Add comprehensive documentation for efficient attention mask handling in long sequences #120
+796 −0
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This PR addresses a common question about Flash-DMA: "How does it handle very long sequences without allocating large
[L, L]attention masks?" The documentation now provides a comprehensive explanation of Flash-DMA's memory-efficient approaches.Problem
Users were unclear about how Flash-DMA avoids the memory overhead of materializing full attention matrices for long sequences. The existing documentation mentioned attention masks of shape
(batch_size, 1, query_len, key_len)but didn't explain how this scales efficiently to very long sequences (32K+ tokens).Solution
Added detailed documentation explaining Flash-DMA's multi-layered approach to efficiency:
1. Dynamic Sparse Masking
2. Variable Length Processing
3. Block-wise Processing
Documentation Added
Key Results
The documentation now clearly explains how Flash-DMA solves the fundamental scalability challenge of transformer attention for very long sequences.
Fixes #115.
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