arXiv AI

Stem: Rethinking Causal Information Flow in Sparse Attention

arXiv:2603. 06274v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The quadratic computational complexity of self-attention remains a fundamental bottleneck for scaling Large Language Models (LLMs) to long contexts, particularly during the pre-filling phase.

arXiv AI
Jul 21

Lil: Less is Less When Applying Post-Training Sparse-Attention Algorithms in Long-Decode Stage

arXiv:2601. 03043v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: 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.

By Junhao Hu, Fangze Li, Mingtao Xu, Feifan Meng, Shiju Zhao, Tiancheng Hu, Ting Peng, Anmin Liu, Wenrui Huang, Chenxu Liu, Ziyue Hua, Tao Xie
arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

Scaling Parameter and Context in Attention: Native Sparse Attention from Mixture-of-Head

The paper introduces NAMOH, a native sparse attention mechanism that activates only a subset of heads per token, allowing each head to attend to a limited subsequence of tokens. By scaling the number of heads while keeping the active heads per token fixed, the method shortens head histories and reduces key‑value access without increasing overall storage. Experiments demonstrate that NAMOH can outperform fully activated models with the same parameter count and enable more efficient long‑context inference than smaller dense models.

By Zizhuo Fu, Runsheng Wang, Meng Li
arXiv Computation and Language
4d ago

Selecting What Matters: Semantic Compression-Guided Selective Pooling for Long-Context Embeddings

The paper introduces SCSP, a training‑free framework that improves long‑context embeddings by selectively pooling informative tokens. SCSP partitions documents into sentence‑aware chunks, adds a semantic compression prompt to each chunk, and uses prompt‑isolated attention masks to estimate token importance. The selected tokens’ intermediate‑layer representations are aggregated to form the final embedding, yielding consistent performance gains across zero‑shot and fine‑tuned models on long‑context benchmarks.

By Zifeng Cheng, Jie Zheng, Zhiwei Jiang, Shuwen Wang, Fei Shen, Shiping Ge, Qing Gu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 10

Express Language Modeling

arXiv:2606. 10944v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a new tool, Express, for converting a non-causal attention approximation into a causal approximation with matching approximation guarantees.

By Albert Gong, Annabelle Michael Carrell, Raaz Dwivedi, Lester Mackey
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

CompKV: Compensation-Aware KV Selection for Long-Context LLM Inference

CompKV introduces a compensation‑aware sparse attention framework for long‑context LLM inference. It partitions tokens into blocks and optimizes token selection to minimize the error introduced by block‑level mean compensation, using compact block‑level statistics. Experiments on RULER and LongBench‑Pro show CompKV outperforms other sparse baselines and achieves up to a 6.85× speedup over full attention.

By Zhen Huang, Ruizhe Yao, Danyi Liu, Xinrui Chen, Shuwei Li, Siru Zhong, Zijian Cao, Yushan Lai, Mingming Guo, Weijie Zheng, Haohuan Fu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

Attention Routing Stabilizes Early: Working-Set Inference for Recurrent Language Models

The paper investigates how attention dynamics evolve across recurrent depth in language models, finding that attention support stabilizes early while hidden states and outputs take longer. It proposes WISE, a training‑free method that uses full attention in early steps and then reuses the discovered sparse working set for later steps, preserving performance on multi‑hop QA tasks. Experiments show that WISE maintains quality up to 2K context, offers measurable speedups, and highlights the importance of recurrent discovery of attention support.

By Ke Wan, Chen Chen
arXiv AI
Jun 8

RePo: Language Models with Context Re-Positioning

arXiv:2512. 14391v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In-context learning is fundamental to modern Large Language Models (LLMs); however, prevailing architectures impose a rigid and fixed contextual structure by assigning linear or constant positional indices.

By Huayang Li, Tianyu Zhao, Deng Cai, Richard Sproat