arXiv Machine Learning

Exact Finite Attention Responses From RoPE Derivatives

arXiv AI
Jul 7

HiFA4: Training-Free 4-bit FlashAttention on Ascend HIF4 NPUs for LLM Inference

arXiv:2607. 04302v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present HiFA4, a post-training operator-level design that executes both QK^T and PV in FlashAttention as 4-bit HIF4 Cube GEMMs for LLM inference on Ascend NPUs, while maintaining the online softmax state in FP16.

By Hui Dong, Yanzhao Li, Jie Gao, Chunlu Li, Zhiyuan Zhang, Yupeng Sun, Zhenyuan Chen, Zhiqiang Zou
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 2

A Hippocampus for Linear Attention: An Exact Memory for What the Recurrent State Forgets

Linear-attention and state-space language models compress the prefix into a fixed-size recurrent state, yielding O(1) memory at the cost of a lossy exact memory: when many key--value associations compete, earlier facts are overwritten and needle recall degrades. Inspired by Complementary Learning Systems, we give linear attention a hippocampal complement.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 3

CRISP: Cliff-awaRe Input-adaptive Sparse Prefilling with Structural-Mass-Motivated Routing

CRISP (Cliff-awaRe Input-adaptive Sparse Prefilling) is a new method for long-context LLM inference that replaces costly quadratic attention prefilling with a dynamic, input-adaptive sparse routing scheme. It introduces a structural proxy, C_struct, to directly read routing decisions from the proxy attention map, eliminating the need for pooled matrix multiplication and KL divergence. Additionally, CRISP addresses the post-softmax mass cliff by using a sink-aware threshold based on the noise floor, theoretically reducing background noise accumulation to O(n). Empirical results on InfiniteBench, RULER, and LongBench show that CRISP outperforms existing sparse methods and can match or exceed exact dense attention, achieving up to a 5.30× speedup at 512k tokens and significant gains on retrieval-heavy tasks.

By Huu Huy Nguyen, Chien Van Nguyen, Franck Dernoncourt, Ryan A. Rossi, Linh Ngo Van, Jieyang Chen, Thien Huu Nguyen