{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/lightseq-a-high-performance-inference-library","title":"LightSeq: A High Performance Inference Library for Transformers","arxiv_id":"2010.13887","date":"2020-10-23","proceeding":"NAACL 2021 4","authors":["Xiaohui Wang","Ying Xiong","Yang Wei","Mingxuan Wang","Lei LI"],"abstract":"Transformer, BERT and their variants have achieved great success in natural language processing. Since Transformer models are huge in size, serving these models is a challenge for real industrial applications. In this paper, we propose LightSeq, a highly efficient inference library for models in the Transformer family. LightSeq includes a series of GPU optimization techniques to to streamline the computation of neural layers and to reduce memory footprint. LightSeq can easily import models trained using PyTorch and Tensorflow. Experimental results on machine translation benchmarks show that LightSeq achieves up to 14x speedup compared with TensorFlow and 1.4x compared with FasterTransformer, a concurrent CUDA implementation. The code is available at https://github.com/bytedance/lightseq.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.13887v4","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.13887v4.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"lightseq-a-high-performance-inference-library","repo_url":"https://github.com/bytedance/lightseq","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"tf","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"GPU"},{"task_slug":"machine-translation","task_name":"Machine Translation"},{"task_slug":"translation","task_name":"Translation"},{"task_slug":"high","task_name":"Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"absolute-position-encodings","method_name":"Absolute Position Encodings"},{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"attention-dropout","method_name":"Attention Dropout"},{"method_slug":"bert","method_name":"BERT"},{"method_slug":"bpe","method_name":"BPE"},{"method_slug":"cosine-annealing","method_name":"Cosine Annealing"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"discriminative-fine-tuning","method_name":"Discriminative Fine-Tuning"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"gpt","method_name":"GPT"},{"method_slug":"label-smoothing","method_name":"Label Smoothing"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"linear-warmup-with-cosine-annealing","method_name":"Linear Warmup With Cosine Annealing"},{"method_slug":"linear-warmup-with-linear-decay","method_name":"Linear Warmup With Linear Decay"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"position-wise-feed-forward-layer","method_name":"Position-Wise Feed-Forward Layer"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"transformer","method_name":"Transformer"},{"method_slug":"weight-decay","method_name":"Weight Decay"},{"method_slug":"wordpiece","method_name":"WordPiece"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2010.13887","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}