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.
arXiv:2605. 16928v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Long-context inference in large language models is bottlenecked by the quadratic cost of full attention.
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.
arXiv:2606. 24467v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-context large language model (LLM) inference is increasingly constrained by the memory footprint and decoding cost of key-value (KV) caches, limiting sustainable deployment on resource-constrained hardware.
arXiv:2606. 29563v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) excel at complex tasks like question answering and summarization, thanks to their ability to handle long-context inputs.
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.
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.
Long-context large language model (LLM) inference is increasingly constrained by the memory footprint and decoding cost of key-value (KV) caches, limiting sustainable deployment on resource-constrained hardware. Existing KV cache eviction methods typically apply heuristic token scoring over all heads in GQA-based LLMs.
arXiv:2604. 20920v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sparse attention can reduce the cost of long-context inference, but most variants introduce new architectural components.
arXiv:2609.13141v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training attention sparsification reduces the quadratic cumulative attention cost of pretrained Transformers by selecting a small set of context u...
arXiv:2607. 21927v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Full self-attention in large language models scales as O(N^2), which limits long-context document analysis to 65,536 tokens and requires costly GPU clusters.
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.
arXiv:2608. 05326v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autoregressive large language model inference is increasingly constrained by the memory footprint of the Key-Value (KV) cache.