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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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Shantanu Acharya , Fei Jia , Boris Ginsburg

Large Language Models (LLMs) incur quadratic attention complexity with input length, creating a major time bottleneck in the prefilling stage. Existing acceleration methods largely exploit attention score sparsity by estimating blocks with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Zhiyuan He , Yike Zhang , Chengruidong Zhang , Huiqiang Jiang , Yuqing Yang , Lili Qiu

As Large Language Models (LLMs) scale to million-token contexts, traditional Mechanistic Interpretability techniques for analyzing attention scale quadratically with context length, demanding terabytes of memory beyond 100,000 tokens. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 J Rosser , José Luis Redondo García , Gustavo Penha , Konstantina Palla , Hugues Bouchard

The integration of long-context capabilities with visual understanding unlocks unprecedented potential for Vision Language Models (VLMs). However, the quadratic attention complexity during the pre-filling phase remains a significant…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Yucheng Li , Huiqiang Jiang , Chengruidong Zhang , Qianhui Wu , Xufang Luo , Surin Ahn , Amir H. Abdi , Dongsheng Li , Jianfeng Gao , Yuqing Yang , Lili Qiu

As software projects rapidly evolve, software artifacts become more complex and defects behind get harder to identify. The emerging Transformer-based approaches, though achieving remarkable performance, struggle with long code sequences due…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-09-13 Xueqi Yang , Mariusz Jakubowski , Li Kang , Haojie Yu , Tim Menzies

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Chuxu Song , Zhencan Peng , Jiuqi Wei , Chuanhui Yang

Long-context video understanding and generation pose a significant computational challenge for Transformer-based video models due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. While existing sparse attention methods employ coarse-grained…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Anmin Liu , Ruixuan Yang , Huiqiang Jiang , Bin Lin , Minmin Sun , Yong Li , Chen Zhang , Tao Xie

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Xinghao Wang , Pengyu Wang , Dong Zhang , Chenkun Tan , Shaojun Zhou , Zhaoxiang Liu , Shiguo Lian , Fangxu Liu , Kai Song , Xipeng Qiu

Large vision-language models (VLMs) enable joint processing of text and images. However, incorporating vision data significantly increases the prompt length, resulting in a longer time to first token (TTFT). This bottleneck can be…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Tharun Adithya Srikrishnan , Deval Shah , Timothy Hein , Ahmed Hasssan , Stephen Youn , Steven K. Reinhardt

Sparse Attention is a technique that approximates standard attention computation with sub-quadratic complexity. This is achieved by selectively ignoring smaller entries in the attention matrix during the softmax function computation.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Yichuan Deng , Zhao Song , Jing Xiong , Chiwun Yang

Long-context understanding is crucial for many NLP applications, yet transformers struggle with efficiency due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. Sparse attention methods alleviate this cost but often impose static, predefined…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Hanzhi Zhang , Heng Fan , Kewei Sha , Yan Huang , Yunhe Feng

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are commonly derived by extending pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) with visual capabilities. In this work, we investigate how MLLMs process visual inputs by analyzing their attention…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Jiahui Wang , Zuyan Liu , Yongming Rao , Jiwen Lu

As large language models (LLMs) continue to support increasingly longer contexts, the memory demand for key-value (KV) caches during decoding grows rapidly, becoming a critical bottleneck in both GPU memory capacity and PCIe bandwidth.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Feiyu Yao , Qian Wang

Scaling inference for large language models (LLMs) is increasingly constrained by limited GPU memory, especially due to growing key-value (KV) caches required for long-context generation. While existing approaches offload KV caches to CPU…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Weishu Deng , Yujie Yang , Peiran Du , Lingfeng Xiang , Zhen Lin , Chen Zhong , Song Jiang , Hui Lu , Jia Rao

Transformers have revolutionized natural language processing, but their quadratic complexity with respect to sequence length remains a fundamental bottleneck for long-range modeling. While sparse attention mechanisms like RingAttention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Dong Liu , Yanxuan Yu

Training and serving long-context large language models (LLMs) incurs substantial overhead. To address this, two critical steps are often required: a pretrained LLM typically undergoes a separate stage for context length extension by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Suyu Ge , Xihui Lin , Yunan Zhang , Jiawei Han , Hao Peng

Long-term memory is a cornerstone of human intelligence. Enabling AI to process lifetime-scale information remains a long-standing pursuit in the field. Due to the constraints of full-attention architectures, the effective context length of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Yu Chen , Runkai Chen , Sheng Yi , Xinda Zhao , Xiaohong Li , Jianjin Zhang , Jun Sun , Chuanrui Hu , Yunyun Han , Lidong Bing , Yafeng Deng , Tianqiao Chen

Large language models (LLMs) with hundreds of billions of parameters have sparked a new wave of exciting AI applications. However, they are computationally expensive at inference time. Sparsity is a natural approach to reduce this cost, but…

Scaling Transformers to ultra-long contexts is bottlenecked by the $O(n^2 d)$ cost of self-attention. Existing methods reduce this cost along the sequence axis through local windows, kernel approximations, or token-level sparsity, but these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Yan Xie , Tiansheng Wen , Tangda Huang , Bo Chen , Chenyu You , Stefanie Jegelka , Yifei Wang

With the increasing volumes of Large Language Models (LLMs) and the expanding context lengths, attention computation has become a key performance bottleneck in LLM serving. For fast attention computation, recent practices often parallelize…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Di Liu , Yifei Liu , Chen Chen , Zhibin Yu , Xiaoyi Fan , Quan Chen , Minyi Guo