arXiv AI

FlashBlock: Attention Caching for Efficient Long-Context Block Diffusion

arXiv:2602. 05305v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generating long-form content, such as minute-long videos and extended texts, is increasingly important for modern generative models.

arXiv AI
Jun 6

Towards Generalization of Block Attention via Automatic Segmentation and Block Distillation

arXiv:2605. 15913v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Block attention, which processes the input as separate blocks that cannot attend to one another, offers significant potential to improve KV cache reuse in long-context scenarios such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).

By Shuaiyi Li, Zhisong Zhang, Yan Wang, Lei Zhu, Dongyang Ma, Chenlong Deng, Yang Deng, Wai Lam
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 Computer Vision
Sep 18

Understanding and Exploiting Diagonal Attention Sparsity in Autoregressive Image Generation

The paper investigates how attention sparsity behaves in autoregressive image generation, finding a distinct diagonal sparsity pattern due to spatial locality of visual tokens. It introduces a diagonal‑aware sparse attention mechanism that skips KV entries along the diagonal within a recent window, achieving up to 3.1× higher throughput and 1.19× lower latency with less than 2% quality loss compared to dense inference.

By Daeun Kim, Junwha Hong, Changhun Oh, Yoonsung Kim, Yoonhyeong Lee, Jongse Park
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

CompKV: Compensation-Aware KV Selection for Long-Context LLM Inference

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 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 Machine Learning
Sep 24

DeltaS: Reading the Gated Linear Attention State for KV Cache Eviction in Streaming Video

DeltaS is a query‑agnostic, training‑free method for evicting key‑value cache entries in hybrid video‑language models that combine linear and full attention. It uses the change in the recurrent state of gated‑delta linear attention—called state drift—to decide which video chunks to keep, selecting those that induce larger normalized state changes. In experiments with a fixed memory budget, DeltaS outperforms position‑, attention‑, and key‑value‑based eviction signals, improving performance by 2.1 points on average across six long‑video benchmarks and 5.6 points on the longest benchmark, while adding only 1.9% of the forward‑pass cost.

By Taeyoun Kwon, Seungjin Kim, Hyeonyu Kim, Moon Hwan Kim