[D] Transformer sequence generation - is it truly quadratic scaling?

• x-transformers

  10 4,147 8.7 Python

  A simple but complete full-attention transformer with a set of promising experimental features from various papers

However, I've come across the concept of Key, Value Caching in Transformer-Decoders recently (e.g. Figure 3 here), wherein because each output (and hence each input, since the model is autoregressive) only depends on previous outputs (inputs), we don't need to re-compute Key and Value vectors for all t < t_i at timestep i of the sequence. My intuition leads me to believe, then, that (unconditioned) inference for a decoder-only model uses an effective sequence length of 1 (the most recently produced token is the only real input that requires computation on), making Attention a linear-complexity operation. This thinking seems to be validated by this github issue, and this paper (2nd paragraph of Introduction).

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