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The computational difficulties of large language model (LLM) inference remain a significant obstacle to their widespread deployment. The need for many applications to support long input sequences and process them in large batches typically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Luka Ribar , Ivan Chelombiev , Luke Hudlass-Galley , Charlie Blake , Carlo Luschi , Douglas Orr

Large language models (LLMs) now support extremely long context windows, but the quadratic complexity of vanilla attention results in significantly long Time-to-First-Token (TTFT) latency. Existing approaches to address this complexity…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-04 Qianchao Zhu , Jiangfei Duan , Chang Chen , Siran Liu , Guanyu Feng , Xin Lv , Xiao Chuanfu , Dahua Lin , Chao Yang

We present Prompt Cache, an approach for accelerating inference for large language models (LLM) by reusing attention states across different LLM prompts. Many input prompts have overlapping text segments, such as system messages, prompt…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-26 In Gim , Guojun Chen , Seung-seob Lee , Nikhil Sarda , Anurag Khandelwal , Lin Zhong

The prefill stage of large language model (LLM) inference is a key computational bottleneck for long-context workloads. At short-to-moderate context lengths (1K--16K tokens), Feed-Forward Networks (FFNs) dominate this cost, accounting for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Aayush Gautam , Mukul Gagrani , Junyoung Park , Mingu Lee , Chiris Lott , Narasimha Reddy

Long-context inference in large language models is bottlenecked by the quadratic cost of full attention. Existing efficient alternatives often rely either on native sparse training or on heuristic token eviction, creating an undesirable…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Yanke Zhou , Yiduo Li , Hanlin Tang , Maohua Li , Kan Liu , Lan Tao , Lin Qu , Yuan Yao , Xiaoxing Ma

Effective attention modules have played a crucial role in the success of Transformer-based large language models (LLMs), but the quadratic time and memory complexities of these attention modules also pose a challenge when processing long…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Ao Sun , Weilin Zhao , Xu Han , Cheng Yang , Zhiyuan Liu , Chuan Shi , Maosong Sun

Transformers, driven by attention mechanisms, form the foundation of large language models (LLMs). As these models scale up, efficient GPU attention kernels become essential for high-throughput and low-latency inference. Diverse LLM…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-04-23 Zihao Ye , Lequn Chen , Ruihang Lai , Wuwei Lin , Yineng Zhang , Stephanie Wang , Tianqi Chen , Baris Kasikci , Vinod Grover , Arvind Krishnamurthy , Luis Ceze

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

The quadratic computational complexity of the attention mechanism in current Large Language Models (LLMs) renders inference with long contexts prohibitively expensive. To address this challenge, various approaches aim to retain critical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-09 Hongyin Tang , Di Xiu , Lanrui Wang , Xiurui Geng , Jingang Wang , Xunliang Cai

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) deliver strong long-context processing capability in a non-autoregressive decoding paradigm. However, the considerable computational cost of bidirectional full attention limits the inference…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Lingkun Long , Yushi Huang , Shihao Bai , Ruihao Gong , Jun Zhang , Ao Zhou , Jianlei Yang

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of AI, demonstrating unprecedented capacity across various tasks. However, the inference process for LLMs comes with significant computational costs. In this paper, we propose an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Zangwei Zheng , Xiaozhe Ren , Fuzhao Xue , Yang Luo , Xin Jiang , Yang You

Existing sparse attention methods primarily target inference-time acceleration by selecting critical tokens under predefined sparsity patterns. However, they often fail to bridge the training-inference gap and lack the capacity for…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Feng Chen , Yefei He , Shaoxuan He , Yuanyu He , Jing Liu , Lequan Lin , Akide Liu , Zhaoyang Li , Jiyuan Zhang , Zhenbang Sun , Bohan Zhuang , Qi Wu

The evolution of large language models (LLMs) towards applications with ultra-long contexts faces challenges posed by the high computational and memory costs of the Transformer architecture. While existing sparse and linear attention…

The quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms limits the efficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) on long-text tasks. Recently, methods that dynamically estimate block importance have enabled efficient block sparse attention, leading…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Yixuan Wang , Huang He , Siqi Bao , Hua Wu , Haifeng Wang , Qingfu Zhu , Wanxiang Che

Extending the context length (i.e., the maximum supported sequence length) of LLMs is of paramount significance. To facilitate long context training of LLMs, sequence parallelism has emerged as an essential technique, which scatters each…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Yujie Wang , Shiju Wang , Shenhan Zhu , Fangcheng Fu , Xinyi Liu , Xuefeng Xiao , Huixia Li , Jiashi Li , Faming Wu , Bin Cui

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. These capabilities stem primarily from the self-attention mechanism, which enables modeling of long-range…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-05 Zeng You , Yaofo Chen , Shuhai Zhang , Zhijie Qiu , Tingyu Wu , Yingjian Li , Yaowei Wang , Mingkui Tan

The growing demand for long-context inference capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) has intensified the computational and memory bottlenecks inherent to the self-attention mechanism. To address this challenge, we introduce BLASST, a…

Self-attention based Transformer has demonstrated the state-of-the-art performances in a number of natural language processing tasks. Self-attention is able to model long-term dependencies, but it may suffer from the extraction of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-12-30 Guangxiang Zhao , Junyang Lin , Zhiyuan Zhang , Xuancheng Ren , Qi Su , Xu Sun

While diffusion language models (DLMs) offer a promising alternative to autoregressive models (ARs), existing open-source DLMs suffer from high inference latency. This bottleneck is mainly due to the attention's quadratic complexity with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Zeqing Wang , Gongfan Fang , Xinyin Ma , Xingyi Yang , Xinchao Wang

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