection numbers, we propose the Dynamic Range Activator (DRA), a new activation function that enhances the Transformer's ability to model recursive patterns and handle severe heteroscedasticity. Given precision requirements for computing the intersections, we quantify the uncertainty of the predictions using Conformal Prediction with a dynamic sliding window adaptive to the partitions of equivalent number of marked points. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no prior work on modeling recursive functions with such a high-variance and factorial growth. Beyond simply computing intersection numbers, we explore the enumerative "world-model" of Transformers. Our interpretability analysis reveals that the network is implicitly modeling the Virasoro constraints in a purely data-driven manner. Moreover, through abductive hypothesis testing, probing, and causal inference, we uncover evidence of an emergent internal representation of the the large-genus asymptotic of psi-class intersection numbers. These findings suggest that the network internalizes the parameters of the asymptotic closed-form and the polynomiality phenomenon of psi-class intersection numbers in a non-linear manner.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 27, 2024

Nonlinear Spectral Computing

Many machine learning algorithms rely on the Fourier transform, which is also the inner core of many analog computing devices and, specifically, of optical computing. The square of the modulus of the Fourier spectrum naturally maps onto pairwise interactions, as in the renowned Ising model, making it applicable to combinatorial optimization. Here we show how the nonlinear Fourier transform, related to integrable nonlinear partial differential equations, significantly widens the computational capability and also enables a wide variety of computing gates. We study specifically the case of the nonlinear Schrödinger equation; we introduce an input composed by ``tokens'', i.e., batches of information encoded in a multi-step potential, and we show how the nonlinear spectral computing arising in the wave propagation not only generalizes combinatorial optimization to higher order problems, but also realizes boolean gates. In the weakly nonlinear regime, nonlinearity generates higher-order interactions as perturbative corrections to the pairwise terms. In the solitonic regime, the discrete nonlinear spectrum performs digital computation through soliton generation. By using four input tokens, we demonstrate the programmability of all 256 Boolean functions of three variables, including 3-SAT instances. Our results show that integrable nonlinear propagation provides an unprecedented single physical platform for higher-order and logical computation, opening the way to a rich variety of new algorithms for analog computing, machine learning, and classical and quantum information processing.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 5

Finite-Precision Symmetric Krylov Methods: Exact Rounding Examples, Block Paige Identities,and a Variable-Block Lanczos Model

Short-recurrence Krylov methods that are equivalent in exact arithmetic often diverge in floating-point arithmetic. To illustrate this, we provide an exactly representable two-cycle for steepest descent with a recursively updated residual. A complementary convergence theorem gives a sufficient condition under which the stored residual decreases geometrically. We then show that a second positive definite family yields different outcomes for a Hestenes--Stiefel Conjugate Gradient (CG) implementation and a direct Lanczos--Galerkin approach. CG finds the exact solution after four updates, whereas the two-step projected system becomes inconsistent. Under stated perturbation and transfer hypotheses, a common spectral enclosure gives comparable convergence bounds. For a dense, left-to-right evaluation order, we prove a sufficient precision bound for a prescribed backward error within n updates for an ntimes n matrix, together with a computable stopping test and specified exponent-range assumptions. We use polynomial estimates and numerical experiments to examine the trade-off between working precision and the number of CG iterations needed to achieve a prescribed backward error. We also compare results on inexact matrix-vector products and preconditioning with the frameworks of Paige and Greenbaum. For block Lanczos, we analyze Householder orthogonalization and singular-value truncation as the block size changes. Under componentwise and normwise error bounds, the computed coefficients satisfy a controlled local recurrence and an exact block Lanczos relation for a nearby symmetric problem in a larger space. A block form of Paige's identity bounds the overlap with a Ritz vector along its residual coordinate direction. An inter-block recurrence describes the evolution of overlap, and a Gram-matrix argument gives a count of additional nearby Ritz values.

  • 1 authors
·
Sep 7

How to Capture Higher-order Correlations? Generalizing Matrix Softmax Attention to Kronecker Computation

In the classical transformer attention scheme, we are given three n times d size matrices Q, K, V (the query, key, and value tokens), and the goal is to compute a new n times d size matrix D^{-1} exp(QK^top) V where D = diag( exp(QK^top) {bf 1}_n ). In this work, we study a generalization of attention which captures triple-wise correlations. This generalization is able to solve problems about detecting triple-wise connections that were shown to be impossible for transformers. The potential downside of this generalization is that it appears as though computations are even more difficult, since the straightforward algorithm requires cubic time in n. However, we show that in the bounded-entry setting (which arises in practice, and which is well-studied in both theory and practice), there is actually a near-linear time algorithm. More precisely, we show that bounded entries are both necessary and sufficient for quickly performing generalized computations: bullet On the positive side, if all entries of the input matrices are bounded above by o(sqrt[3]{log n}) then we show how to approximate the ``tensor-type'' attention matrix in n^{1+o(1)} time. bullet On the negative side, we show that if the entries of the input matrices may be as large as Omega(sqrt[3]{log n}), then there is no algorithm that runs faster than n^{3-o(1)} (assuming the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis from fine-grained complexity theory). We also show that our construction, algorithms, and lower bounds naturally generalize to higher-order tensors and correlations. Interestingly, the higher the order of the tensors, the lower the bound on the entries needs to be for an efficient algorithm. Our results thus yield a natural tradeoff between the boundedness of the entries, and order of the tensor one may use for more expressive, efficient attention computation.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 6, 2023

Less Quantum, More Advantage: An End-to-End Quantum Algorithm for the Jones Polynomial

We present an end-to-end reconfigurable algorithmic pipeline for solving a famous problem in knot theory using a noisy digital quantum computer, namely computing the value of the Jones polynomial at the fifth root of unity within additive error for any input link, i.e. a closed braid. This problem is DQC1-complete for Markov-closed braids and BQP-complete for Plat-closed braids, and we accommodate both versions of the problem. Even though it is widely believed that DQC1 is strictly contained in BQP, and so is 'less quantum', the resource requirements of classical algorithms for the DQC1 version are at least as high as for the BQP version, and so we potentially gain 'more advantage' by focusing on Markov-closed braids in our exposition. We demonstrate our quantum algorithm on Quantinuum's H2-2 quantum computer and show the effect of problem-tailored error-mitigation techniques. Further, leveraging that the Jones polynomial is a link invariant, we construct an efficiently verifiable benchmark to characterise the effect of noise present in a given quantum processor. In parallel, we implement and benchmark the state-of-the-art tensor-network-based classical algorithms for computing the Jones polynomial. The practical tools provided in this work allow for precise resource estimation to identify near-term quantum advantage for a meaningful quantum-native problem in knot theory.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 7, 2025