arXiv Computer Vision

iCATS: Fast Video Generation via Interaction-Aware Sparse Attention and Timestep-Adaptive Sparsity

iCATS introduces a training‑free sparse attention mechanism for Diffusion Transformers that accelerates video generation by reducing computations. It improves importance estimation by clustering query‑key dot‑product interactions and reformulates the objective as a quadratic form for low‑cost computation. The method also adapts sparsity dynamically across denoising timesteps using an SNR‑guided schedule and employs a tail‑merging strategy to enhance GPU kernel utilization, achieving significant speedups while maintaining high PSNR scores.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

ClusterAttention: A training-free speedup of bidirectional attention

ClusterAttention is a training‑free technique that speeds up bidirectional attention by recursively clustering keys and queries into fixed‑size, power‑of‑two blocks, enabling block‑sparse attention to match dense attention latency on GPUs. The method derives error bounds for sparse attention, showing tighter clusters can reduce error when compensated via centroids, and demonstrates significant speedups—up to six‑fold on large tabular data and 1.8× on video generation—while preserving over 99% of dense accuracy.

By Kasper Nordenram, Amelie Dittmann
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 13

SCOPE: Subspace Clustering with Online Per-Head Top-K Estimation for Sparse Video Attention

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) incur quadratic self-attention cost over spatiotemporal tokens. Existing training-free sparse attention methods often construct sparse masks from block-level or cluster-level proxy scores, which can obscure fine-grained differences among keys and miss high contribution keys under aggressive sparsity.

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
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 22

SparkDiffusion: Mitigating the High-Sparsity Trap --- A Unified Framework for up to $265\times$ Single-GPU Acceleration of Visual Generation

arXiv:2609.23153v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Video diffusion transformers are expensive because attention dominates long spatiotemporal token sequences. We identify the \emph{high-sparsity trap}:...

By Yuxi Liu, Haoyu Li, Zekun Zhang, Tengxu Sun, Yixiang Cai, Jiayong Li, Yifei Xia, Tianle Liu, Baole Ai, Ang Wang, Jiamang Wang, Lin Qu, Kai Zhang, Kun Yuan, Bin Cui