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: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
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:2607. 16213v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) generate text autoregressively, relying on a key-value (KV) cache whose memory footprint grows linearly with context length, creating a major bottleneck.
By Soumia Bouyahiaoui, Manel Kara laouar, Aicha Boutorh, Mohamed Hadj Ameur
arXiv:2607. 24331v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As the inference phase of Large Language Models (LLMs) requires handling long context windows, the Key-Value (KV) cache initially appears to address this challenge but eventually becomes a significant bottleneck as the context window continues to grow.
By Tan T. Nguyen, Quan V. Dang
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: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).
By Ran Yan, Youhe Jiang, Zhuoming Chen, Haohui Mai, Beidi Chen, Binhang Yuan
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.
By Piotr Nawrot, Robert Li, Renjie Huang, Sebastian Ruder, Kelly Marchisio, Edoardo M. Ponti
arXiv:2605.15508v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: The quadratic complexity of attention imposes severe memory and computational bottlenecks on Large Language Model (LLM) inference. This challenge i...
By Jiangnan Yu, Ceyu Xu, Yongji Wu, Yuan Xie
arXiv:2607. 19358v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in long chain-of-thought reasoning models such as DeepSeek-R1 have led to increasingly longer inference context lengths under the test-time scaling paradigm.
By Yu Zhao, Zekun Zhang, Fan Jiang, Bo Zeng, Linlong Xu, Shimin Shan, Yu Liu, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo
arXiv:2606. 31519v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-context Large Language Model inference is severely bottlenecked by the massive Key-Value (KV) cache, yet existing sparse attention methods often suffer from static fixed-budget (Top-k) retrieval or rely on proxy scores that are computationally expensive and biased.
By Wenhao Li, Jinhao Dong, Hailin Zhang, Wenhang Shi, Wei Lu, Xiaoyong Du
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.
By Xiang Hu, Xinyu Wei, Hao Gu, Minshen Zhang, Tian Liang, Huayang Li, Lei Zhu, Yan Wang, Sirui Han, Yushi Bai, Kewei Tu, Haitao Mi, Leo Liang