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:2607. 01792v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While decoder-only LLMs excel at a vast array of natural language tasks, it suffers from an asymmetric information flow induced by causal attention: later tokens are richer in contextual grounding than earlier ones.
By Andikawati P Widjaja, Yongjun Kim, Hyounghun Kim, Jaeho Lee
arXiv:2606. 01839v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based agents resolve a user task through many turns of dependent inference and tool calls, producing a workload whose total cost is unknown when the task arrives.
By Jianru Ding, Ryien Hosseini, Pouya Mahdi Gholami, Mingyuan Xiang, Henry Hoffmann
arXiv:2607. 01831v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-context inference is increasingly common in large language model (LLM) serving, driven by retrieval-augmented generation and agentic systems.
By Wenchen Han, Gingfung Matthew Yeung, Marco Barletta, William Toner, Amory Hoste, Adam Barker
GroupKV is a lightweight hierarchical KV cache management system designed for long‑context diffusion large language model (dLLM) inference. It partitions the context into contiguous groups and uses coarse‑to‑fine sparse selection, cross‑layer consistency for predictive prefetching, and a staleness correction mechanism to keep the cache coherent amid dynamic KV updates. The approach also incorporates streaming prefill to lower peak memory usage, achieving up to 48× longer serviceable context, 3.73× faster inference in offload‑based settings, and competitive task accuracy.
By Jinhao Wang, Zhexin Hu, Kangjie Zhou, Xin Zhou, Fangfang Liu
arXiv:2608. 12385v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As large language models serve ever more requests, cumulative inference cost is growing relative to the one-time cost of training.
By Liming Liu, Mingze Wang, Tuo Zhao
arXiv:2606.10537v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) re-encode the entire prefix at every denoising step, causing recomputation that scales
quadratically with...
By Jing Xiong, Qi Han, Shansan Gong, Yunta Hsieh, Boyuan Zheng, Chengyue Wu, Chaofan Tao, Chenyang Zhao, Ngai Wong
Diffusion language models (dLLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising a masked response and can commit multiple output positions per model invocation. Their bidirectional attention prevents exact autoregressive-style KV caching, since committing one position shifts the KV activations of all others.
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.
By Zhen Huang, Ruizhe Yao, Danyi Liu, Xinrui Chen, Shuwei Li, Siru Zhong, Zijian Cao, Yushan Lai, Mingming Guo, Weijie Zheng, Haohuan Fu
arXiv:2606. 02544v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) LLMs, offering faster inference through parallel or blockwise decoding.
By Junxia Cui, Haotian Ye, Runchu Tian, Hongcan Guo, Jinya Jiang, Haoru Li, Chaojie Ren, Yiming Huang, Kaijie Zhu, Zhongkai Yu, Kun Zhou, Jingbo Shang
While decoder-only LLMs excel at a vast array of natural language tasks, it suffers from an asymmetric information flow induced by causal attention: later tokens are richer in contextual grounding than earlier ones. A simple and effective remedy is prompt repetition -- just appending a second copy of prompt before generation can redistribute grounding across positions and improve reasoning performance.
The paper introduces Speculative Probing, a method that repurposes the speculative‑decoding module of large language models for real‑time classification tasks. By appending a trained soft prompt to the target sequence, the approach leverages the already‑cached KV store during inference, adding negligible overhead while achieving higher accuracy than traditional hidden‑state probes. Experiments on four classification tasks across multiple models show that these lightweight probes outperform zero‑shot GPT‑5.4‑mini and rival or surpass specialized 8B safety classifiers without running a full LLM.
By Collin Zhang, Tingwei Zhang, Vitaly Shmatikov