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:2606. 29844v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The quadratic computational cost of traditional attention mechanisms poses a major bottleneck to the scalability and practical deployment of large language models (LLMs), particularly in long-context scenarios.
By Linrui Ma, Chun Hei Lo, Xinyu Wang, Peng Lu, Xihao Yuan, Hanting Chen, Kai Han, Xinghao Chen, Chengjun Zhan, Hanlin Xu, Yichun Yin, Lifeng Shang, Feng Wen, Boxing Chen, Yufei Cui
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
arXiv:2606. 16093v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modeling long-range dependencies remains a central challenge in natural language processing.
By Kuzey Torlak, H\"useyin Arda Arslan, An{\i}l Dervi\c{s}o\u{g}lu, Beyza Nur Deniz, Onur Boyar
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
The paper introduces Semantic Head Specialization (SHS), a phenomenon where Vision Transformer (ViT) attention heads specialize as either object- or background-focused, most evident under full attention. It proposes the SHS-Index to quantify this specialization, demonstrating its ability to distinguish full-attention from chunk-window ViTs and its strong correlation with downstream benchmark performance. Leveraging insights into window interaction, token serialization, and local softmax allocation, the authors design Ariadne Attention, a hybrid attention mechanism that matches full-attention performance on 22 image and video tasks while reducing attention compute by 6.5×.
By Chenhong He, Lei Li, Shicheng Li, Hanglong Lv, Lingpeng Kong, Qi Liu, Tong Yang, Shuhuai Ren
The paper investigates how attention dynamics evolve across recurrent depth in language models, finding that attention support stabilizes early while hidden states and outputs take longer. It proposes WISE, a training‑free method that uses full attention in early steps and then reuses the discovered sparse working set for later steps, preserving performance on multi‑hop QA tasks. Experiments show that WISE maintains quality up to 2K context, offers measurable speedups, and highlights the importance of recurrent discovery of attention support.
By Ke Wan, Chen Chen
arXiv:2512. 14391v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In-context learning is fundamental to modern Large Language Models (LLMs); however, prevailing architectures impose a rigid and fixed contextual structure by assigning linear or constant positional indices.
By Huayang Li, Tianyu Zhao, Deng Cai, Richard Sproat
arXiv:2604. 03444v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work has demonstrated the potential of non-transformer language models, especially linear recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and hybrid models that mix recurrence and attention.
By William Merrill, Yanhong Li, Tyler Romero, Anej Svete, Caia Costello, Pradeep Dasigi, Dirk Groeneveld, David Heineman, Bailey Kuehl, Nathan Lambert, Chuan Li, Kyle Lo, Saumya Malik, DJ Matusz, Benjamin Minixhofer, Jacob Morrison, Luca Soldaini, Finbarr Timbers, Pete Walsh, Noah A. Smith, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Ashish Sabharwal
arXiv:2608.28444v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Due to the nature of quadratic attention, Large Language Models (LLMs) consume a lot of memory and energy. Every new token costs more than the previo...
By Alexia Jolicoeur-Martineau, Rhea Sanjay Sukthanker, Pashmina Cameron, Emy Gervais
arXiv:2609.38530v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Language models increasingly use architectures that vary attention span and positional encoding across layers, such as applying RoPE with sliding-windo...
By Eric Enouen, Sainyam Galhotra
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