Rather than directly giving the input data to models, we can
pass a tensor instead. In the short term, this saves some duplicated
code.
Longer term, we will want to overlap setting up the next batch with
processing of the current one. In this case, we will only have the
shape of tensor but it will not be loaded with data at the time of
graph generation. By passing only a tensor to models now, we set up
this possibility and prevent them from relying on data that they won't
have in the future.
Although the same could be done for Positions and Outputs, in some
cases we either need the raw input data or don't use them at all.
Therefore, for now we leave them as they are and allow models to
convert them to tensors as needed.
Models may require that a set of inputs all be processed as part
of the same batch. For example, if an image has multiple patches
with fully connected attention between them, we should not split
the batch in the middle of an image.
Fixes#9697
The encoder cache needs to know the position of images in the input
stream so that it knows when to delete them. Previously images didn't
have a position, so we implied one by breaking batches before an
image and then assuming the image was in the first position. However,
multimodal objects are now given explicit positions in the input
stream, so we can use that instead.
Breaking batches was also a way to simulate a cross attention mask
for mllama. However, given that it only supports a single sequence
and a single image, this mask doesn't serve any real purpose.
Removing the batch break does not appear to affect the quality of
the output.
Most of this is simply moving the input data structures to a new
package to avoid import cycles.
