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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

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Wenhu Zhang , Yiming Wu , Huanyu Wang , Yaoyang Liu , Huanzhang Dou , Senqiao Yang , Sitong Wu , Hanbin Zhao , Jiaya Jia

Efficient inference on GPUs using large language models remains challenging due to memory bandwidth limitations, particularly during data transfers between High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and SRAM in attention computations. Approximate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Nirav Koley , Prajwal Singhania , Abhinav Bhatele

Accommodating long sequences efficiently in autoregressive Transformers, especially within an extended context window, poses significant challenges due to the quadratic computational complexity and substantial KV memory requirements…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Chao Lou , Zixia Jia , Zilong Zheng , Kewei Tu

Attention is a core component of transformer architecture, whether encoder-only, decoder-only, or encoder-decoder model. However, the standard softmax attention often produces noisy probability distribution, which can impair effective…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Dhananjay Ram , Wei Xia , Stefano Soatto

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-24 Tri Dao , Daniel Y. Fu , Stefano Ermon , Atri Rudra , Christopher Ré

As Large Language Models (LLMs) scale to longer context windows, the computational cost of attention mechanisms, which traditionally grows quadratically with input length, presents a critical challenge for real-time and memory-constrained…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-10 James Vo

Scaling Transformers to ultra-long contexts is bottlenecked by the $O(n^2 d)$ cost of self-attention. Existing methods reduce this cost along the sequence axis through local windows, kernel approximations, or token-level sparsity, but these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Yan Xie , Tiansheng Wen , Tangda Huang , Bo Chen , Chenyu You , Stefanie Jegelka , Yifei Wang

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Chuxu Song , Zhencan Peng , Jiuqi Wei , Chuanhui Yang

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…

Sparse attention, which selectively attends to a subset of tokens in the context was supposed to be efficient. However, its theoretical reduction in FLOPs has rarely translated into wall-clock speed-up over its dense attention counterparts…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Xihui Lin , Yunan Zhang , Suyu Ge , Liliang Ren , Barun Patra , Vishrav Chaudhary , Hao Peng , Xia Song

Long-Context Transformer Models (LCTMs) are vital for real-world applications but suffer high computational costs due to attention's quadratic complexity. Block-sparse attention mitigates this by focusing computation on critical regions,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Ruyi Xu , Guangxuan Xiao , Haofeng Huang , Junxian Guo , Song Han

The computational cost of softmax-based attention in transformers limits their applicability to long-context tasks. Adaptive sparsity, of which $\alpha$-entmax attention is an example, offers a flexible data-dependent alternative, but…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Nuno Gonçalves , Marcos Treviso , André F. T. Martins

Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art performance across various tasks, but suffer from a notable quadratic complexity in sequence length due to the attention mechanism. In this work, we propose MonarchAttention -- a novel approach to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Can Yaras , Alec S. Xu , Pierre Abillama , Changwoo Lee , Laura Balzano

Diffusion transformers have achieved remarkable success in high-quality video generation, yet their reliance on spatiotemporal 3D full attention incurs prohibitive computational cost due to the quadratic complexity of attention. Block…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Jie Hu , Zixiang Gao , Yutong He , Kun Yuan

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Weilin Zhao , Zihan Zhou , Zhou Su , Chaojun Xiao , Yuxuan Li , Yanghao Li , Yudi Zhang , Weilun Zhao , Zhen Li , Yuxiang Huang , Ao Sun , Xu Han , Zhiyuan Liu

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

Large language model (LLM) inference demands significant amount of computation and memory, especially in the key attention mechanism. While techniques, such as quantization and acceleration algorithms, like FlashAttention, have improved…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Hao Kang , Srikant Bharadwaj , James Hensman , Tushar Krishna , Victor Ruhle , Saravan Rajmohan

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly prevalent in the field of long-context modeling, however, their inference computational costs have become a critical bottleneck hindering the advancement of tasks such as agents and multimodal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Di Xiu , Hongyin Tang , Bolin Rong , Lizhi Yan , Jingang Wang , Yifan Lu , Xunliang Cai