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Accelerating large language model (LLM) inference is critical for real-world deployments requiring high throughput and low latency. Contextual sparsity, where each token dynamically activates only a small subset of the model parameters,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Susav Shrestha , Brad Settlemyer , Nikoli Dryden , Narasimha Reddy

The quadratic complexity of self-attention in Transformer models remains a significant bottleneck for processing long sequences and deploying large language models efficiently. For this approach, there has been significant research into…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Spandan Pratyush

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

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) face significant computational bottlenecks during inference due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention mechanisms, particularly as context lengths increase. We introduce SpecAttn, a novel training-free…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Harsh Shah

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

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

Transformer has achieved great success in NLP. However, the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism in Transformer makes it inefficient in handling long sequences. Many existing works explore to accelerate Transformers by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-03 Chuhan Wu , Fangzhao Wu , Tao Qi , Binxing Jiao , Daxin Jiang , Yongfeng Huang , Xing Xie

Long-context modeling is crucial for next-generation language models, yet the high computational cost of standard attention mechanisms poses significant computational challenges. Sparse attention offers a promising direction for improving…

Transformers are considered one of the most important deep learning models since 2018, in part because it establishes state-of-the-art (SOTA) records and could potentially replace existing Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Despite the remarkable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-23 Hongwu Peng , Shaoyi Huang , Shiyang Chen , Bingbing Li , Tong Geng , Ang Li , Weiwen Jiang , Wujie Wen , Jinbo Bi , Hang Liu , Caiwen Ding

Transformers are the mainstream of NLP applications and are becoming increasingly popular in other domains such as Computer Vision. Despite the improvements in model quality, the enormous computation costs make Transformers difficult at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-22 Liu Liu , Zheng Qu , Zhaodong Chen , Yufei Ding , Yuan Xie

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

Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) on edge devices remains challenging due to their quadratically increasing computations with the sequence length. Existing studies for dynamic attention pruning are designed for hardware with massively…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Jiawen Qi , Chang Gao , Zhaochun Ren , Qinyu Chen

Multimodal Transformers serve as the backbone for state-of-the-art vision-language models, yet their quadratic attention complexity remains a critical barrier to scalability. In this work, we investigate the viability of Linear Attention…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Armin Gerami , Seyedehanita Madani , Ramani Duraiswami

Leveraging attention sparsity to accelerate long-context large language models (LLMs) has been a hot research topic. However, current algorithms such as sparse attention or key-value (KV) cache compression tend to use a fixed budget, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Chaofan Lin , Jiaming Tang , Shuo Yang , Hanshuo Wang , Tian Tang , Boyu Tian , Ion Stoica , Song Han , Mingyu Gao

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) enable breakthroughs in reasoning and parallel decoding but suffer from prohibitive quadratic computational complexity and memory overhead during inference. Current caching techniques accelerate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Yuerong Song , Xiaoran Liu , Ruixiao Li , Zhigeng Liu , Zengfeng Huang , Qipeng Guo , Ziwei He , Xipeng Qiu

With the rise of Transformer models in NLP and CV domain, Multi-Head Attention has been proven to be a game-changer. However, its expensive computation poses challenges to the model throughput and efficiency, especially for the long…

Image and Video Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-04-12 Jiing-Ping Wang , Ming-Guang Lin , An-Yeu , Wu

Sparse attention, which selectively attends to a subset of tokens in the context was supposed to be efficient. However, its theoretical reduction in FLOPs has rarely translated into wall-clock speed-up over its dense attention counterparts…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Xihui Lin , Yunan Zhang , Suyu Ge , Liliang Ren , Barun Patra , Vishrav Chaudhary , Hao Peng , Xia Song

The discovery of the lazy neuron phenomenon in trained Transformers, where the vast majority of neurons in their feed-forward networks (FFN) are inactive for each token, has spurred tremendous interests in activation sparsity for enhancing…

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