English

FVAttn: Adaptive Sparse Attention with Runtime Load Balancing for Video Generation

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-07-17 v1

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-pp 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-pp routing, a Top-kk 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 4.41×4.41\times attention speedup over FlashAttention, while achieving a 2.022.02--2.11×2.11\times 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}
}