Accelerating Attention with Basis Decomposition

Abstract

Attention is a core operation in large language models (LLMs). We present BD Attention (BDA), a lossless algorithmic reformulation of attention. BDA is enabled by a simple matrix identity from Basis Decomposition (BD), which restructures multi-head projections into a compact form while preserving exact outputs. Unlike I/O-aware system optimizations such as FlashAttention, BDA provides a mathematically guaranteed acceleration that is architecture-agnostic. On DeepSeek-V2-Lite (16B, FP16), BDA requires only 4s of offline preparation with no retraining required and, on modern GPUs, achieves 34% faster key/value projections and 25% smaller weights, while increasing perplexity (PPL) by just 0.02% (FP16) or 0.0004% (FP32), a negligible effect on model performance. These results position BDA as a theoretically exact method for lossless attention acceleration that is complementary to existing engineering-level optimizations. Our code is available at https://github.com/abcbdf/basis-decomposition-official.