English
Related papers

Related papers: vAttention: Verified Sparse Attention

200 papers

Attention mechanisms have been widely applied in the Visual Question Answering (VQA) task, as they help to focus on the area-of-interest of both visual and textual information. To answer the questions correctly, the model needs to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-09-20 Tingting Qiao , Jianfeng Dong , Duanqing Xu

Large language models (LLMs) with long context windows have gained significant attention. However, the KV cache, stored to avoid re-computation, becomes a bottleneck. Various dynamic sparse or TopK-based attention approximation methods have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-19 Zhuoming Chen , Ranajoy Sadhukhan , Zihao Ye , Yang Zhou , Jianyu Zhang , Niklas Nolte , Yuandong Tian , Matthijs Douze , Leon Bottou , Zhihao Jia , Beidi Chen

Efficient inference is critical for long-context language models, where attention computation and KV-cache access dominate the cost. Recent work RAT+, introduces a recurrence-augmented attention backbone that enables flexible dilated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Xiuying Wei , Caglar Gulcehre

In long-context large language model (LLM) inference, the prefill stage dominates computation due to self-attention over the complete input context. Sparse attention significantly reduces self-attention computation by limiting each token's…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Rakshith Jayanth , Viktor Prasanna

Efficient long-context understanding and reasoning are increasingly vital for large language model (LLM) applications such as multi-turn dialogue and program analysis. However, the core self-attention mechanism scales quadratically with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Siran Liu , Zane Cao , Yongchao He

Recently, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising technique for interpreting activations in foundation models by disentangling features into a sparse set of concepts. However, identifying the optimal level of sparsity for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Dongsheng Wang , Jinsen Zhang , Dawei Su , Hui Huang

Self-attention is a method of encoding sequences of vectors by relating these vectors to each-other based on pairwise similarities. These models have recently shown promising results for modeling discrete sequences, but they are non-trivial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-06-19 Matthias Sperber , Jan Niehues , Graham Neubig , Sebastian Stüker , Alex Waibel

Long-context inference in large language models (LLMs) is increasingly constrained by the KV cache bottleneck: memory usage grows linearly with sequence length, while attention computation scales quadratically. Existing approaches address…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Huanxuan Liao , Yixing Xu , Shizhu He , Guanchen Li , Xuanwu Yin , Dong Li , Emad Barsoum , Jun Zhao , Kang Liu

Transformers have revolutionized natural language processing, but their quadratic complexity with respect to sequence length remains a fundamental bottleneck for long-range modeling. While sparse attention mechanisms like RingAttention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Dong Liu , Yanxuan Yu

Large Language Models capable of handling extended contexts are in high demand, yet their inference remains challenging due to substantial Key-Value cache size and high memory bandwidth requirements. Previous research has demonstrated that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Junlin Mu , Hantao Huang , Jihang Zhang , Minghui Yu , Tao Wang , Yidong Li

Attention scales quadratically with sequence length, fundamentally limiting long-context inference. Existing block-granularity sparsification can reduce latency, but coarse blocks impose an intrinsic sparsity ceiling, making further…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Yu Zhang , Songwei Liu , Chenqian Yan , Sheng Lin , Beichen Ning , Fangmin Chen , Xing Wang

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have dominated computer vision for years, due to its ability in capturing locality and translation invariance. Recently, many vision transformer architectures have been proposed and they show promising…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Pichao Wang , Xue Wang , Fan Wang , Ming Lin , Shuning Chang , Hao Li , Rong Jin

We propose SparseContrast, a new framework that merges dynamic sparse attention with contrastive learning for medical imaging, with a focus on chest X-ray disease detection in low-data settings. Traditional contrastive learning methods rely…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Paarth Prasad , Ruchika Malhotra

Scaling Diffusion Transformer (DiT) inference via sequence parallelism is critical for reducing latency in visual generation, but is severely hampered by workload imbalance when applied to models employing block-wise sparse attention. The…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Siqi Chen , Ke Hong , Tianchen Zhao , Ruiqi Xie , Zhenhua Zhu , Xudong Zhang , Yu Wang

Transformers have demonstrated great success in numerous domains including natural language processing and bioinformatics. This success stems from the use of the attention mechanism by these models in order to represent and propagate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Nathaniel Tomczak , Sanmukh Kuppannagari

We introduce Block-attention, an attention mechanism designed to address the increased inference latency and cost in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) scenarios. Traditional approaches often encode the entire context in an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Dongyang Ma , Yan Wang , Lan Tian

The quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms limits the efficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) on long-text tasks. Recently, methods that dynamically estimate block importance have enabled efficient block sparse attention, leading…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Yixuan Wang , Huang He , Siqi Bao , Hua Wu , Haifeng Wang , Qingfu Zhu , Wanxiang Che

In visual generation, the quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms results in high memory and computational costs, especially for longer token sequences required in high-resolution image or multi-frame video generation. To address this,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Tianchen Zhao , Ke Hong , Xinhao Yang , Xuefeng Xiao , Huixia Li , Feng Ling , Ruiqi Xie , Siqi Chen , Hongyu Zhu , Yichong Zhang , Yu Wang

Diffusion Transformers dominate video generation, but the quadratic complexity of attention computation introduces substantial latency. Attention sparsity reduces computational costs by focusing on critical tokens while ignoring…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Xuewen Liu , Zhikai Li , Jing Zhang , Mengjuan Chen , Qingyi Gu

Long-context LLM serving is bottlenecked by the cost of attending over ever-growing KV caches. Dynamic sparse attention promises relief by accessing only a small, query-dependent subset of the KV state per decoding step and extending the KV…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Zihan Zhao , Baotong Lu , Shengjie Lin , Yizou Chen , Jing Liu , Yanqi Zhang , Ziming Miao , Ming-Chang Yang , Haiying Shen , Qi Chen , Fan Yang