FVAttn: Adaptive Sparse Attention with Runtime Load Balancing for Video Generation
Abstract
Video Diffusion Transformers process long spatio-temporal sequences, making self-attention the main bottleneck in high-resolution video generation. Training-free sparse attention reduces this cost, but adaptive Top- routing creates uneven per-head workloads under multi-GPU sequence parallelism. The resulting workload heterogeneity turns sparse attention into a rank-level straggler problem. We present \method{}, a training-free sparse-attention system that improves the distributed execution efficiency of adaptive sparse attention under multi-GPU sequence parallelism. \method{} uses Top- routing, a Top- safety floor, and video-aware block organization as the sparse-routing frontend, then repairs the materialized mask at runtime. Runtime Load Balancing migrates a small number of heavy heads via P2P communication to shorten the current critical path. Slack-Aware Sparse Augmentation fills residual non-critical-rank slack with additional high-value blocks, while overlap hides scheduling and migration overhead behind existing computation. On step-distilled Wan2.2 I2V, \method{} reduces average load imbalance from 1.34 to 1.08 and delivers a attention speedup over FlashAttention, while achieving a -- DiT inference speedup with competitive video quality.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2607.16190,
title = {FVAttn: Adaptive Sparse Attention with Runtime Load Balancing for Video Generation},
author = {Hao Liu and Chenghuan Huang and Ye Huang and Zhiying Wen and Hao Liu and Mohan Zhang and Chen Li and Ziyang Ma and Jing Lyu and Jiangsu Du},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.16190},
year = {2026}
}