  Large language models (LLMs) with hundreds of billions of parameters have
sparked a new wave of exciting AI applications. However, they are
computationally expensive at inference time. Sparsity is a natural approach to
reduce this cost, but existing methods either require costly retraining, have
to forgo LLM's in-context learning ability, or do not yield wall-clock time
speedup on modern hardware. We hypothesize that contextual sparsity, which are
small, input-dependent sets of attention heads and MLP parameters that yield
approximately the same output as the dense model for a given input, can address
these issues. We show that contextual sparsity exists, that it can be
accurately predicted, and that we can exploit it to speed up LLM inference in
wall-clock time without compromising LLM's quality or in-context learning
ability. Based on these insights, we propose DejaVu, a system that uses a
low-cost algorithm to predict contextual sparsity on the fly given inputs to
each layer, along with an asynchronous and hardware-aware implementation that
speeds up LLM inference. We validate that DejaVu can reduce the inference
latency of OPT-175B by over 2X compared to the state-of-the-art
FasterTransformer, and over 6X compared to the widely used Hugging Face
implementation, without compromising model quality. The code is available at
https://github.com/FMInference/DejaVu.
