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The quadratic complexity of self attention in Transformer based LLMs renders long context inference prohibitively expensive. While Sliding Window Attention (SWA), the simplest sparse attention pattern, offers a linear complexity…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Yijiong Yu , Jiale Liu , Qingyun Wu , Huazheng Wang , Ji Pei

Attention calculation is extremely time-consuming for long-sequence inference tasks, such as text or image/video generation, in large models. To accelerate this process, we developed a low-precision, mathematically-equivalent algorithm…

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) deliver strong long-context processing capability in a non-autoregressive decoding paradigm. However, the considerable computational cost of bidirectional full attention limits the inference…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Lingkun Long , Yushi Huang , Shihao Bai , Ruihao Gong , Jun Zhang , Ao Zhou , Jianlei Yang

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Chao Lou , Zixia Jia , Zilong Zheng , Kewei Tu

Sparse attention reduces the quadratic complexity of full self-attention but faces two challenges: (1) an attention gap, where applying sparse attention to full-attention-trained models causes performance degradation due to train-inference…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Zhenyi Shen , Junru Lu , Lin Gui , Jiazheng Li , Yulan He , Di Yin , Xing Sun

Transformer-based architectures have become the prevailing backbone of large language models. However, the quadratic time and memory complexity of self-attention remains a fundamental obstacle to efficient long-context modeling. To address…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yutao Sun , Zhenyu Li , Yike Zhang , Tengyu Pan , Bowen Dong , Yuyi Guo , Jianyong Wang

As long-context language modeling becomes increasingly important, the cost of maintaining and attending to large Key/Value (KV) caches grows rapidly, becoming a major bottleneck in both training and inference. While prior works such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Dong Liu , Yanxuan Yu , Ben Lengerich , Ying Nian Wu

Attention mechanisms are the core of foundation models, but their quadratic complexity remains a critical bottleneck for scaling. This challenge has driven the development of efficient attention mechanisms, with sparsity emerging as the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Xiaolong Li , Youping Gu , Xi Lin , Weijie Wang , Bohan Zhuang

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,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Yuxuan Hu , Jianchao Tan , Jiaqi Zhang , Wen Zan , Pingwei Sun , Yifan Lu , Yerui Sun , Yuchen Xie , Xunliang Cai , Jing Zhang

Sparse attention, which selectively attends to a subset of tokens in the context was supposed to be efficient. However, its theoretical reduction in FLOPs has rarely translated into wall-clock speed-up over its dense attention counterparts…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Xihui Lin , Yunan Zhang , Suyu Ge , Liliang Ren , Barun Patra , Vishrav Chaudhary , Hao Peng , Xia Song

Efficient long-sequence generation is a critical challenge for Large Language Models. While recent sparse decoding methods improve efficiency, they suffer from KV cache misalignment, where approximation errors accumulate and degrade…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Yutao Sun , Tianzhu Ye , Li Dong , Yuqing Xia , Jian Chen , Yizhao Gao , Shijie Cao , Jianyong Wang , Furu Wei

Exploiting sparsity during long-context inference is key to scaling large language models, as attention dominates the cost of autoregressive decoding. Sparse attention reduces this cost by restricting computation to a subset of tokens, but…

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

Deploying long-context large language models (LLMs) is essential but poses significant computational and memory challenges. Caching all Key and Value (KV) states across all attention heads consumes substantial memory. Existing KV cache…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Guangxuan Xiao , Jiaming Tang , Jingwei Zuo , Junxian Guo , Shang Yang , Haotian Tang , Yao Fu , Song Han

Long-context transformers face significant efficiency challenges due to the quadratic cost of self-attention. However, many modern applications-from multi-turn dialogue to high-resolution vision-require contexts spanning tens of thousands…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Jacob Fein-Ashley , Neelesh Gupta , Rajgopal Kannan , Viktor Prasanna

Recent studies \citep{gur2018gradient,song2024does, wen2024understanding} highlight a fundamental dichotomy in deep learning optimization: Although parameter updates along the top eigendirections of the loss Hessian (Dom-space) capture most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Wenjie Zhou , Bohan Wang , Wei Chen , Xueqi Cheng

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Nirav Koley , Prajwal Singhania , Abhinav Bhatele

Benefiting from the self-attention mechanism, Transformer models have attained impressive contextual comprehension capabilities for lengthy texts. The requirements of high-throughput inference arise as the large language models (LLMs)…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Huizheng Wang , Jiahao Fang , Xinru Tang , Zhiheng Yue , Jinxi Li , Yubin Qin , Sihan Guan , Qize Yang , Yang Wang , Chao Li , Yang Hu , Shouyi Yin

Large language models (LLMs) encounter computational challenges during long-sequence inference, especially in the attention pre-filling phase, where the complexity grows quadratically with the prompt length. Previous efforts to mitigate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Xunhao Lai , Jianqiao Lu , Yao Luo , Yiyuan Ma , Xun Zhou

We introduce LongCat ZigZag Attention (LoZA), which is a sparse attention scheme designed to transform any existing full-attention models into sparse versions with rather limited compute budget. In long-context scenarios, LoZA can achieve…