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Felix Chern

4 accepted papers

2025

Spark Transformer: Reactivating Sparsity in Transformer FFN and Attention

NeurIPS 2025poster

The discovery of the *lazy neuron phenomenon* (Li et al., 2022), where fewer than 10% of the feedforward networks (FFN) parameters in trained Transformers are activated per token, has spurred significant interests in *activation sparsity* for enhancing large model efficiency. While notable progress…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

The Lazy Neuron Phenomenon: On Emergence of Activation Sparsity in Transformers

ICLR 2023poster

This paper studies a curious phenomenon that machine learning model with Transformer architectures have sparse activation maps. By activation map we refer to the intermediate output of the multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) after a ReLU activation function, and by "sparse" we mean that on average very f…

Cited by 92SourcePDFScholar
2022

TPU-KNN: K Nearest Neighbor Search at Peak FLOP/s

NeurIPS 2022accept

This paper presents a novel nearest neighbor search algorithm achieving TPU (Google Tensor Processing Unit) peak performance, outperforming state-of-the-art GPU algorithms with similar level of recall. The design of the proposed algorithm is motivated by an accurate accelerator performance model tha…

Cited by 30SourcePDFScholar
2020

Accelerating Large-Scale Inference with Anisotropic Vector Quantization

ICML 2020poster

Quantization based techniques are the current state-of-the-art for scaling maximum inner product search to massive databases. Traditional approaches to quantization aim to minimize the reconstruction error of the database points. Based on the observation that for a given query, the database points t…