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Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant computational bottlenecks during inference due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention mechanisms, particularly as context lengths increase. We introduce SpecAttn, a novel training-free…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Harsh Shah

While the self-attention mechanism has been widely used in a wide variety of tasks, it has the unfortunate property of a quadratic cost with respect to the input length, which makes it difficult to deal with long inputs. In this paper, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-09-30 Xiaoya Li , Yuxian Meng , Mingxin Zhou , Qinghong Han , Fei Wu , Jiwei Li

Due to the auto-regressive nature of current video large language models (Video-LLMs), the inference latency increases as the input sequence length grows, posing challenges for the efficient processing of video sequences that are usually…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Xuan Zhang , Cunxiao Du , Sicheng Yu , Jiawei Wu , Fengzhuo Zhang , Wei Gao , Qian Liu

The attention mechanism is an important reason for the success of transformers. It relies on computing pairwise relations between tokens. To reduce the high computational cost of standard quadratic attention, linear attention has been…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Hanno Ackermann , Hong Cai , Mohsen Ghafoorian , Amirhossein Habibian

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. These capabilities stem primarily from the self-attention mechanism, which enables modeling of long-range…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-05 Zeng You , Yaofo Chen , Shuhai Zhang , Zhijie Qiu , Tingyu Wu , Yingjian Li , Yaowei Wang , Mingkui Tan

Sparse attention offers a promising strategy to extend long-context capabilities in Transformer LLMs, yet its efficiency-accuracy trade-offs remain unclear due to the lack of comprehensive evaluation. We address this gap with the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Piotr Nawrot , Robert Li , Renjie Huang , Sebastian Ruder , Kelly Marchisio , Edoardo M. Ponti

Knowledge tracing (KT) is the problem of predicting students' future performance based on their historical interaction sequences. With the advanced capability of capturing contextual long-term dependency, attention mechanism becomes one of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-25 Shuyan Huang , Zitao Liu , Xiangyu Zhao , Weiqi Luo , Jian Weng

Long-context inference in large language models (LLMs) is bottlenecked by the linear growth of the self-attention key-value (KV) cache. Top-k sparse attention alleviates this by loading only a small fraction of the KV cache, but accurately…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Keqi Deng , Shaoshi Ling , Ruchao Fan , Jinyu Li

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong capabilities across a wide range of complex tasks and are increasingly deployed at scale, placing significant demands on inference efficiency. Prior work typically decomposes inference into…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Junhao Hu , Fangze Li , Mingtao Xu , Feifan Meng , Shiju Zhao , Tiancheng Hu , Ting Peng , Anmin Liu , Wenrui Huang , Chenxu Liu , Ziyue Hua , Tao Xie

The quadratic computational complexity of standard attention mechanisms presents a severe scalability bottleneck for LLMs in long-context scenarios. While hybrid attention mechanisms combining Full Attention (FA) and Sparse Attention (SA)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Quantong Qiu , Zhiyi Hong , Yi Yang , Haitian Wang , Kebin Liu , Qingqing Dang , Juntao Li , Min Zhang

Transformer has achieved great success in NLP. However, the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism in Transformer makes it inefficient in handling long sequences. Many existing works explore to accelerate Transformers by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-03 Chuhan Wu , Fangzhao Wu , Tao Qi , Binxing Jiao , Daxin Jiang , Yongfeng Huang , Xing Xie

Existing sparse attention methods primarily target inference-time acceleration by selecting critical tokens under predefined sparsity patterns. However, they often fail to bridge the training-inference gap and lack the capacity for…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Feng Chen , Yefei He , Shaoxuan He , Yuanyu He , Jing Liu , Lequan Lin , Akide Liu , Zhaoyang Li , Jiyuan Zhang , Zhenbang Sun , Bohan Zhuang , Qi Wu

Transformers' quadratic complexity with respect to the input sequence length has motivated a body of work on efficient sparse approximations to softmax. An alternative path, used by entmax transformers, consists of having built-in exact…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-22 Marcos Treviso , António Góis , Patrick Fernandes , Erick Fonseca , André F. T. Martins

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

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

Long-context agentic workflows have emerged as a defining use case for large language models, making attention efficiency critical for both inference speed and serving cost. Sparse attention addresses this challenge effectively, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Yushi Bai , Qian Dong , Ting Jiang , Xin Lv , Zhengxiao Du , Aohan Zeng , Jie Tang , Juanzi Li

Long-context large language model (LLM) inference has become the norm for today's AI applications. However, it is severely bottlenecked by the increasing memory demands of its KV cache. Previous works have shown that self-speculative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yikang Yue , Yuqi Xue , Jian Huang

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Lin Niu , Xin Luo , Linchuan Xie , Yifu Sun , Guanghua Yu , Jianchen Zhu , S Kevin Zhou

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