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The quadratic computational cost of the self-attention mechanism is a primary challenge in scaling Transformer models. While attention sparsity is widely studied as a technique to improve computational efficiency, it is almost universally…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Sagar Gandhi , Vishal Gandhi

Self-attention serves as the core foundation of large-scale transformer pretraining, but its quadratic token interaction cost makes inference expensive. Replacing attention with simpler sequential modules is appealing, yet naive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Yuxin Ren , Maxwell D Collins , Miao Hu , Huanrui Yang

In this paper, we demonstrate that an inherent waveform pattern in the attention allocation of large language models (LLMs) significantly affects their performance in tasks demanding a high degree of context awareness, such as utilizing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Yuhan Chen , Ang Lv , Ting-En Lin , Changyu Chen , Yuchuan Wu , Fei Huang , Yongbin Li , Rui Yan

Long-context inference for Large Language Models (LLMs) is heavily limited by high computational demands. While several existing methods optimize attention computation, they still process the full set of hidden states at each layer,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Lingkun Long , Rubing Yang , Yushi Huang , Desheng Hui , Ao Zhou , Jianlei Yang

Autoregressive Transformers adopted in Large Language Models (LLMs) are hard to scale to long sequences. Despite several works trying to reduce their computational cost, most of LLMs still adopt attention layers between all pairs of tokens…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Sotiris Anagnostidis , Dario Pavllo , Luca Biggio , Lorenzo Noci , Aurelien Lucchi , Thomas Hofmann

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized Natural Language Processing (NLP), but their size creates computational bottlenecks. We introduce a novel approach to create accurate, sparse foundational versions of performant LLMs that…

As large language models scale to longer contexts, loading the growing KV cache during attention computation becomes a critical bottleneck. Previous work has shown that attention computation is dominated by a small subset of tokens. This…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Di Liu , Ruitian Wang , Chen Chen , Mingliang Gong , Yongjie Yuan , Han Zhao , Yu Feng , Quan Chen , Minyi Guo

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Daniel Ohayon , Itay Lamprecht , Itay Hubara , Israel Cohen , Daniel Soudry , Noam Elata

Efficient long-context understanding and reasoning are increasingly vital for large language model (LLM) applications such as multi-turn dialogue and program analysis. However, the core self-attention mechanism scales quadratically with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Siran Liu , Zane Cao , Yongchao He

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

Efficiently processing long sequences with Transformer models usually requires splitting the computations across accelerators via context parallelism. The dominant approaches in this family of methods, such as Ring Attention or DeepSpeed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Ravi Ghadia , Maksim Abraham , Sergei Vorobyov , Max Ryabinin

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

Large language models (LLMs) can solve challenging tasks. However, their inference computation on modern GPUs is highly inefficient due to the increasing number of tokens they must attend to as they generate new ones. To address this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Tian Jin , Wanzin Yazar , Zifei Xu , Sayeh Sharify , Xin Wang

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Bailin Wang , Dan Friedman , Tao Lei , Chong Wang

While Transformer architectures have demonstrated impressive scalability across domains, they continue to face challenges in long-context reasoning, computational efficiency, and structural generalization - largely due to rigid layer…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Haochen You , Baojing Liu

End-to-end spoken language understanding (SLU) systems benefit from pretraining on large corpora, followed by fine-tuning on application-specific data. The resulting models are too large for on-edge applications. For instance, BERT-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-06-30 Pu Wang , Hugo Van hamme

Sparse attention reduces the quadratic complexity of full self-attention but faces two challenges: (1) an attention gap, where applying sparse attention to full-attention-trained models causes performance degradation due to train-inference…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Zhenyi Shen , Junru Lu , Lin Gui , Jiazheng Li , Yulan He , Di Yin , Xing Sun

The long-context capability of the Large Language Models (LLM) has made significant breakthroughs, but the maximum supported context length in length extrapolation remains a critical bottleneck limiting their practical applications. The…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-20 Xiaoran Liu , Ruixiao Li , Qipeng Guo , Zhigeng Liu , Yuerong Song , Kai Lv , Hang Yan , Linlin Li , Qun Liu , Xipeng Qiu

LLMs have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in understanding tasks but continue to struggle with long-context comprehension, particularly with content located in the middle of extensive inputs. This limitation, known as the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-03 James Begin , Namit Agrawal , Eshan Singh , Yicheng Fu , Sean O'Brien , Vasu Sharma , Kevin Zhu

The computational demands of self-attention mechanisms pose a critical challenge for transformer-based video generation, particularly in synthesizing ultra-long sequences. Current approaches, such as factorized attention and fixed sparse…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Qirui Li , Guangcong Zheng , Qi Zhao , Jie Li , Bin Dong , Yiwu Yao , Xi Li