arXiv:2608. 01536v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on sparsity to reduce inference cost, but most prior work targets a single sparsity source-either weight or activation-and optimizes for batched multi-user inference.
By Ruokai Yin, Priyadarshini Panda
arXiv:2607. 08786v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: With the growing deployment of large language models (LLMs), LLM inference cost has become a key challenge.
By Tao Lu, Haoyu Wang, Zonghui Wang, Keshen Xiang, Jiaheng Zhang, Wenzhi Chen
arXiv:2607. 21985v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The increasing deployment of large language models (LLMs) has magnified the computational and memory bottlenecks of autoregressive decoding, where low compute intensity and bandwidth-bound kernels dominate inference cost.
By Jinhyeok Kim, Yejoon Lee, Jaeyoung Do
The paper introduces a hardware-software co‑design framework that compresses Mixture‑of‑Experts (MoE) model weights into low‑precision, hardware‑native sparse representations, enabling efficient execution on Sparse Tensor Cores (SpTCs). By relaxing discrete support selection through continuous reparameterization, the method jointly optimizes quantized weights and supports a router‑weighted reconstruction objective, achieving up to 4.35 percentage‑point gains in joint sparse‑quantization accuracy while retaining 96.09% of the original model’s performance. A custom grouped sparse GEMM kernel further boosts inference speed, outperforming NVIDIA’s baseline by up to 1.65× and reducing latency by up to 4.03× on B200 GPUs.
By Kwanhee Lee, Namhoon Lee, Dan Alistarh
arXiv:2606. 10445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Semi-structured 2:4 sparsity is widely supported by modern accelerators, providing up to a 2x theoretical speedup.
By Jaeseong Lee, Seung-won Hwang, Samyam Rajbhandari
Semi-structured 2:4 sparsity is widely supported by modern accelerators, providing up to a 2x theoretical speedup. However, its strict 50% sparsity constraint often causes non-negligible accuracy degradation under post-training pruning.
arXiv:2607. 25504v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-grained weight pruning and activation sparsification have emerged as effective approaches for reducing the compute and memory cost of inference for Transformer models.
By Bowen Wang, Chi Zhang, Diyou Shen, Renzo Andri, Navaneeth Kunhi Purayil, Luca Benini
arXiv:2608. 05033v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse matrix kernels are fundamental to scientific computing, graph analytics, and machine learning.
By Shiyang Li, Guangyan Sun, Jinwei Tang, Yanzhi Wang, Mingyi Hong, Caiwen Ding
The paper addresses the problem of non‑deterministic outputs from large language models (LLMs) when run on different GPU architectures, caused by floating‑point non‑associativity and hardware‑dependent kernel choices. It proposes a set of fixed‑configuration fused‑upcast GEMM kernels that load 16‑bit weights, upcast to FP32, and perform IEEE‑754 compliant reductions in a problem‑shape‑dependent order, ensuring identical linear‑layer outputs across NVIDIA Ampere, Ada, and Hopper GPUs. The new approach achieves 1.17–3.1× faster end‑to‑end performance than existing solutions and halves weight‑memory traffic while maintaining cross‑architecture reproducibility.
By Liam Cooper, Shinnung Jeong, Hyeran Jeon, Jeffrey Young, Hyesoon Kim
SparseDitto is an agentic sparse compilation framework that jointly synthesizes representation, execution schedule, and hardware mapping for sparse matrix computations on GPUs. It uses structural analysis, a learned template-ranking prior, and LLM-guided lowering to generate CUDA code, with target-GPU profiling refining the plan. The framework supports multiple operators such as SpMV, SpMM, and SpGEMM, adapts to different hardware, and achieves significant speedups over cuSPARSE, including up to 146.61× on certain matrices and 3.39× acceleration for full-batch GCN training.
By Shiyang Li, Guangyan Sun, Jinwei Tang, Yanzhi Wang, Mingyi Hong, Caiwen Ding
STAPLE is a method that integrates static sparse memory into pretrained language models by adding token‑indexed embeddings as a residual pathway while preserving the original feed‑forward network. On the OLMo‑2 1B and 7B models, STAPLE outperforms dense training and other static sparse baselines, improving benchmark scores by up to 4.27 points and achieving faster decoding with less GPU memory and energy usage. The approach demonstrates that large pretrained models can be expanded efficiently without costly sparse pretraining from scratch.
By Ranajoy Sadhukhan, Euijin Hong, Sheng Cao, Zechun Liu, Shuowei Jin, Sha Li, Changlong Yu, Xin Liu, Qin Lu, Zhenyu Shi, Priyanka Nigam, Beidi Chen
arXiv:2603. 29002v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern large language models (LLMs) increasingly depends on efficient long-context processing and generation mechanisms, including sparse attention, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and compressed contextual memory, to support complex reasoning.
By Zifan He, Rui Ma, Yizhou Sun, Jason Cong