English
Related papers

Related papers: The Sparse Frontier: Sparse Attention Trade-offs i…

200 papers

As Large Language Models (LLMs) scale to longer context windows, the computational cost of attention mechanisms, which traditionally grows quadratically with input length, presents a critical challenge for real-time and memory-constrained…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-10 James Vo

Large Language Models (LLMs) face efficiency bottlenecks due to the quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism when processing long contexts. Sparse attention methods offer a promising solution, but existing approaches often suffer…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Lida Chen , Dong Xu , Chenxin An , Xintao Wang , Yikai Zhang , Jiangjie Chen , Zujie Liang , Feng Wei , Jiaqing Liang , Yanghua Xiao , Wei Wang

The quadratic complexity of standard attention mechanisms poses a significant scalability bottleneck for large language models (LLMs) in long-context scenarios. While hybrid attention strategies that combine sparse and full attention within…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Zecheng Tang , Quantong Qiu , Yi Yang , Zhiyi Hong , Haiya Xiang , Kebin Liu , Qingqing Dang , Juntao Li , Min Zhang

Sparse attention methods exploit the inherent sparsity in attention to speed up the prefilling phase of long-context inference, mitigating the quadratic complexity of full attention computation. While existing sparse attention methods rely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Dan Peng , Zhihui Fu , Zewen Ye , Zhuoran Song , Jun Wang

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

Long-context models are essential for many applications but face inefficiencies in loading large KV caches during decoding. Prior methods enforce fixed token budgets for sparse attention, assuming a set number of tokens can approximate full…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Kan Zhu , Tian Tang , Qinyu Xu , Yile Gu , Zhichen Zeng , Rohan Kadekodi , Liangyu Zhao , Ang Li , Arvind Krishnamurthy , Baris Kasikci

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

Transformers allow attention between all pairs of tokens, but there is reason to believe that most of these connections - and their quadratic time and memory - may not be necessary. But which ones? We evaluate the impact of sparsification…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Siddhartha Brahma , Polina Zablotskaia , David Mimno

Transformers' quadratic complexity with respect to the input sequence length has motivated a body of work on efficient sparse approximations to softmax. An alternative path, used by entmax transformers, consists of having built-in exact…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-22 Marcos Treviso , António Góis , Patrick Fernandes , Erick Fonseca , André F. T. Martins

Sparse attention mechanisms aim to reduce computational overhead with minimal accuracy loss by selectively processing salient tokens. Despite their effectiveness, most methods merely exploit a model's inherent sparsity and thus plateau at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Feng Chen , Yefei He , Lequan Lin , Chenhui Gou , Jing Liu , Bohan Zhuang , Qi Wu

Sparsity has long been a central theme in LLM efficiency, but its role in context processing remains unresolved. As LLM workloads shift toward longer contexts and agentic interactions, the compute and memory bottlenecks of attention become…

Large language models (LLMs) encounter computational challenges during long-sequence inference, especially in the attention pre-filling phase, where the complexity grows quadratically with the prompt length. Previous efforts to mitigate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Xunhao Lai , Jianqiao Lu , Yao Luo , Yiyuan Ma , Xun Zhou

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

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

Transformer-based architectures have become the prevailing backbone of large language models. However, the quadratic time and memory complexity of self-attention remains a fundamental obstacle to efficient long-context modeling. To address…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yutao Sun , Zhenyu Li , Yike Zhang , Tengyu Pan , Bowen Dong , Yuyi Guo , Jianyong Wang

The attention mechanism of a transformer has a quadratic complexity, leading to high inference costs and latency for long sequences. However, attention matrices are mostly sparse, which implies that many entries may be omitted from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Jeffrey Willette , Heejun Lee , Sung Ju Hwang

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)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Quantong Qiu , Zhiyi Hong , Yi Yang , Haitian Wang , Kebin Liu , Qingqing Dang , Juntao Li , Min Zhang

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

While sparse attention mitigates the computational bottleneck of long-context LLM training, its distributed training process exhibits extreme heterogeneity in both \textit{1)} sequence length and \textit{2)} sparsity sensitivity, leading to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Hongtao Xu , Jianchao Tan , Yuxuan Hu , Pengju Lu , Hongyu Wang , Pingwei Sun , Yerui Sun , Yuchen Xie , Xunliang Cai , Mingzhen Li , Weile Jia

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
‹ Prev 1 2 3 10 Next ›