Related papers: vAttention: Verified Sparse Attention
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…
Accommodating long sequences efficiently in autoregressive Transformers, especially within an extended context window, poses significant challenges due to the quadratic computational complexity and substantial KV memory requirements…
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.…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly prevalent in the field of long-context modeling, however, their inference computational costs have become a critical bottleneck hindering the advancement of tasks such as agents and multimodal…
Long-context video understanding and generation pose a significant computational challenge for Transformer-based video models due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. While existing sparse attention methods employ coarse-grained…
The quadratic complexity of attention remains the central bottleneck in long-context inference for large language models. Prior acceleration methods either sparsify the attention map with structured patterns or permanently evict tokens at…
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…
Long-context LLMs increasingly rely on extended, reusable prefill prompts for agents and domain Q&A, pushing attention and KV-cache to become the dominant decode-time bottlenecks. While sparse attention reduces computation and transfer…
Current hierarchical attention methods, such as NSA and InfLLMv2, select the top-k relevant key-value (KV) blocks based on coarse attention scores and subsequently apply fine-grained softmax attention on the selected tokens. However, the…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Vision-Language Large Models (VLLMs) face significant efficiency challenges when processing high-resolution inputs. The quadratic complexity in attention and autoregressive generation, as well as the constantly growing key value (KV) cache…
We introduce SeerAttention-R, a sparse attention framework specifically tailored for the long decoding of reasoning models. Extended from SeerAttention, SeerAttention-R retains the design of learning attention sparsity through a…
Vision Transformer (ViT) has emerged as a competitive alternative to convolutional neural networks for various computer vision applications. Specifically, ViT multi-head attention layers make it possible to embed information globally across…
Large Language Models (LLMs) with extended context lengths face significant computational challenges during the pre-filling phase, primarily due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. Existing methods typically employ dynamic…
Efficient inference on GPUs using large language models remains challenging due to memory bandwidth limitations, particularly during data transfers between High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and SRAM in attention computations. Approximate…
Attention is the cornerstone of modern Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet its quadratic complexity hinders efficiency and scalability, especially for long-context processing. A promising approach is to leverage sparsity in attention.…