Flash-SemiCRF 流式结构化推理
阅读原文· arxiv.orgFlash-SemiCRF 通过流式计算突破半马尔可夫条件随机场(semi-CRFs)的内存瓶颈,实现超长序列精确推理。该方法用前缀和数组即时计算替代存储边势张量,内存占用随片段长度与标签数量乘积大幅降低;采用流式前向-后向传递与检查点边界归一化,保持工作内存亚线性增长,可处理超过10万位置的基因组序列。方案融合为Triton内核,解决了传统方法在大状态空间下的不可行问题。
Semi-Markov Conditional Random Fields (semi-CRFs) assign labels to segments of a sequence rather than to individual positions, enabling exact inference over segment-level features and principled uncertainty estimates at their boundaries. However, existing implementations must materialize a large edge potential tensor whose size grows with sequence length, maximum segment length, and label count, becoming prohibitive for speech-scale state spaces and intractable at genomic scales where sequences can exceed 100,000 positions. This memory bottleneck has limited the adoption of exact segment-level inference for long sequences and large label sets. We identify that the core inefficiency is materializing edge potentials that can instead be evaluated on-the-fly from a compact prefix-sum array, and make several improvements. First, replacing the stored edge tensor with prefix-sum lookup reduces the memory footprint by a factor proportional to the product of segment length and label count. Second, a streaming forward-backward pass with checkpoint-boundary normalization keeps working memory sublinear in sequence length while preserving exact gradients. Third, zero-centered cumulative scores control numerical drift and induce an adaptive duration prior under label imbalance. We integrate these ideas into Flash-SemiCRF, a fused Triton kernel that enables exact semi-CRF inference on previously intractable problem sizes. Available at https://github.com/biobenkj/flash-semicrf.