Related papers: FSA: An Alternative Efficient Implementation of Na…
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…
In this work, we conduct a systematic analysis of Native Sparse Attention (NSA) and propose targeted improvements that enhance long-context modeling. A key insight is that alternating between local (sliding-window) and global (compression,…
Processing long contexts has become a critical capability for modern large language models (LLMs). However, serving long-context LLMs comes with significant inference costs due to the high memory overhead of the key-value (KV) cache.…
Many sparse attention mechanisms such as Neighborhood Attention have typically failed to consistently deliver speedup over the self attention baseline. This is largely due to the level of complexity in attention infrastructure, and the…
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)…
Linear RNNs with gating recently demonstrated competitive performance compared to Transformers in language modeling. Although their linear compute scaling in sequence length offers theoretical runtime advantages over Transformers, realizing…
In Diffusion Transformer (DiT) models, particularly for video generation, attention latency is a major bottleneck due to the long sequence length and the quadratic complexity. We find that attention weights can be separated into two parts:…
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…
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…
The computational burden of attention in long-context language models has motivated two largely independent lines of work: sparse attention mechanisms that reduce complexity by attending to selected tokens, and gated attention variants that…
The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) faces a critical bottleneck when handling lengthy inputs: the prohibitive memory footprint of the Key Value (KV) cache. To address this bottleneck, the token pruning paradigm leverages…
Long-sequence processing is a critical capability for modern large language models. However, the self-attention mechanism in the standard Transformer architecture faces severe computational and memory bottlenecks when processing long…
The quadratic cost of attention limits the scalability of long-context LLMs, especially under limited hardware memory budgets. While attention is often sparse, existing static sparse methods cannot adapt to task- or input-dependent…
Decoding throughput improvements from larger inference batches are limited by GPU memory, which is largely consumed by the key-value (KV) cache. Prior training-free KV cache offloading alleviates this by keeping redundant context on the CPU…
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…
Modern large language models increasingly require long contexts for reasoning and multi-document tasks, but attention's quadratic complexity creates a severe computational bottleneck. We present Block-Sparse FlashAttention (BSFA), a drop-in…
Transformer models rely heavily on the scaled dot-product attention (SDPA) operation, typically implemented as FlashAttention. Characterized by its frequent interleaving of matrix multiplications and softmax operations, FlashAttention fails…
The Transformer architecture, underpinned by the Multi-Head Attention (MHA) mechanism, has become the de facto standard for state-of-the-art models in artificial intelligence. However, the quadratic computational complexity of MHA with…
Transformer architectures have achieved remarkable success in various domains. While efficient alternatives to Softmax Attention have been widely studied, the search for more expressive mechanisms grounded in theoretical insight-even at…
Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) set the state of the art in visual generation, yet their quadratic self-attention cost fundamentally limits scaling to long token sequences. Recent Top-K sparse attention approaches reduce the computation of…