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Large language models (LLMs) face significant challenges in processing long contexts due to the linear growth of the key-value (KV) cache and quadratic complexity of self-attention. Existing approaches address these bottlenecks separately:…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Zeng You , Yaofo Chen , Qiuwu Chen , Ying Sun , Shuhai Zhang , Yingjian Li , Yaowei Wang , Mingkui Tan

Scaling inference for large language models (LLMs) is increasingly constrained by limited GPU memory, especially due to growing key-value (KV) caches required for long-context generation. While existing approaches offload KV caches to CPU…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Weishu Deng , Yujie Yang , Peiran Du , Lingfeng Xiang , Zhen Lin , Chen Zhong , Song Jiang , Hui Lu , Jia Rao

This paper proposes Block-Filtered Long-Context Attention (BFLA), a training-free sparse prefill attention mechanism for long-context inference. BFLA adopts a two-stage design. In Stage 1, query and key sequences are compressed into coarse…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-13 Chong Wu , Zhenan Feng , Renjie Xu , Houwang Zhang , Jiawang Cao , Maolin Che , Wenbo Zhu , Hong Yan

Long-context understanding is crucial for many NLP applications, yet transformers struggle with efficiency due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. Sparse attention methods alleviate this cost but often impose static, predefined…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Hanzhi Zhang , Heng Fan , Kewei Sha , Yan Huang , Yunhe Feng

Long-context inference in LLMs faces the dual challenges of quadratic attention complexity and prohibitive KV cache memory. While token-level sparse attention offers superior accuracy, its indexing overhead is costly; block-level methods…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Yuxuan Hu , Jianchao Tan , Jiaqi Zhang , Wen Zan , Pingwei Sun , Yifan Lu , Yerui Sun , Yuchen Xie , Xunliang Cai , Jing Zhang

Accelerating large language model (LLM) inference is critical for real-world deployments requiring high throughput and low latency. Contextual sparsity, where each token dynamically activates only a small subset of the model parameters,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Susav Shrestha , Brad Settlemyer , Nikoli Dryden , Narasimha Reddy

The quadratic cost of attention limits the scalability of long-context LLMs, especially under limited hardware memory budgets. While attention is often sparse, existing static sparse methods cannot adapt to task- or input-dependent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Siheng Xiong , Joe Zou , Faramarz Fekri , Yae Jee Cho

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…

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.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Feiyu Yao , Qian Wang

The efficiency of long-video inference remains a critical bottleneck, mainly due to the dense computation in the prefill stage of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). Existing methods either compress visual embeddings or apply sparse attention…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Yuxiang Huang , Mingye Li , Xu Han , Chaojun Xiao , Weilin Zhao , Ao Sun , Ziqi Yuan , Hao Zhou , Fandong Meng , Zhiyuan Liu

Large language models (LLMs) now support extremely long context windows, but the quadratic complexity of vanilla attention results in significantly long Time-to-First-Token (TTFT) latency. Existing approaches to address this complexity…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-04 Qianchao Zhu , Jiangfei Duan , Chang Chen , Siran Liu , Guanyu Feng , Xin Lv , Xiao Chuanfu , Dahua Lin , Chao Yang

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable potential in processing long sequences and complex reasoning tasks, yet efficiently serving these models remains challenging due to the quadratic computational complexity of attention in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Shang Yang , Junxian Guo , Haotian Tang , Qinghao Hu , Guangxuan Xiao , Jiaming Tang , Yujun Lin , Zhijian Liu , Yao Lu , Song Han

Large Language Models (LLMs) with extended context lengths face significant computational challenges during the pre-filling phase, primarily due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. Existing methods typically employ dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Yu Zhang , Dong Guo , Fang Wu , Guoliang Zhu , Dian Ding , Yiming Zhang

As the length of input text increases, the key-value (KV) cache in LLMs imposes prohibitive GPU memory costs and limits long-context inference on resource constrained devices. Existing approaches, such as KV quantization and pruning, reduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Tenghui Li , Guoxu Zhou , Xuyang Zhao , Yuning Qiu , Qibin Zhao

Large Language Models (LLMs) face efficiency bottlenecks due to the quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism when processing long contexts. Sparse attention methods offer a promising solution, but existing approaches often suffer…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Lida Chen , Dong Xu , Chenxin An , Xintao Wang , Yikai Zhang , Jiangjie Chen , Zujie Liang , Feng Wei , Jiaqing Liang , Yanghua Xiao , Wei Wang

Long-context inference increasingly operates over CPU-resident KV caches, either because decoding-time KV states exceed GPU memory capacity or because disaggregated prefill-decode systems place KV data in host memory. Although block-sparse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Feiyu Yao , Zhixiong Niu , Xiaqing Li , Yongqiang Xiong , Juan Fang , Qian Wang

Deploying long-context large language models (LLMs) is essential but poses significant computational and memory challenges. Caching all Key and Value (KV) states across all attention heads consumes substantial memory. Existing KV cache…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Guangxuan Xiao , Jiaming Tang , Jingwei Zuo , Junxian Guo , Shang Yang , Haotian Tang , Yao Fu , Song Han

While long-context inference is crucial for advancing large language model (LLM) applications, its prefill speed remains a significant bottleneck. Current approaches, including sequence parallelism strategies and compute reduction through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Yuxiang Huang , Mingye Li , Xu Han , Chaojun Xiao , Weilin Zhao , Sun Ao , Hao Zhou , Jie Zhou , Zhiyuan Liu , Maosong Sun

Transformers are considered one of the most important deep learning models since 2018, in part because it establishes state-of-the-art (SOTA) records and could potentially replace existing Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Despite the remarkable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-23 Hongwu Peng , Shaoyi Huang , Shiyang Chen , Bingbing Li , Tong Geng , Ang Li , Weiwen Jiang , Wujie Wen , Jinbo Bi , Hang Liu , Caiwen Ding

Long contexts improve capabilities of large language models but pose serious hardware challenges: compute and memory footprints grow linearly with sequence length. Particularly, the decoding phase continuously accesses massive KV cache,…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Wang Fan , Wei Cao , Xi Zha , Kedi Ma , MingQian Sun , Jialin Chen , Fengzhe Zhang , Fan Zhang