arXiv Machine Learning

Memory-Managed Long-Context Attention: A Preliminary Study of Editable Request-Local Memory

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.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

Elastic Threshold Attention: Learned Contextual Sparsity for Long-Context Decoding

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