I am a computer science PhD student at Georgia Tech advised by Prof. Humphrey Shi. My primary research area is High Performance AI Architecture, which involves making fast and efficient AI, from neural network architecture down to computer architecture. Since 2021, I've been working on NATTEN, a solution for fast multi-dimensional sparse attention. In our most recent paper, Generalized Neighborhood Attention, we discuss outstanding challenges in sparse attention infrastructure, and our proposed solutions, which involve both an analytical study, and a fast implementation achieving the maximum speedup theoretically possible. I've been fortunate to have worked at HippoML and NVIDIA (both in production and research), through which I've been exposed to some of the most challenging problems in high performance AI.
GitHub / Google Scholar / Twitter / LinkedIn
Select publications & preprints
2025
Generalized Neighborhood Attention: Multi-dimensional Sparse Attention at the Speed of Light
Ali Hassani, Fengzhe Zhou, Aditya Kane, Jiannan Huang, Chieh-Yun Chen, Min Shi, Steven Walton, Markus Hoehnerbach, Vijay Thakkar, Michael Isaev, Qinsheng Zhang, Bing Xu, Haicheng Wu, Wen-mei Hwu, Ming-Yu Liu, and Humphrey Shi.
Preprint.
2024
Faster Neighborhood Attention: Reducing the O(n^2) Cost of Self Attention at the Threadblock Level
Ali Hassani, Wen-Mei Hwu, and Humphrey Shi.
NeurIPS 2024.
2023
Neighborhood Attention Transformer
Ali Hassani, Steven Walton, Jiachen Li, Shen Li, and Humphrey Shi.
CVPR 2023.
2022
StyleNAT: Giving Each Head a New Perspective
Steven Walton, Ali Hassani, Xingqian Xu, Zhangyang Wang, and Humphrey Shi.
Preprint.
2021
Escaping the Big Data Paradigm with Compact Transformers
Ali Hassani*, Steven Walton*, Nikhil Shah, Abulikemu Abuduweili, Jiachen Li, and Humphrey Shi.
Preprint.
Experience
Since 12/2024
NVIDIA Research, Deep Imagination Research
Research Intern
06/2023 - 12/2023
Software Engineering Intern
06/2022 - 09/2022
Picsart AI Research
Research Intern
Since 2024
SHI Labs at Georgia Tech
Graduate Researcher
2021-2023
SHI Labs at University of Oregon
Graduate Researcher
2019 to 2021
University of Kerman, Mahani Mathematical Research Center
Undergraduate Researcher
Teaching
Education