Related papers: A Preliminary Study on the Promises and Challenges…

State-of-the-art sparse attention methods for reducing decoding latency fall into two main categories: approximate top-$k$ (and its extension, top-$p$) and recently introduced sampling-based estimation. However, these approaches are…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a pivotal research area, yet the attention module remains a critical bottleneck in LLM inference, even with techniques like KVCache to mitigate redundant computations. While various top-$k$…

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…

Top-$k$ decoding is a widely used method for sampling from LLMs: at each token, only the largest $k$ next-token-probabilities are kept, and the next token is sampled after re-normalizing them to sum to unity. Top-$k$ and other sampling…

As long-context inference becomes central to large language models (LLMs), attention over growing key-value caches emerges as a dominant decoding bottleneck, motivating sparse attention for scalable inference. Fixed-budget top-k sparse…

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…

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…

Long-context inference in large language models (LLMs) is bottlenecked by the linear growth of the self-attention key-value (KV) cache. Top-k sparse attention alleviates this by loading only a small fraction of the KV cache, but accurately…

The proliferation of long-context large language models (LLMs) exposes a key bottleneck: the rapidly expanding key-value cache during decoding, which imposes heavy memory and latency costs. While recent approaches attempt to alleviate this…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have attracted extensive attention due to their remarkable performance across various tasks. However, the substantial computational and memory requirements of LLM inference pose challenges for deployment in…

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success in multi-modal reasoning, but their inference time efficiency remains a significant challenge due to the memory overhead during decoding, especially when the query and…

Large language models have shown remarkable performance across a wide range of language tasks, owing to their exceptional capabilities in context modeling. The most commonly used method of context modeling is full self-attention, as seen in…

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…

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…

The computational difficulties of large language model (LLM) inference remain a significant obstacle to their widespread deployment. The need for many applications to support long input sequences and process them in large batches typically…

As large language models (LLMs) continue to support increasingly longer contexts, the memory demand for key-value (KV) caches during decoding grows rapidly, becoming a critical bottleneck in both GPU memory capacity and PCIe bandwidth.…

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…

In this paper, we demonstrate that an inherent waveform pattern in the attention allocation of large language models (LLMs) significantly affects their performance in tasks demanding a high degree of context awareness, such as utilizing…

Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) in streaming applications such as multi-round dialogue, where long interactions are expected, is urgently needed but poses two major challenges. Firstly, during the decoding stage, caching previous…

We present an approximate attention mechanism named HyperAttention to address the computational challenges posed by the growing complexity of long contexts used in Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent work suggests that in the worst-case…