flash-attention VS whisper

Compare flash-attention vs whisper and see what are their differences.

flash-attention

Fast and memory-efficient exact attention (by Dao-AILab)

whisper

Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision (by openai)
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flash-attention whisper
26 343
10,773 59,916
8.5% 5.3%
9.4 6.8
16 days ago 12 days ago
Python Python
BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

flash-attention

Posts with mentions or reviews of flash-attention. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-10.
  • How the Transformer Architecture Was Likely Discovered: A Step-by-Step Guide
    1 project | dev.to | 8 Apr 2024
    If you're looking for an implementation, I highly recommend checking out fast attention [https://github.com/Dao-AILab/flash-attention]. It's my go-to, and far better than anything we could whip up here using just PyTorch or TensorFlow.
  • Interactive Coloring with ControlNet
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Feb 2024
    * Even if I bought a 3090, I would have to get a computer to go with it, along with a PSU and some cooling. Don't know where to start with that.

    [1] https://github.com/Dao-AILab/flash-attention/issues/190

  • Coding Self-Attention, Multi-Head Attention, Cross-Attention, Causal-Attention
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Jan 2024
    highly recommend using Tri's implementation https://github.com/Dao-AILab/flash-attention rotary should be built in, and some group overseas even contributed alibi
  • PSA: new ExLlamaV2 quant method makes 70Bs perform much better at low bpw quants
    2 projects | /r/LocalLLaMA | 10 Dec 2023
    Doesn't seem so https://github.com/Dao-AILab/flash-attention/issues/542 No updates for a while.
  • VLLM: 24x faster LLM serving than HuggingFace Transformers
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Jun 2023
    I wonder how this compares to Flash Attention (https://github.com/HazyResearch/flash-attention), which is the other "memory aware" Attention project I'm aware of.

    I guess Flash Attention is more about utilizing memory GPU SRam correctly, where this is more about using the OS/CPU memory better?

  • Hacking Around ChatGPT’s Character Limits with the Code Interpreter
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 27 May 2023
    https://github.com/HazyResearch/flash-attention
  • Flash Attention on Consumer
    1 project | /r/LocalLLM | 10 May 2023
  • Unlimiformer: Long-Range Transformers with Unlimited Length Input
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 May 2023
    After a very quick read, that's my understanding too: It's just KNN search. So I agree on points 1-3. When something works well, I don't care much about point 4.

    I've had only mixed success with KNN search. Maybe I haven't done it right? Nothing seems to work quite as well for me as explicit token-token interactions by some form of attention, which as we all know is too costly for long sequences (O(n²)). Lately I've been playing with https://github.com/hazyresearch/safari , which uses a lot less compute and seems promising. Otherwise, for long sequences I've yet to find something better than https://github.com/HazyResearch/flash-attention for n×n interactions and https://github.com/glassroom/heinsen_routing for n×m interactions. If anyone here has other suggestions, I'd love to hear about them.

  • Ask HN: Bypassing GPT-4 8k tokens limit
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 May 2023
    Longer sequence length in transformers is an active area of research (see e.g the great work from the Flash-attention team - https://github.com/HazyResearch/flash-attention), and I'm sure will improve things dramatically very soon.
  • Scaling Transformer to 1M tokens and beyond with RMT
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Apr 2023
    Here's a list of tools for scaling up transformer context that have github repos:

    * FlashAttention: In my experience, the current best solution for n² attention, but it's very hard to scale it beyond the low tens of thousands of tokens. Code: https://github.com/HazyResearch/flash-attention

    * Heinsen Routing: In my experience, the current best solution for n×m attention. I've used it to pull up more than a million tokens as context. It's not a substitute for n² attention. Code: https://github.com/glassroom/heinsen_routing

    * RWKV: A sort-of-recurrent model which claims to have performance comparable to n² attention in transformers. In my limited experience, it doesn't. Others agree: https://twitter.com/arankomatsuzaki/status/16390003799784038... . Code: https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM

    * RMT (this method): I'm skeptical that the recurrent connections will work as well as n² attention in practice, but I'm going to give it a try. Code: https://github.com/booydar/t5-experiments/tree/scaling-repor...

    In addition, there's a group at Stanford working on state-space models that looks promising to me. The idea is to approximate n² attention dynamically using only O(n log n) compute. There's no code available, but here's a blog post about it: https://hazyresearch.stanford.edu/blog/2023-03-27-long-learn...

    If anyone here has other suggestions for working with long sequences (hundreds of thousands to millions of tokens), I'd love to learn about them.

whisper

Posts with mentions or reviews of whisper. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-31.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing flash-attention and whisper you can also consider the following projects:

xformers - Hackable and optimized Transformers building blocks, supporting a composable construction.

vosk-api - Offline speech recognition API for Android, iOS, Raspberry Pi and servers with Python, Java, C# and Node

TensorRT - NVIDIA® TensorRT™ is an SDK for high-performance deep learning inference on NVIDIA GPUs. This repository contains the open source components of TensorRT.

silero-vad - Silero VAD: pre-trained enterprise-grade Voice Activity Detector

DeepSpeed - DeepSpeed is a deep learning optimization library that makes distributed training and inference easy, efficient, and effective.

buzz - Buzz transcribes and translates audio offline on your personal computer. Powered by OpenAI's Whisper.

memory-efficient-attention-pytorch - Implementation of a memory efficient multi-head attention as proposed in the paper, "Self-attention Does Not Need O(n²) Memory"

NeMo - A scalable generative AI framework built for researchers and developers working on Large Language Models, Multimodal, and Speech AI (Automatic Speech Recognition and Text-to-Speech)

RWKV-LM - RWKV is an RNN with transformer-level LLM performance. It can be directly trained like a GPT (parallelizable). So it's combining the best of RNN and transformer - great performance, fast inference, saves VRAM, fast training, "infinite" ctx_len, and free sentence embedding.

whisper.cpp - Port of OpenAI's Whisper model in C/C++

alpaca_lora_4bit

text-generation-webui - A Gradio web UI for Large Language Models. Supports transformers, GPTQ, AWQ, EXL2, llama.cpp (GGUF), Llama models.