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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-$k$…

The growing demand for long-context inference capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) has intensified the computational and memory bottlenecks inherent to the self-attention mechanism. To address this challenge, we introduce BLASST, a…

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

As Large Language Models (LLMs) scale to longer context windows, the computational cost of attention mechanisms, which traditionally grows quadratically with input length, presents a critical challenge for real-time and memory-constrained…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-10 James Vo

Recent advance in sparse attention mechanisms has demonstrated strong potential for reducing the computational cost of long-context training and inference in large language models (LLMs). Native Sparse Attention (NSA), one state-of-the-art…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Ran Yan , Youhe Jiang , Zhuoming Chen , Haohui Mai , Beidi Chen , Binhang Yuan

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Wentao Ni , Kangqi Zhang , Zhongming Yu , Oren Nelson , Mingu Lee , Hong Cai , Fatih Porikli , Jongryool Kim , Zhijian Liu , Jishen Zhao

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Kan Zhu , Tian Tang , Qinyu Xu , Yile Gu , Zhichen Zeng , Rohan Kadekodi , Liangyu Zhao , Ang Li , Arvind Krishnamurthy , Baris Kasikci

Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) on edge devices remains challenging due to their quadratically increasing computations with the sequence length. Existing studies for dynamic attention pruning are designed for hardware with massively…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Jiawen Qi , Chang Gao , Zhaochun Ren , Qinyu Chen

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

Block-wise diffusion language models (DLMs) generate multiple tokens in any order, offering a promising alternative to the autoregressive decoding pipeline. However, they still remain bottlenecked by memory-bound attention in long-context…

Large language models spend most of their inference cost on attention over long contexts, yet empirical behavior suggests that only a small subset of tokens meaningfully contributes to each query. We formalize this phenomenon by modeling…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Vashista Nobaub

Self-attention has recently been adopted for a wide range of sequence modeling problems. Despite its effectiveness, self-attention suffers from quadratic compute and memory requirements with respect to sequence length. Successful approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Aurko Roy , Mohammad Saffar , Ashish Vaswani , David Grangier

Transformer-based language models have found many diverse applications requiring them to process sequences of increasing length. For these applications, the causal self-attention -- which is the only component scaling quadratically w.r.t.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-05 Matteo Pagliardini , Daniele Paliotta , Martin Jaggi , François Fleuret

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) excel in natural language processing tasks by capturing long-range dependencies through self-attention mechanisms. However, long-context modeling faces significant computational inefficiencies…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Shuhai Zhang , Zeng You , Yaofo Chen , Zhiquan Wen , Qianyue Wang , Zhijie Qiu , Yuanqing Li , Mingkui Tan

Gating mechanisms have been widely utilized, from early models like LSTMs and Highway Networks to recent state space models, linear attention, and also softmax attention. Yet, existing literature rarely examines the specific effects of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Zihan Qiu , Zekun Wang , Bo Zheng , Zeyu Huang , Kaiyue Wen , Songlin Yang , Rui Men , Le Yu , Fei Huang , Suozhi Huang , Dayiheng Liu , Jingren Zhou , Junyang Lin

Efficient long-context modeling remains a critical challenge for natural language processing (NLP), as the time complexity of the predominant Transformer architecture scales quadratically with the sequence length. While state-space models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Zhihao Zhan , Jianan Zhao , Zhaocheng Zhu , Jian Tang

Scaling Transformers to ultra-long contexts is bottlenecked by the $O(n^2 d)$ cost of self-attention. Existing methods reduce this cost along the sequence axis through local windows, kernel approximations, or token-level sparsity, but these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Yan Xie , Tiansheng Wen , Tangda Huang , Bo Chen , Chenyu You , Stefanie Jegelka , Yifei Wang

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

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