arXiv:2609.13141v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Post-training attention sparsification reduces the quadratic cumulative attention cost of pretrained Transformers by selecting a small set of context u...
By Zhiwei Li, Lei Zhu, Hao Gu, Xiang Hu, Yan Wang, Haitao Mi, Sirui Han, Leo Liang, Zhijiang Guo
arXiv:2609.30738v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: KV cache eviction methods such as SnapKV and PyramidKV rank tokens solely by mean attention over a small observation window. We study a unified score,...
By Tianfang Xie, Wei Zhu
arXiv:2605. 16928v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Long-context inference in large language models is bottlenecked by the quadratic cost of full attention.
By Yanke Zhou, Yiduo Li, Hanlin Tang, Maohua Li, Kan Liu, Tao Lan, Lin Qu, Yuan Yao, Xiaoxing Ma
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.
By Yufei Xu, Fanxu Meng, Fan Jiang, Yuxuan Wang, Ruijie Zhou, Zhaohui Wang, Jiexi Wu, Zhixin Pan, Xiaojuan Tang, Wenjie Pei, Tongxuan Liu, Di Yin, Xing Sun, Muhan Zhang
The paper examines LLM-based recommendation rerankers that are often evaluated under an oracle protocol, which guarantees the ground-truth item is present in the scored set. Across Amazon datasets, this protocol overestimates realistic NDCG@10 by 92–95% because realistic retrieval only covers 2–19% of relevant items at K=100, creating a recall ceiling that limits any closed-candidate reranker's top‑k NDCG. The authors find that various optimisation strategies—including prompt engineering, model scaling, sequential models, supervised neural rerankers, LoRA fine‑tuning, hybrid retrieval, score‑aware prompting, and LLM+CF fusion—do not significantly improve over a collaborative‑filtering baseline under realistic retrieval, and they propose a Recall‑Aware Evaluation Protocol (RAEP) to better assess rerankers in low‑recall regimes.
By Zhaohui Wang
Block Sparse Flash Attention (BSFA) is a drop‑in replacement for FlashAttention that speeds up long‑context inference by pruning about 50% of computation and memory transfers. It selects the top‑k most important value blocks for each query using exact query‑key similarities and calibrated per‑layer, per‑head thresholds, requiring only a one‑time training‑free calibration. On Llama‑3.1‑8B, BSFA delivers up to 1.13× speedup on LongBench with a 1.1% accuracy drop and up to 1.24× on Needle‑in‑a‑Haystack retrieval with a 1% drop, while the attention kernel itself accelerates by up to 1.38×.
By Daniel Ohayon, Itay Lamprecht, Itay Hubara, Israel Cohen, Daniel Soudry, Noam Elata
arXiv:2609.36835v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Long-context large language model inference is bottlenecked by KV caches that grow linearly with sequence length. This burden is especially severe for...
By Zheyu Shen, Guanhua Wang, Dezhan Tu, Mengchi Zhang, Yanjia Li, Adnan Aziz, Chunqiang Tang, Ang Li
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).
By Alexander Tian, Aditya Ghai, Sanjit Neelam, Zaal Vasania, Akshay Mishra
arXiv:2609. 31093v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scaling language models to long contexts is limited by the quadratic cost of self-attention.
By Bohao Tang, Zhen Qin, Yuqi Pan, Zheng Li, Pengfei Liu
arXiv:2603.02561v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Attention mechanism remains the defining operator in Transformers since it provides expressive global credit assignment, yet its quadratic co...
By Chenghao Zhang, Chao Feng, Yuanhao Pu, Xunyong Yang, Wenhui Yu, Xiang Li, Chunjie Chen, Kaiqiao Zhan
The paper introduces Pre-hoc Sparsity (PrHS), a method that selects key-value (KV) cache entries before attention scoring to avoid posterior bias in large language model inference. By bounding mutual‑information loss through the dropped attention mass, PrHS offers explicit accuracy control and implements three orthogonal selectors across time, depth, and layer. Experiments on LLaMA and Mistral models show that PrHS cuts retrieval overhead by over 90%, achieves higher sparsity than HShare, and delivers significant speedups and reduced FLOPs on NVIDIA A100 GPUs while maintaining near‑dense accuracy.
By Yifei Gao, Lei Wang, Rong-Cheng Tu, Qixin Zhang, Jun Cheng, Dacheng Tao
arXiv:2604. 24432v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Long-context ability, has become one of the most important iteration direction of next-generation Large Language Models, particularly in semantic understanding/reasoning, code agentic intelligence and recommendation system.
By Chenglong Chu, Guorui Zhou, Guowang Zhang, Han Li, Hao Peng, Hongtao Cheng, Hui Wang, Jian Liang, Jiangxia Cao, Kun Gai, Lingzhi Zhou, Lu Ren, Qi Zhang, Ruiming Tang, Ruitao Wang, Xinchen Luo, Yi Su, Zhiyuan Liang, Ziqi Wang, Boyang Ding, Chengru Song, Dunju Zang, Jiao Ou, Jiaxin Deng, Jijun Shi, Jinghao Zhang, Junmin Chen, Lejian Ren, Minxuan Lv, Qianqian Wang, Qigen Hu, Shiyao Wang, Siyang Mao, Tao Wang, Xingmei Wang, Zhixin Ling, Ziming Li, Zixing Zhang