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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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…