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With the increasing volumes of Large Language Models (LLMs) and the expanding context lengths, attention computation has become a key performance bottleneck in LLM serving. For fast attention computation, recent practices often parallelize…
Block-wise sparse attention offers significant efficiency gains for long-context modeling, yet existing methods often suffer from low selection fidelity and cumulative contextual loss by completely discarding unselected blocks. To address…
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…
Attention serves as the fundamental mechanism for long-context modeling in large language models (LLMs), yet dense attention becomes structurally prohibitive for long sequences due to its quadratic complexity. Consequently, sparse attention…
An efficient attention implementation is essential for large models due to its quadratic time complexity. Fortunately, attention commonly exhibits sparsity, i.e., many values in the attention map are near zero, allowing for the omission of…
Looped Transformers (LT) have emerged as a powerful architecture by iterating their layers multiple times before decoding the final token. However, pairing them with full attention retains quadratic complexity, making them computationally…
The attention mechanism of a transformer has a quadratic complexity, leading to high inference costs and latency for long sequences. However, attention matrices are mostly sparse, which implies that many entries may be omitted from…
Attention is the cornerstone of modern Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet its quadratic complexity hinders efficiency and scalability, especially for long-context processing. A promising approach is to leverage sparsity in attention.…
Transformers are slow and memory-hungry on long sequences, since the time and memory complexity of self-attention are quadratic in sequence length. Approximate attention methods have attempted to address this problem by trading off model…
Gating mechanisms have been widely utilized, from early models like LSTMs and Highway Networks to recent state space models, linear attention, and also softmax attention. Yet, existing literature rarely examines the specific effects of…
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…
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…
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…
The Segment Anything Model (SAM) achieves strong open-vocabulary segmentation, but its ViT-based image encoders dominate inference latency and memory. Existing activation compression methods, such as token merging, reduce the token length…
Sparse attention methods exploit the inherent sparsity in attention to speed up the prefilling phase of long-context inference, mitigating the quadratic complexity of full attention computation. While existing sparse attention methods rely…
Modern large language models increasingly require long contexts for reasoning and multi-document tasks, but attention's quadratic complexity creates a severe computational bottleneck. We present Block-Sparse FlashAttention (BSFA), a drop-in…
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)…
Long-context modeling is crucial for next-generation language models, yet the high computational cost of standard attention mechanisms poses significant computational challenges. Sparse attention offers a promising direction for improving…
In long-context large language model (LLM) inference, the prefill stage dominates computation due to self-attention over the complete input context. Sparse attention significantly reduces self-attention computation by limiting each token's…
Long-sequence processing is a critical capability for modern large language models. However, the self-attention mechanism in the standard Transformer architecture faces severe computational and memory bottlenecks when processing long…