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Papers that changed AI, with a plain-language explainer for each.
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- 2024
SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos
arXiv
SAM 2 is a Meta FAIR foundation model that segments objects in images and videos from simple prompts such as points, boxes or masks, released together with a large video segmentation dataset and training code.
- 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.
- 2024
Transformers are SSMs: Generalized Models and Efficient Algorithms Through Structured State Space Duality
ICML
Tri Dao and Albert Gu's paper introduces state space duality, a framework showing that structured state space models and attention variants are closely related, and uses it to derive Mamba-2, whose core layer runs 2 to 8 times faster than Mamba's.
- 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.
- 2023
Segment Anything
arXiv 2304.02643
A 2023 paper that introduces the Segment Anything project: a promptable segmentation task, a model, and a dataset of over 1 billion masks on 11 million images, all released to advance foundation models for computer vision.
- 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.
- 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
Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision (CLIP)
ICML
CLIP is an OpenAI model trained on 400 million image-text pairs to map pictures and sentences into one shared space, so it can classify images zero-shot from a written description.
- 2020
An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale (ViT)
arXiv
A 2020 paper showing that a plain Transformer applied directly to sequences of image patches, with no convolution at all, can match state-of-the-art convolutional networks on image classification.
- 2020
An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale
arXiv 2010.11929 (ICLR 2021)
A 2020 paper by Alexey Dosovitskiy and colleagues showing that a pure Transformer applied directly to sequences of image patches — the Vision Transformer, or ViT — matches state-of-the-art convolutional networks on image classification when pre-trained on large amounts of data.
- 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
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.
- 2019
Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer (T5)
JMLR
A 2019 Google paper that frames every language task as text in, text out, using one encoder-decoder Transformer and one training setup. It also introduced the C4 dataset, and the released T5 models became common research starting points.
- 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
BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding
NAACL
Google's 2018 BERT paper introduced an encoder-only Transformer that reads text in both directions and is pre-trained by hiding words. It set new results on eleven language tasks and made download-and-fine-tune the default workflow.
- 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
Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training (GPT)
OpenAI
OpenAI's 2018 paper introducing GPT, a Transformer decoder pre-trained to predict the next token and then fine-tuned for specific tasks. It improved the state of the art on 9 of 12 tasks studied and set the recipe the GPT series followed.
- 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.