A serving-oriented study note on KV cache lifecycle, prefill, decode, TTFT, TPOT, memory admission, and why autoregressive inference turns attention state into a scheduler problem.
A systems-oriented study note on prefill/decode interference, chunked prefill, disaggregated serving, KV transfer, placement, routing, goodput, and exact cache handoff contracts.
A code- and shape-oriented study note on Transformer cost: parameters, activations, FLOPs, memory traffic, prefill, decode, and why FLOPs alone do not predict runtime.
A kernel-oriented reconstruction of FlashAttention-2 work partitioning, parallelism across sequence rows, prefill/decode shape changes, and the boundary where decode requires a different schedule.
A derivation- and implementation-oriented study of one autoregressive request: prompt state, prefill/decode, last-row logits, token selection, KV append timing, positions, stopping, beam reorder, streaming, and cache equivalence.