arXiv AI

SPARTA: A Sparse Ternary LLM Accelerator with Adaptive Attention and Unified Datapath for Long-Context Edge Inference

SPARTA is a sparse ternary LLM accelerator designed for long‑context inference on edge devices. It combines a phase‑aware sparse dataflow, a unified compute fabric that maps ternary SpMM/SpMV and bit‑serial attention onto shared processing elements, and an adaptive two‑stage attention engine that reduces KV‑cache traffic. The design achieves significant reductions in KV traffic (4.1‑4.8× over full attention) and outperforms NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin and AMD Ryzen 7 9700X in generation throughput and energy efficiency, while also surpassing other accelerators in throughput, energy, and area efficiency.

arXiv AI
Oct 12

DeltaLLM: Delta-Key Sparse Attention for Edge LLMs

DeltaLLM is a training‑free framework that accelerates on‑device large language model inference by introducing delta‑key sparse attention and a vectorized structured sparse online softmax. It reuses delta keys across query heads, preserves exact attention near the diagonal while approximating non‑local regions, and exploits hardware‑friendly sparsity with a specialized vector‑processor architecture. Experiments on BitNet‑b1.58‑2B‑4T and LLaMA3.2‑1B‑Instruct show up to 60% delta‑key sparsity, 63% structured attention‑score sparsity, and a 1.62× speedup on the KV260 FPGA with minimal accuracy loss.

By Jiawen Qi, Jiayu Liu, Chang Gao, Zhaochun Ren, Qinyu Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
4d ago

AMMA: A Multi-Chiplet Memory-Centric Architecture for Low-Latency 1M Context Attention Serving

AMMA is a multi‑chiplet, memory‑centric architecture designed to reduce latency in large‑context attention for language models. It replaces GPU compute dies with HBM‑PNM cubes, doubling memory bandwidth and employing a logic‑die microarchitecture, two‑level hybrid parallelism, and a reordered collective flow to minimize communication overhead. Design‑space exploration and evaluations show AMMA achieves 15.5× lower attention latency and 6.9× lower energy consumption compared with the NVIDIA H100.

By Zhongkai Yu, Haotian Ye, Chenyang Zhou, Ohm Rishabh Venkatachalam, Zaifeng Pan, Zhengding Hu, Junsung Kim, Won Woo Ro, Po-An Tsai, Shuyi Pei, Yangwook Kang, Yufei Ding
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 9

QUILT: Rethinking Sparse-Attention Prefill through Shared Query Execution

The paper introduces QUILT, a new sparse‑attention execution mechanism that jointly processes neighboring queries to reuse shared key‑value (KV) entries, thereby reducing redundant memory traffic and computation. QUILT employs Shift‑and‑Compare Set Decomposition (SCSD) to convert irregular set operations into regular data‑parallel primitives and pipelines this with attention computation to hide overhead. The approach includes cascaded sharing across multiple granularities and a tile‑aware strategy that balances sharing with hardware utilization, achieving up to 55.1% lower kernel latency and 36.8% faster time‑to‑first‑token on LongBench benchmarks with negligible accuracy loss.

By Zhenduo Zhao, Qihui Zhou, Mingcong Song, Zhiyi Chen, Chuangguan Ye, Fengfan Hou, Zequn Gong, Jing Li, Hongjie Si, Guoping Long
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 28

INTRA: Interleaved Non-contiguous Token spaRse Attention

The paper introduces INTRA, a hardware‑aware static sparse attention mechanism that interleaves non‑contiguous token groups to enable efficient long‑range communication while reducing quadratic cost. INTRA uses Scatter and Gather layers to create short mediated paths across layers, and a FlashAttention‑style kernel computes structured indices at runtime for dense packing of selected tokens. Experiments on an A100 GPU show significant speedups—up to 8.4× over MoBA and 10.4× over density‑constrained NSA—while maintaining or improving image quality and long‑context performance on models like FLUX.1‑dev and LLaMA‑3.1‑8B.

By Yuxuan Xia, Wenbo Lu, Shaoyi Zheng, Shengjie Wang
arXiv AI
Jun 4

Stochastic Sparse Attention for Memory-Bound Inference

arXiv:2605. 01910v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autoregressive decoding becomes bandwidth-limited at long contexts, as generating each token requires reading all $n_k$ key and value vectors from KV cache.

By Kyle Lee, Corentin Delacour, Kevin Callahan-Coray, Kyle Jiang, Can Yaras, Samet Oymak, Tathagata Srimani, Kerem Y. Camsari