arXiv Machine Learning

Systolic Linear Attention: Co-Designing Tile-Grouped Gated Delta Attention for TPUs

arXiv AI
Jun 12

MiniMax Sparse Attention

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.

By Xunhao Lai, Weiqi Xu, Yufeng Yang, Qiaorui Chen, Yang Xu, Lunbin Zeng, Xiaolong Li, Haohai Sun, Haichao Zhu, Vito Zhang, Pengyu Zhao
arXiv AI
Jun 19

StreamKL: Fast and Memory-Efficient KL Divergence for Boosting Attention Distillation

arXiv:2606. 20005v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Attention distillation, which trains one attention distribution to match another by minimizing their Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, is widely used in knowledge distillation, model compression, continual learning, and sparse-attention LLM training.

By Guangda Liu, Yiquan Wang, Chengwei Li, Wenhao Chen, Jing Lin, Yiwu Yao, Danning Ke, Wenchao Ding, Jieru Zhao
arXiv Computation and Language
2d ago

FlyWheel: Attention Kernels Built for the TPU

FlyWheel introduces optimized TPU kernels for softmax and linear attention, reducing vector work and improving matrix operand reuse. By overlapping independent computations, FlyWheel achieves up to 4.14× speedups over the RPA kernel and 1.80× over Splash Attention, reaching 81% of peak BF16 throughput on TPU v6e. It also boosts Gated DeltaNet prefill by up to 3.61× and enhances vLLM serving of Qwen3.8-27B prefill throughput by up to 1.56× while preserving accuracy.

By Zishuo Bao, Zeshen Zhang, Linkun Chen, Yucheng Lu
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 15

GQLA: Group-Query Latent Attention for Hardware-Adaptive Decoding

The paper introduces Group-Query Latent Attention (GQLA), a variant of Multi-head Latent Attention that shares group‑sharded up‑projections to enable a joint latent representation and a shardable expanded cache. GQLA supports both MQA‑absorb and GQA execution using the same weights and existing kernels, and roofline analysis shows how absorption trades traffic for computation while GQA shards KV groups. Experiments on DeepSeek‑V3.1‑Base and other models demonstrate that GQLA achieves comparable training losses to MLA, maintains high accuracy after checkpoint conversion, and improves output throughput by up to 35% on eight H20‑3e GPUs, while also allowing larger batch sizes due to a smaller per‑rank cache.

By Fanxu Meng, Zhixin Pan
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
Oct 28

BellowsKV: One Latent for Many Layers, Expanded on Demand

BellowsKV introduces a training‑free approach that maps the hidden states of multiple adjacent layers in a large language model to a single shared latent representation per token, allowing each layer to retrieve its own keys and values via a layer‑specific projection. The method retains the latent at full dimension and offers two compression strategies: BellowsKV‑Quant, which stores the latent at low precision, and BellowsKV‑Evict, which makes a shared eviction decision per block. Experiments on Llama‑3.1‑8B, Mistral‑7B, and Qwen2.5‑7B show that BellowsKV‑Quant preserves about 99% of full‑cache accuracy at 3.6× compression and 97‑98% at 13‑14×, outperforming existing cross‑layer methods that drop to at most 84% accuracy at 16× compression.

By Jiamu Zhang, Hanjie Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

Fixed State, Long Reach: What a Constant-Size Cache Buys Block Diffusion at Scale

The paper investigates how block‑diffusion language models can use a constant‑size cache to enable efficient parallel decoding. By employing sequence mixers that summarize completed blocks into a reusable state and a block‑causal training objective, the authors pretrain three 3B block‑diffusion denoisers (attention, Mamba, and hybrid) on 300 B tokens. The resulting state‑space cache remains O(1) in memory and latency regardless of context length, yielding significant speed‑up and memory savings compared to traditional attention‑based caches, especially at very long sequences.

By Vaibhav Singh, Pierre-Andr\'e No\"el, Torsten Scholak, Eugene Belilovsky, Oleksiy Ostapenko