Elastic Threshold Attention (ETA) is a trainable attention mechanism that dynamically predicts contextual thresholds from query representations, enabling selective pruning of KV cache tokens during long‑context decoding. By multiplicatively suppressing sub‑threshold logits during training, ETA avoids representation collapse and eliminates localized attention sinks, allowing a 1.45B model to match dense attention performance at roughly 85% training sparsity and 38% active decode density. At inference, a custom Triton kernel achieves up to 2.5× faster decoding on sequences up to 512K tokens, and an offline calibration step can further reduce compute by 27% by freezing per‑head thresholds.
By Themistoklis Haris, Henry Li, Maryam Karimzadehgan
The paper introduces Declarative Attention (DA), a protocol that lets language models explicitly declare which parts of their context to focus on during generation. By partitioning decoding into full-context, region-specific, and recent-output-only modes, the inference engine can skip large portions of the KV cache, dramatically reducing attended tokens. Experiments on 15 long-context tasks with off-the-shelf models show significant savings (52.0% and 31.1% reductions) with only modest accuracy drops that diminish as model size increases.
By Namgyu Ho, Huzama Ahmad, Woosung Koh, Se-Young Yun, Tal Schuster, Cicero Nogueira dos Santos
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:2606. 28876v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-context language models often conflate two different goals: compressing history into an efficient state, and maintaining reliable long-term memory.
By Junyi Zou, Avrova Donz
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:2606. 28876v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study memory-managed long-context attention: explicit bounded memory with a learned query-independent writer, lifecycle control, query-aware reading, calibrated sparse fallback, and frozen-LLM generation from raw evidence.
By Junyi Zou, Avrova Donz
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:2609.39661v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Self-attention gives LLMs fine-grained, query-dependent access to context, but dense token interactions incur quadratic prefill cost and a key--value c...
By Zhentao Tan, Jingyi Shen, Yanbo Li, Yao Liu, Yue Wu, Jieping Ye
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
arXiv:2606. 25156v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Native length extrapolation remain a weakly solvable problem in language modeling due to trade-off balancing between exact retrieval fidelity, long-document likelihood, and inference efficiency.
By Habibullah Akbar
The report introduces A.X K2, a 688‑parameter Mixture‑of‑Experts language model designed for agentic applications. Trained on 8.5 trillion tokens, it surpasses its predecessor A.X K1 by over 30 percentage points on several benchmarks, thanks to a higher‑quality data mix and improved token efficiency. Key innovations include Sparse Gated Attention for efficient long‑context handling, Gated Norm for training stability, and a Think‑Fusion recipe that allows switching between thinking and non‑thinking modes within the same model.
By Cheolseung Baek, Dhammiko Arya, Eunki Kim, Gun Song, Gyoungeun Han, Hyunho Yang, Hyunjun Eun, Jin Kim, Junyoung Park, Juyun Wee, Minki Hong, Minkyung Park, Minsang Kim, Minsoo Kang, SaeRom Kim, Sangjin Kim, Sangyeol Lee, Seojin Lee, Seokhwan Jo, Seokyoung Hong, Seongho Choi, Seonghye Cho, Seongmin Ok, Sereimony Sek, Seungmo Cho, Seungsik Kim, Singon Kim, Sohee Park, Sooyeon Park, Subin Yi, Sungbin Yoon, Sungeun Lee, Sung Jun Cheon, Sungwan Kim, Sunwoo Lee, Tae Yoon Kim, Wonbeom Jang, Yohan Ra, Yong-jin Han, Youngjin Kim, Youngrang Kim, Yujin Kang, Yujin Lee
arXiv:2603. 17484v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Language models struggle to generalize beyond pretraining context lengths, limiting long-horizon reasoning and retrieval.
By Sakshi Choudhary, Aditya Chattopadhyay, Luca Zancato, Elvis Nunez, Matthew Trager, Wei Xia, Stefano Soatto