README.md

Pytorch Window Matmul

Description

This repository contains a custom PyTorch CUDA kernel for batched windowed matrix multiplication. This is particularly useful for the windowed local attention in sparse attention transformer models such as BigBird and Longformer. Given two matrices $Q$ and $K$ of size (B, M, N) and (B, N, M) it computes the windowed diagonal of the batched matrix product $QK = A$ for a window size $w$. An entry $a_{i,j} = \sum_{k=1}^N Q_{i,k} \cdot K_{k,i + j - w}$ and $A$ has size (B, M, 2w + 1). The image below gives an example for M = 10 and $w$ = 2. The window extends $w$ entries to left and right of the diagonal. Any entries outside the window are set to zero.

To complete the windowed attention operation, the attention matrix $A$ needs to be multiplied with another matrix $V$. Here the windowed matrix needs to unraveled and multiplied with the correct windowed entries in $V$. We call this the "unwindow" operation. An entry of the output matrix $O$ is given by $o_{i,k} = \sum_{j=1}^{2w + 1} a_{i,j} \cdot v_{i + j - w, k}$ and $O$ has size (B, M, N).

Installation and Usage

Be sure to have the cudatoolkit installed before running pip install. We recommend installing the cudatoolkit using conda.

conda install -c nvidia cuda-toolkit

To install the package run

pip install git+https://github.com/webis-de/pytorch-window-matmul.git

An example on how to use the kernel:

import torch
import window_matmul

# create some random matrices
batch_size = 2
seq_len = 10
hidden_size = 5
window_size = 2
q = torch.rand(batch_size, seq_len, hidden_size)
k = torch.rand(batch_size, hidden_size, seq_len)
v = torch.rand(batch_size, seq_len, hidden_size)

# compute windowed attention
a = window_matmul.window_matmul(q, k, window_size)

assert a.shape[-1] == 2 * window_size + 1

# compute output
o = window_matmul.unwindow_matmul(a, v, window_size)

NOTE: The cpu version is not optimized and is only for reference. The cuda version is optimized and is the one to use.

Benchmark