HISA: Efficient Hierarchical Indexing for Fine-Grained Sparse Attention proposes a two-stage hierarchical indexer that replaces the flat token scan used in token-level sparse attention mechanisms like DeepSeek Sparse Attention. The method first performs block-level coarse filtering to discard irrelevant regions, then applies the original token-level indexer only within the retained candidate blocks, preserving the same top-sparse pattern for downstream attention. Benchmarks show HISA achieves significant speedups at 64K context and matches the quality of DeepSeek-V3.2 and GLM-5 without additional training.
arXiv:2605. 16928v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Long-context inference in large language models is bottlenecked by the quadratic cost of full attention.
arXiv:2607. 11976v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Indexer-TopK, the operation to compute the scores and select the top-k candidates, is widely used by sparse attention kernels in large language models and vector retrieval in recommendation systems and vector databases.
arXiv:2606. 13392v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Ultra-long-context capability is becoming indispensable for frontier LLMs: agentic workflows, repository-scale code reasoning, and persistent memory all require the model to jointly attend over hundreds of thousands to millions of tokens, yet the quadratic cost of softmax attention makes this untenable at deployment scale.
arXiv:2607. 09052v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Block sparse attention is a hardware friendly way to alleviate the key-value (KV) cache read bottleneck in large language models (LLMs).
arXiv:2504. 17768v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sparse attention offers a promising strategy to extend long-context capabilities in Transformer LLMs, yet its efficiency-accuracy trade-offs remain unclear due to the lack of comprehensive evaluation.
arXiv:2607. 02980v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scaling modern large language models (LLMs) to long contexts is limited by the quadratic computation cost, and poor length extrapolation of dense attention.
arXiv:2508. 18224v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in sparse attention mechanisms have demonstrated strong potential for reducing the computational cost of long-context training and inference in large language models (LLMs).
CRISP (Cliff-awaRe Input-adaptive Sparse Prefilling) is a new method for long-context LLM inference that replaces costly quadratic attention prefilling with a dynamic, input-adaptive sparse routing scheme. It introduces a structural proxy, C_struct, to directly read routing decisions from the proxy attention map, eliminating the need for pooled matrix multiplication and KL divergence. Additionally, CRISP addresses the post-softmax mass cliff by using a sink-aware threshold based on the noise floor, theoretically reducing background noise accumulation to O(n). Empirical results on InfiniteBench, RULER, and LongBench show that CRISP outperforms existing sparse methods and can match or exceed exact dense attention, achieving up to a 5.30× speedup at 512k tokens and significant gains on retrieval-heavy tasks.
arXiv:2607. 27692v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Top-$K$ sparse attention reduces the cost of Softmax and value aggregation by attending to only a small subset of key--value (KV) entries.
arXiv:2604. 20920v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sparse attention can reduce the cost of long-context inference, but most variants introduce new architectural components.
arXiv:2606. 07703v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-context prefill remains expensive because full/GQA layers still score the historical sequence, even in hybrid models with local, sparse, linear, or recurrent components.
arXiv:2608. 01662v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA) enables efficient long-context modeling through its Lightning Indexer.