arXiv Machine Learning

Sliding-window beats linear attention

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

Attention Routing Stabilizes Early: Working-Set Inference for Recurrent Language Models

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 AI
Jun 11

Architecture-Aware Reinforcement Learning Makes Sliding-Window Attention Competitive in Math Reasoning

arXiv:2606. 11634v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid progress of reasoning and agentic large language models (LLMs) has increased the demand for long-context inference, but self-attention (SA) scales quadratically with context length.

By Kai Liu, Peijie Dong, Xinchen Xie, Jianfei Gao, Qipeng Guo, Xiaowen Chu, Shaoting Zhang, Kai Chen
arXiv AI
Sep 3

Language Models Can Control Their Own Attention

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 AI
Jun 10

Blurry Window Attention

arXiv:2606. 09862v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Softmax Attention operation in Transformer language models has a quadratic complexity in the sequence length and a growing state size in the form of KV cache, which becomes a bottleneck in long context scenarios.

By Axel Laborieux, Christos Sourmpis, Juan Gabriel Kostelec, Qinghai Guo
arXiv AI
23h ago

Prism Attention: Proposal-Refined Index Sharing Mechanism for Efficient LLMs Inference

Prism Attention introduces a proposal‑refined sparse attention framework that replaces static cross‑layer index reuse with a coarse‑to‑fine strategy, allowing layer‑wise adaptability while maintaining efficiency. The method leverages the observation that high‑attention tokens remain largely stable across layers, with changes concentrated near the boundary of previously selected regions. Experiments demonstrate state‑of‑the‑art performance on reasoning and long‑context benchmarks, achieving a 3.4× decoding speedup over FlashAttention at 128K context length.

By Zhenxu Tian, Kebin Liu, Zhengwu Yang, Yi Su, Qingqing Dang, Yanlin Sha, Kaipeng Deng, Dianhai Yu, Yanjun Ma, Juntao Li, Min Zhang