Contents

Grouped Query Attention (GQA)

Overview

In a typical Scaled Dot-Product Attention (SDPA) [1], the input Query, Key, and Value tensors have the same head number. It becomes a performance bottleneck to load the Key and Value tensors in each generation step, especially when the sentence length gets longer.

To reduce the memory bandwidth overhead of loading the Key and Value tensors, Multi-Query Attention (MQA) [2] is created by reducing the head number of Key and Value tensors to one which means multiple Queries will map to the same single Key and Value tensor. However, MQA may lead to model quality degradation and training instability. Therefore, Grouped-Query Attention (GQA) [3], an interpolation between the typical SDPA and MQA, is proposed with single Key and Value head per a subgroup of Query heads. The head number of Key and Value equals to the group number of Query heads.

The notations used in the document:

  • N: the mini-batch size.

  • H_q: the head number of Query.

  • H_kv: the head number of Key or Value.

  • N_rep: H_q / H_kv, indicates how many Query heads are mapped to one Key head.

  • S: the sequence length.

  • D: the size of each head.

GQA Pattern

Similar to how SDPA is supported, the GQA pattern is also defined as a directional acyclic graph (DAG) using oneDNN Graph API. oneDNN extends the SDPA pattern to support floating-point (f32, bf16, and f16) GQA as follows. The blue nodes are required when defining a GQA pattern while the brown nodes are optional.

GQA pattern

Compared to a typical SDPA pattern, there are a few differences in the GQA pattern:

  1. The input Query has shape (N, H_q, S, D). It will be reshaped to (N, H_kv, N_rep, S, D) by splitting H_q dimension into H_kv and N_rep. The reshaping can be constructed using the StaticReshape operation in Graph API.

  2. Similarly, the input Key and Value have shape (N, H_kv, S, D). They will be reshaped to (N, H_kv, 1, S, D) to meet the input shape requirement of MatMul operation.

  3. The second MatMul calculates the dot products between the probabilities after SoftMax and Value nodes and generates output with shape (N, H_kv, N_rep, S, D).

  4. Another StaticReshape operation is applied to the output of the second MatMul to convert the shape into (N, H_q, S, D) by combining H_kv and N_rep dimensions.

  5. The input scale factor and mask in the pattern also need to meet the operations’ shape requirement which can be achieved through StaticReshape similarly. Besides that, they have the same definition as described in the typical SDPA pattern.

Data Types

oneDNN supports the floating-point GQA pattern with data types f32, bf16, and f16. You can specify the data type via the input and output data type fields of logical tensors for each operation. oneDNN does not support mixing different floating data types in a floating-point GQA pattern.

The definition of the data types and support status on different CPU and GPU platforms follow the general description in Data Types.

Implementation Limitations

  1. oneDNN primitive-based GQA is implemented as the reference implementation on both Intel Architecture Processors and Intel Graphics Products. The reference implementation requires memory to store the intermediate results of the dot products between Query and Key which takes \(O(S^2)\) memory. It may lead to Out-of-Memory error when computing long sequence length input on platforms with limited memory.

  2. The GQA patterns functionally support all input shapes meeting the shape requirements of each operation in the graph.

  3. CPU

    • Optimized implementation is available for 4D Q/K/V tensors with shape defined as (N, H_q, S, D) for Query and (N, H_kv, S, D) for Key and Value.

    • Optimized implementation is available for OpenMP runtime and Threadpool runtime on Intel Architecture Processors.

    • Specifically for OpenMP runtime, the optimized implementation requires N * H_q > 2 * thread number to get enough parallelism.

  4. GPU

    • Optimized implementation is available for 4D Q/K/V tensors with shape defined as (N, H_q, S, D) for Query and (N, H_kv, S, D) for Key and Value.

    • Optimized implementation is available for floating-point GQA with f16 data type and D <= 256 on Intel Graphics Products with Intel(R) Xe Matrix Extensions (Intel(R) XMX) support.

Example

oneDNN provides a GQA example demonstrating how to construct a floating-point GQA pattern with oneDNN Graph API on CPU and GPU with different runtimes.

References

[1] Attention is all you need, https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762v7

[2] Fast Transformer Decoding: One Write-Head is All You Need, https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.02150

[3] GQA: Training Generalized Multi-Query Transformer Models from Multi-Head Checkpoints, https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.13245