Related papers: Block-Attention for Efficient Prefilling

We introduce the Block Transformer which adopts hierarchical global-to-local modeling to autoregressive transformers to mitigate the inference bottlenecks associated with self-attention. Self-attention requires the key-value (KV) cache of…

This paper proposes Block-Filtered Long-Context Attention (BFLA), a training-free sparse prefill attention mechanism for long-context inference. BFLA adopts a two-stage design. In Stage 1, query and key sequences are compressed into coarse…

Transformers have emerged as the architecture of choice for many state-of-the-art AI models, showcasing exceptional performance across a wide range of AI applications. However, the memory demands imposed by Transformers limit their ability…

Inference with Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) on long sequences is both costly and slow due to the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism. We introduce Star Attention, a two-phase block-sparse approximation…

While Transformers have shown remarkable success in natural language processing, their attention mechanism's large memory requirements have limited their ability to handle longer contexts. Prior approaches, such as recurrent memory or…

The quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms poses a critical bottleneck for large language models processing long contexts. While dynamic sparse attention methods offer input-adaptive efficiency, they face fundamental trade-offs:…

Efficient attention algorithms are critical to mitigate the quadratic cost of attention in long-context workloads. Prior work utilises block-scaled quantisation techniques on Blackwell GPUs to move attention computation to 4-bit precision…

Interacting with humans through multi-turn conversations is a fundamental feature of large language models (LLMs). However, existing LLM serving engines executing multi-turn conversations are inefficient due to the need to repeatedly…

Modern large language models increasingly require long contexts for reasoning and multi-document tasks, but attention's quadratic complexity creates a severe computational bottleneck. We present Block-Sparse FlashAttention (BSFA), a drop-in…

Long-context LLMs increasingly rely on extended, reusable prefill prompts for agents and domain Q&A, pushing attention and KV-cache to become the dominant decode-time bottlenecks. While sparse attention reduces computation and transfer…

Scaling the context length of large language models (LLMs) offers significant benefits but is computationally expensive. This expense stems primarily from the self-attention mechanism, whose $O(N^2)$ complexity with respect to sequence…

Long-context decoding in LLMs is IO-bound: each token re-reads an ever-growing KV cache. Prior accelerations cut bytes via compression, which lowers fidelity, or selection/eviction, which restricts what remains accessible, and both can…

Transformers are slow and memory-hungry on long sequences, since the time and memory complexity of self-attention are quadratic in sequence length. Approximate attention methods have attempted to address this problem by trading off model…

Each request in LLM inference goes through two phases: compute-bound prefill and memory-bandwidth-bound decode. To improve GPU utilization, recent systems use hybrid batching that combines the prefill and decode phases of different requests…

In long-context large language model (LLM) inference, the prefill stage dominates computation due to self-attention over the complete input context. Sparse attention significantly reduces self-attention computation by limiting each token's…

Transformer-based models have emerged as one of the most widely used architectures for natural language processing, natural language generation, and image generation. The size of the state-of-the-art models has increased steadily reaching…

Attention mechanisms underpin the success of large language models (LLMs), yet their substantial computational and memory overhead poses challenges for optimizing efficiency and performance. A critical bottleneck arises as KV cache and…

Attention is the cornerstone of modern Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet its quadratic complexity hinders efficiency and scalability, especially for long-context processing. A promising approach is to leverage sparsity in attention.…

The quadratic computational complexity of standard attention mechanisms presents a severe scalability bottleneck for LLMs in long-context scenarios. While hybrid attention mechanisms combining Full Attention (FA) and Sparse Attention (SA)…

Current hierarchical attention methods, such as NSA and InfLLMv2, select the top-k relevant key-value (KV) blocks based on coarse attention scores and subsequently apply fine-grained softmax attention on the selected tokens. However, the…