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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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Hao Liu , Matei Zaharia , Pieter Abbeel

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…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Rakshith Jayanth , Viktor Prasanna

Transformers and large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized machine learning, with attention mechanisms at the core of their success. As the landscape of attention variants expands, so too do the challenges of optimizing their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Feiyang Chen , Yu Cheng , Lei Wang , Yuqing Xia , Ziming Miao , Lingxiao Ma , Fan Yang , Jilong Xue , Zhi Yang , Mao Yang , Haibo Chen

Recently Transformers have provided state-of-the-art performance in sparse matching, crucial to realize high-performance 3D vision applications. Yet, these Transformers lack efficiency due to the quadratic computational complexity of their…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-04-25 Suwichaya Suwanwimolkul , Satoshi Komorita

Many advanced Large Language Model (LLM) applications require long-context processing, but the self-attention module becomes a bottleneck during the prefilling stage of inference due to its quadratic time complexity with respect to sequence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Xiaodong Ji , Hailin Zhang , Fangcheng Fu , Bin Cui

Diffusion transformers have achieved remarkable success in high-quality video generation, yet their reliance on spatiotemporal 3D full attention incurs prohibitive computational cost due to the quadratic complexity of attention. Block…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Jie Hu , Zixiang Gao , Yutong He , Kun Yuan

Large language models (LLMs) now support context windows of hundreds of thousands to millions of tokens, enabling applications such as long-document summarization, large-scale code synthesis, multi-document question answering and persistent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Siyuan Yan , Guo-Qing Jiang , Yuchen Zhang , Xiaoxing Ma , Ran Zhu , Chun Cao , Jingwei Xu

Transformer-based models are popularly used in natural language processing (NLP). Its core component, self-attention, has aroused widespread interest. To understand the self-attention mechanism, a direct method is to visualize the attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-02 Han Shi , Jiahui Gao , Xiaozhe Ren , Hang Xu , Xiaodan Liang , Zhenguo Li , James T. Kwok

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Joe Sharratt

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Amirkeivan Mohtashami , Martin Jaggi

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

Attention is the dominant source of latency during long-context LLM inference, an increasingly popular workload with reasoning models and RAG. We propose Kascade, a training-free sparse attention method that leverages known observations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Dhruv Deshmukh , Saurabh Goyal , Nipun Kwatra , Ramachandran Ramjee

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 design of Large Language Models (LLMs) has long been hampered by a fundamental conflict within their core attention mechanism: its remarkable expressivity is built upon a computational complexity of O(H N^2) that grows quadratically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Mingkuan Zhao , Wentao Hu , Jiayin Wang , Xin Lai , Tianchen Huang , Yuheng Min , Rui Yan , Xiaoyan Zhu

Transformers have achieved success in both language and vision domains. However, it is prohibitively expensive to scale them to long sequences such as long documents or high-resolution images, because self-attention mechanism has quadratic…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-12-08 Chen Zhu , Wei Ping , Chaowei Xiao , Mohammad Shoeybi , Tom Goldstein , Anima Anandkumar , Bryan Catanzaro

Generating realistic videos with diffusion transformers demands significant computation, with attention layers the central bottleneck; even producing a short clip requires running a transformer over a very long sequence of embeddings, e.g.,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Sankeerth Durvasula , Kavya Sreedhar , Zain Moustafa , Suraj Kothawade , Ashish Gondimalla , Suvinay Subramanian , Narges Shahidi , Nandita Vijaykumar

Long-context transformers face significant efficiency challenges due to the quadratic cost of self-attention. However, many modern applications-from multi-turn dialogue to high-resolution vision-require contexts spanning tens of thousands…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Jacob Fein-Ashley , Neelesh Gupta , Rajgopal Kannan , Viktor Prasanna

Deploying long-context large language models (LLMs) is essential but poses significant computational and memory challenges. Caching all Key and Value (KV) states across all attention heads consumes substantial memory. Existing KV cache…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Guangxuan Xiao , Jiaming Tang , Jingwei Zuo , Junxian Guo , Shang Yang , Haotian Tang , Yao Fu , Song Han

An efficient attention implementation is essential for large models due to its quadratic time complexity. Fortunately, attention commonly exhibits sparsity, i.e., many values in the attention map are near zero, allowing for the omission of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Jintao Zhang , Chendong Xiang , Haofeng Huang , Jia Wei , Haocheng Xi , Jun Zhu , Jianfei Chen

We present a novel non attention based architecture for large language models (LLMs) that efficiently handles very long context windows, on the order of hundreds of thousands to potentially millions of tokens. Unlike traditional Transformer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Andrew Kiruluta , Preethi Raju , Priscilla Burity