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Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in long-context tasks such as reasoning, code generation, and multi-turn dialogue. However, inference over extended contexts is bottlenecked by the Key-Value (KV) cache, whose memory…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Seonghwan Choi , Beomseok Kang , Dongwon Jo , Jae-Joon Kim

A significant portion of the energy consumed by Large Language Models (LLMs) arises from their inference processes; hence developing energy-efficient methods for inference is crucial. While several techniques exist for inference…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Soham Poddar , Paramita Koley , Janardan Misra , Sanjay Podder , Navveen Balani , Niloy Ganguly , Saptarshi Ghosh

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…

Language Models (LMs) assign significant attention to the first token, even if it is not semantically important, which is known as attention sink. This phenomenon has been widely adopted in applications such as streaming/long context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Xiangming Gu , Tianyu Pang , Chao Du , Qian Liu , Fengzhuo Zhang , Cunxiao Du , Ye Wang , Min Lin

Sparse attention mechanisms aim to reduce computational overhead with minimal accuracy loss by selectively processing salient tokens. Despite their effectiveness, most methods merely exploit a model's inherent sparsity and thus plateau at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Feng Chen , Yefei He , Lequan Lin , Chenhui Gou , Jing Liu , Bohan Zhuang , Qi Wu

Large vision-language models (VLMs) enable joint processing of text and images. However, incorporating vision data significantly increases the prompt length, resulting in a longer time to first token (TTFT). This bottleneck can be…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Tharun Adithya Srikrishnan , Deval Shah , Timothy Hein , Ahmed Hasssan , Stephen Youn , Steven K. Reinhardt

As Large Language Models (LLMs) scale to million-token contexts, traditional Mechanistic Interpretability techniques for analyzing attention scale quadratically with context length, demanding terabytes of memory beyond 100,000 tokens. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 J Rosser , José Luis Redondo García , Gustavo Penha , Konstantina Palla , Hugues Bouchard

Leveraging attention sparsity to accelerate long-context large language models (LLMs) has been a hot research topic. However, current algorithms such as sparse attention or key-value (KV) cache compression tend to use a fixed budget, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Chaofan Lin , Jiaming Tang , Shuo Yang , Hanshuo Wang , Tian Tang , Boyu Tian , Ion Stoica , Song Han , Mingyu Gao

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in natural language processing and generation, yet their ability to handle long-context input remains constrained by the quadratic complexity of attention computation and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Manlai Liang , Wanyi Huang , Mandi Liu , Huaijun Li , Jinlong Li

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Dhruv Deshmukh , Saurabh Goyal , Nipun Kwatra , Ramachandran Ramjee

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) set the state of the art in visual generation, yet their quadratic self-attention cost fundamentally limits scaling to long token sequences. Recent Top-K sparse attention approaches reduce the computation of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Yifan Zhou , Zeqi Xiao , Tianyi Wei , Shuai Yang , Xingang Pan

In large language model (LLM) serving systems, executing each request consists of two phases: the compute-intensive prefill phase and the memory-intensive decoding phase. To prevent performance interference between the two phases, current…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-03-27 Yunkai Liang , Zhangyu Chen , Pengfei Zuo , Zhi Zhou , Xu Chen , Zhou Yu

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

Long-context LLMs increasingly rely on extended, reusable prefill prompts for agents and domain Q&A, pushing attention and KV-cache to become the dominant decode-time bottlenecks. While sparse attention reduces computation and transfer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Chuxu Song , Zhencan Peng , Jiuqi Wei , Chuanhui Yang

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) enable globally coherent, bidirectional, and controllable text generation, offering advantages over traditional autoregressive LLMs, while scaling to ultra-long sequences remains costly. Many existing…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Wenhu Zhang , Yiming Wu , Huanyu Wang , Yaoyang Liu , Huanzhang Dou , Senqiao Yang , Sitong Wu , Hanbin Zhao , Jiaya Jia

The efficiency of large vision-language models (LVLMs) is constrained by the computational bottleneck of the attention mechanism during the prefill phase and the memory bottleneck of fetching the key-value (KV) cache in the decoding phase,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-12-19 Yefei He , Feng Chen , Jing Liu , Wenqi Shao , Hong Zhou , Kaipeng Zhang , Bohan Zhuang

The high power consumption and latency-sensitive deployments of large language models (LLMs) have motivated efficiency techniques like quantization and sparsity. Contextual sparsity, where the sparsity pattern is input-dependent, is crucial…

Scaling the context length of large language models (LLMs) offers significant benefits but is computationally expensive. This expense stems primarily from the self-attention mechanism, whose $O(N^2)$ complexity with respect to sequence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Xinghao Wang , Pengyu Wang , Dong Zhang , Chenkun Tan , Shaojun Zhou , Zhaoxiang Liu , Shiguo Lian , Fangxu Liu , Kai Song , Xipeng Qiu

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

Reasoning-capable large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on complex tasks but often exhibit overthinking after distillation, generating unnecessarily long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning even for simple inputs and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Feng Luo , Yu-Neng Chuang , Guanchu Wang , Hoang Anh Duy Le , Shaochen Zhong , Hongyi Liu , Jiayi Yuan , Yang Sui , Vladimir Braverman , Vipin Chaudhary , Xia Hu