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Related papers: vAttention: Verified Sparse Attention

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Self-attention dominates the computational and memory cost of long-context LLM inference across both prefill and decode phases. To address this challenge, we introduce Sketch&Walk Attention, a training-free sparse attention method that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Hoang Anh Duy Le , Sahil Joshi , Zeyu Yang , Zhaozhuo Xu , Anshumali Shrivastava

Sparse attention improves LLM inference efficiency by selecting a subset of key-value entries, but at the cost of potential accuracy degradation. In particular, omitting critical KV entries can induce substantial errors in model outputs.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Mohsen Dehghankar , Abolfazl Asudeh

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in long-context tasks such as reasoning, code generation, and multi-turn dialogue. However, inference over extended contexts is bottlenecked by the Key-Value (KV) cache, whose memory…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Seonghwan Choi , Beomseok Kang , Dongwon Jo , Jae-Joon Kim

Long-context decoding in LLMs is IO-bound: each token re-reads an ever-growing KV cache. Prior accelerations cut bytes via compression, which lowers fidelity, or selection/eviction, which restricts what remains accessible, and both can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Jinghan Yao , Sam Adé Jacobs , Walid Krichene , Masahiro Tanaka , Dhabaleswar K Panda

The inference process for large language models is slow and memory-intensive, with one of the most critical bottlenecks being excessive Key-Value (KV) cache accesses. This paper introduces "Double Sparsity," a novel post-training sparse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Shuo Yang , Ying Sheng , Joseph E. Gonzalez , Ion Stoica , Lianmin Zheng

The computational demands of self-attention mechanisms pose a critical challenge for transformer-based video generation, particularly in synthesizing ultra-long sequences. Current approaches, such as factorized attention and fixed sparse…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Qirui Li , Guangcong Zheng , Qi Zhao , Jie Li , Bin Dong , Yiwu Yao , Xi Li

Self-attention in transformer models is an incremental associative memory that maps key vectors to value vectors. One way to speed up self-attention is to employ GPU-compatible vector search algorithms based on standard partitioning methods…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Pierre-Emmanuel Mazaré , Gergely Szilvasy , Maria Lomeli , Francisco Massa , Naila Murray , Hervé Jégou , Matthijs Douze

Transformer-based models have emerged as one of the most widely used architectures for natural language processing, natural language generation, and image generation. The size of the state-of-the-art models has increased steadily reaching…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Rya Sanovar , Srikant Bharadwaj , Renee St. Amant , Victor Rühle , Saravan Rajmohan

Advanced autoregressive (AR) video generation models have improved visual fidelity and interactivity, but the quadratic complexity of attention remains a primary bottleneck for efficient deployment. While existing sparse attention solutions…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Chengtao Lv , Yumeng Shi , Yushi Huang , Ruihao Gong , Shen Ren , Wenya Wang

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

Recently, it has been argued that encoder-decoder models can be made more interpretable by replacing the softmax function in the attention with its sparse variants. In this work, we introduce a novel, simple method for achieving sparsity in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-10-07 Biao Zhang , Ivan Titov , Rico Sennrich

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…

The quadratic complexity of attention imposes severe memory and computational bottlenecks on Large Language Model (LLM) inference. This challenge is particularly acute for emerging agentic applications that require processing multi-million…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Ceyu Xu , Jiangnan Yu , Yongji Wu , Yuan Xie

As software projects rapidly evolve, software artifacts become more complex and defects behind get harder to identify. The emerging Transformer-based approaches, though achieving remarkable performance, struggle with long code sequences due…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-09-13 Xueqi Yang , Mariusz Jakubowski , Li Kang , Haojie Yu , Tim Menzies

Large language models (LLMs) have driven significant advancements across diverse NLP tasks, with long-context models gaining prominence for handling extended inputs. However, the expanding key-value (KV) cache size required by Transformer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Lijie Yang , Zhihao Zhang , Zhuofu Chen , Zikun Li , Zhihao Jia

We present Top-Theta (Top-$\theta$) Attention, a training-free method for sparsifying transformer attention during inference. Our key insight is that static, per-head thresholds can be calibrated to retain the desired constant number of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-25 Konstantin Berestizshevsky , Renzo Andri , Lukas Cavigelli

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

Irregularly sampled time series with substantial missing observations are common in healthcare and sensor networks. We introduce SDE-Attention, a family of SDE-RNNs equipped with channel-level attention on the latent pre-RNN state,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Yuting Fang , Qouc Le Gia , Flora Salim

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

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