Related papers: Punctuation-aware Hybrid Trainable Sparse Attentio…

Long-context inference in large language models is bottlenecked by the quadratic cost of full attention. Existing efficient alternatives often rely either on native sparse training or on heuristic token eviction, creating an undesirable…

Transformer-based models have become ubiquitous in natural language processing thanks to their large capacity, innate parallelism and high performance. The contextualizing component of a Transformer block is the $\textit{pairwise…

We propose Low-Rank Sparse Attention (Lorsa), a sparse replacement model of Transformer attention layers to disentangle original Multi Head Self Attention (MHSA) into individually comprehensible components. Lorsa is designed to address the…

Transformers are the mainstream of NLP applications and are becoming increasingly popular in other domains such as Computer Vision. Despite the improvements in model quality, the enormous computation costs make Transformers difficult at…

The Transformer architecture, underpinned by the Multi-Head Attention (MHA) mechanism, has become the de facto standard for state-of-the-art models in artificial intelligence. However, the quadratic computational complexity of MHA with…

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.…

Sparse-Linear Attention (SLA) combines sparse and linear attention to accelerate diffusion models and has shown strong performance in video generation. However, (i) SLA relies on a heuristic split that assigns computations to the sparse or…

Sparse Attention is a technique that approximates standard attention computation with sub-quadratic complexity. This is achieved by selectively ignoring smaller entries in the attention matrix during the softmax function computation.…

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…

Chunked prefill has become a widely adopted serving strategy for long-context large language models, but efficient attention computation in this regime remains challenging. Existing sparse attention methods are primarily designed for…

We introduce a simple post-training method that makes transformer attention sparse without sacrificing performance. Applying a flexible sparsity regularisation under a constrained-loss objective, we show on models up to 7B parameters that…

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…

Inference with Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) on long sequences is both costly and slow due to the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism. We introduce Star Attention, a two-phase block-sparse approximation…

The quadratic computational complexity of self-attention remains a fundamental bottleneck for scaling Large Language Models (LLMs) to long contexts, particularly during the pre-filling phase. In this paper, we rethink the causal attention…

Transformer architectures have achieved remarkable success across language, vision, and multimodal tasks, and there is growing demand for them to address in-context compositional learning tasks. In these tasks, models solve the target…

We consider the problem of accurate sparse fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs), that is, fine-tuning pretrained LLMs on specialized tasks, while inducing sparsity in their weights. On the accuracy side, we observe that standard…

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…

This work explores the challenge of building ``Machines that Can Remember'', framing long-term memory as the problem of efficient ultra-long context modeling. We argue that this requires three key properties: \textbf{sparsity},…

As the demand for processing extended textual data grows, the ability to handle long-range dependencies and maintain computational efficiency is more critical than ever. One of the key issues for long-sequence modeling using attention-based…

A key advantage of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) over Transformers is their linear computational and space complexity enables faster training and inference for long sequences. However, RNNs are fundamentally unable to randomly access…