FlashAttention-3: Fast and Accurate Attention with Asynchrony and Low-precision

Attention, as a core layer of the ubiquitous Transformer architecture, is the bottleneck for large language models and long-context applications. FlashAttention elaborated an approach to speed up attention on GPUs through minimizing memory reads/writes. However, it has yet to take advantage of new capabilities present in recent hardware, with FlashAttention-2 achieving only 35% utilization on the H100 GPU. We develop three main techniques to speed up attention on Hopper GPUs: exploiting asynchrony of the Tensor Cores and TMA to (1) overlap overall computation and data movement via warp-specialization and (2) interleave block-wise matmul and softmax operations, and (3) block quantization and incoherent processing that leverages hardware support for FP8 low-precision. We demonstrate that our method, FlashAttention-3, achieves speedup on H100 GPUs by 1.5-2.0$\times$ with FP16 reaching up to 740 TFLOPs/s (75% utilization), and with FP8 reaching close to 1.2 PFLOPs/s. We validate that FP8 FlashAttention-3 achieves 2.6$\times$ lower numerical error than a baseline FP8 attention.

fVDB: A Deep-Learning Framework for Sparse, Large-Scale, and High-Performance Spatial Intelligence

We present fVDB, a novel GPU-optimized framework for deep learning on large-scale 3D data. fVDB provides a complete set of differentiable primitives to build deep learning architectures for common tasks in 3D learning such as convolution, pooling, attention, ray-tracing, meshing, etc. fVDB simultaneously provides a much larger feature set (primitives and operators) than established frameworks with no loss in efficiency: our operators match or exceed the performance of other frameworks with narrower scope. Furthermore, fVDB can process datasets with much larger footprint and spatial resolution than prior works, while providing a competitive memory footprint on small inputs. To achieve this combination of versatility and performance, fVDB relies on a single novel VDB index grid acceleration structure paired with several key innovations including GPU accelerated sparse grid construction, convolution using tensorcores, fast ray tracing kernels using a Hierarchical Digital Differential Analyzer algorithm (HDDA), and jagged tensors. Our framework is fully integrated with PyTorch enabling interoperability with existing pipelines, and we demonstrate its effectiveness on a number of representative tasks such as large-scale point-cloud segmentation, high resolution 3D generative modeling, unbounded scale Neural Radiance Fields, and large-scale point cloud reconstruction.

Conditioning Deep Generative Raw Audio Models for Structured Automatic Music

Existing automatic music generation approaches that feature deep learning can be broadly classified into two types: raw audio models and symbolic models. Symbolic models, which train and generate at the note level, are currently the more prevalent approach; these models can capture long-range dependencies of melodic structure, but fail to grasp the nuances and richness of raw audio generations. Raw audio models, such as DeepMind's WaveNet, train directly on sampled audio waveforms, allowing them to produce realistic-sounding, albeit unstructured music. In this paper, we propose an automatic music generation methodology combining both of these approaches to create structured, realistic-sounding compositions. We consider a Long Short Term Memory network to learn the melodic structure of different styles of music, and then use the unique symbolic generations from this model as a conditioning input to a WaveNet-based raw audio generator, creating a model for automatic, novel music. We then evaluate this approach by showcasing results of this work.