Yuang Ma

Ziwei Li, Yuang Ma, Yi Kang

The rapid growth of large language models (LLMs) presents significant deployment challenges due to their massive computational and memory demands. While model compression, such as network pruning, offers potential solutions, most existing methods often fail to maintain good performance at high compression ratios. To address this, we propose SLaB, a novel framework that decomposes each linear layer weight into three complementary components: a sparse matrix, a low-rank matrix, and a binary matrix. SLaB eliminates the need for retraining and leverages activation-aware pruning scores to guide the decomposition process. Experiments on Llama-family models demonstrate that SLaB achieves state-of-the-art performance, reducing perplexity by up to 36% compared to existing methods at 50% compression and improving accuracy by up to 8.98% over the baseline on zero-shot tasks.

Yuannuo Feng, Wenyong Zhou, Yuang Ma et al.

Analog compute-in-memory (CIM) arrays have emerged as a promising substrate for energy-efficient LLM inference, particularly for weight-stationary computations in linear layers. However, extending analog CIM to attention mechanisms introduces a fundamental challenge: KV cache operations demand repeated in-situ weight updates, and the resulting mismatch with the weight-stationary paradigm exposes dynamic computations to significant hardware noise, a critical problem that remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we present the first systematic study of dynamic attention computation on analog CIM arrays, revealing that initial and recent tokens exhibit disproportionate vulnerability to hardware noise. Motivated by this token-level insight, we propose a hierarchical token protection strategy that keeps sink tokens and a sliding recent-token window on a higher-precision digital path while processing the bulk KV cache on analog CIM. A co-designed scheduler combines analog programming, ownership transition, and bulk-MVM tile formation to bound digital overhead. Evaluations on nine LLMs show that our approach lowers average perplexity under analog noise from 33.91 to 11.95, close to the clean baseline of 11.06, while improving dynamic-KV programming-row utilization from 23.1\% to 91.2\%.