English

Flux Attention: Context-Aware Hybrid Attention for Efficient LLMs Inference

Machine Learning 2026-04-10 v1 Computation and Language

Abstract

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) offer a potential solution, existing methods typically rely on static allocation ratios that fail to accommodate the variable retrieval demands of different tasks. Furthermore, head-level dynamic sparsity often introduces severe computational load imbalance and synchronization long-tails, which hinder hardware acceleration during autoregressive decoding. To bridge this gap, we introduce Flux Attention, a context-aware framework that dynamically optimizes attention computation at the layer level. By integrating a lightweight Layer Router into frozen pretrained LLMs, the proposed method adaptively routes each layer to FA or SA based on the input context. This layer-wise routing preserves high-fidelity information retrieval while ensuring contiguous memory access, translating theoretical computational reductions into practical wall-clock speedups. As a parameter-efficient approach, our framework requires only 12 hours of training on 8×\timesA800 GPUs. Extensive experiments across multiple long-context and mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that Flux Attention achieves a superior trade-off between performance and inference speed compared with baseline models, with speed improvements of up to 2.8×2.8\times and 2.0×2.0\times in the prefill and decode stages.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.07394,
  title  = {Flux Attention: Context-Aware Hybrid Attention for Efficient LLMs Inference},
  author = {Quantong Qiu and Zhiyi Hong and Yi Yang and Haitian Wang and Kebin Liu and Qingqing Dang and Juntao Li and Min Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.07394},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:59:48.643Z