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Papers that changed AI, with a plain-language explainer for each.
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- 2024
FlashAttention-3: Fast and Accurate Attention with Asynchrony and Low-precision
arXiv
FlashAttention-3 is an attention algorithm for NVIDIA Hopper (H100) GPUs that reaches up to 75% utilization in FP16 and close to 1.2 PFLOPs/s in FP8, using asynchronous execution and low-precision techniques.
- 2023
FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioning
arXiv
FlashAttention-2 is a 2023 revision of the FlashAttention attention kernel that reorganizes work across GPU thread blocks and warps, roughly doubling speed and reaching up to 73% of the A100's theoretical peak throughput.
- 2023
QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs
arXiv
QLoRA is a finetuning method that trains a 65B-parameter language model on a single 48GB GPU while matching full 16-bit finetuning quality, using 4-bit quantization, double quantization and paged optimizers.
- 2022
Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers (DiT)
arXiv
A 2022 paper by William Peebles and Saining Xie that replaces the U-Net backbone of diffusion models with a transformer operating on latent patches, showing that image quality improves predictably as compute grows and reaching a state-of-the-art FID of 2.27 on ImageNet 256×256.
- 2022
FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness
arXiv
FlashAttention is an exact attention algorithm built around GPU memory traffic: by tiling computation so intermediates stay on chip, it cuts reads and writes to high bandwidth memory, training Transformers faster and enabling longer sequences.
- 2022
Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding (Imagen)
arXiv
Imagen is a text-to-image diffusion model that uses a large pretrained language model to encode prompts; it reached a zero-shot FID of 7.27 on COCO and introduced the DrawBench benchmark.
- 2021
High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models
arXiv 2112.10752 (CVPR 2022)
A 2021 paper by Rombach, Blattmann, Lorenz, Esser and Ommer that runs diffusion models inside the latent space of pretrained autoencoders, cutting the compute needed for high-resolution image synthesis while adding cross-attention for text and bounding-box control.
- 2021
LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models
arXiv
LoRA is a fine-tuning method that freezes a pre-trained model's weights and trains small low-rank matrices injected into each layer, cutting trainable parameters and memory by orders of magnitude.
- 2021
Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation (DALL·E)
arXiv
A 2021 OpenAI paper describing a single 12-billion-parameter autoregressive transformer trained on 250 million image-text pairs, which generates images from text and, evaluated zero-shot, is competitive with domain-specific models.
- 2020
GShard: Scaling Giant Models with Conditional Computation and Automatic Sharding
arXiv
GShard, submitted to arXiv in June 2020, is a set of annotation APIs and an XLA compiler extension from Google that lets existing model code express parallel computation, scaling a sparsely gated mixture-of-experts translation model past 600 billion parameters.
- 2020
Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models
NeurIPS
A 2020 paper by Jonathan Ho, Ajay Jain and Pieter Abbeel that trained a U-Net to reverse a gradual noising process, making diffusion models a practical rival to GANs and paving the way for DALL-E 2, Imagen and Stable Diffusion.
- 2020
NeRF: Representing Scenes as Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis
arXiv
A 2020 paper by Mildenhall, Srinivasan, Tancik, Barron, Ramamoorthi and Ng that represents a scene as a neural radiance field: a network mapping 5D coordinates to density and colour, optimized from a sparse set of images with known camera poses.
- 2018
A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks
arXiv
This 2018 paper introduces a style-based GAN generator that separates high-level attributes from stochastic variation and allows scale-specific control, improving distribution quality, interpolation, and disentanglement.
- 2018
Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis
arXiv
A 2018 paper by Andrew Brock, Jeff Donahue and Karen Simonyan that trained generative adversarial networks at the largest scale attempted at the time, introduced BigGANs and set a new state of the art in class-conditional image synthesis.
- 2018
Glow: Generative Flow with Invertible 1x1 Convolutions
arXiv
A 2018 paper by Diederik P. Kingma and Prafulla Dhariwal presenting Glow, a flow-based generative model built on invertible 1x1 convolutions, which improved log-likelihood on standard benchmarks and could synthesise and manipulate large images.
- 2017
Neural Discrete Representation Learning
arXiv
A 2017 paper by van den Oord, Vinyals and Kavukcuoglu proposing VQ-VAE, a generative model whose latent code is discrete rather than continuous, and whose prior is learned rather than fixed, so that useful representations can be learned without supervision.
- 2017
Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation
arXiv
A 2017 paper by Karras, Aila, Laine and Lehtinen that trains generative adversarial networks by growing the generator and discriminator from low to high resolution, improving stability, quality and variation.
- 2017
Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms
arXiv
A 2017 paper by Schulman, Wolski, Dhariwal, Radford and Klimov that introduced proximal policy optimization (PPO), a reinforcement learning method that is much simpler to implement and tune and became OpenAI's default RL algorithm.
- 2017
Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation Using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks
arXiv
CycleGAN learns image-to-image translation between two domains without aligned pairs, combining an adversarial loss with a cycle-consistency constraint to constrain the mapping.
- 2016
WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio
arXiv
WaveNet is a deep neural network that generates raw audio waveforms one sample at a time, predicting each sample from all the ones before it. Used for text-to-speech, it was rated by listeners as more natural than the systems it was compared with.