Can 99% Sparse Transformers Run Faster? Insights from the ‘Attention Is All You Need’ Authors
The paper shows that applying lightweight L1 regularization can make over 99% of FFN activations zero, and by using a new tile‑wise ELLPACK (TwELL) format together with a hybrid routing scheme, inference speed improves up to 30% while memory usage drops over 24% and energy consumption is reduced, all with negligible impact on downstream task performance.
