arXiv:2607. 21752v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data-adaptive sparse attention masks substantially outperform fixed patterns (e.
arXiv:2508. 18224v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in sparse attention mechanisms have demonstrated strong potential for reducing the computational cost of long-context training and inference in large language models (LLMs).
Block Sparse Flash Attention (BSFA) is a drop‑in replacement for FlashAttention that speeds up long‑context inference by pruning about 50% of computation and memory transfers. It selects the top‑k most important value blocks for each query using exact query‑key similarities and calibrated per‑layer, per‑head thresholds, requiring only a one‑time training‑free calibration. On Llama‑3.1‑8B, BSFA delivers up to 1.13× speedup on LongBench with a 1.1% accuracy drop and up to 1.24× on Needle‑in‑a‑Haystack retrieval with a 1% drop, while the attention kernel itself accelerates by up to 1.38×.
arXiv:2605. 16928v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Long-context inference in large language models is bottlenecked by the quadratic cost of full attention.
arXiv:2606. 04511v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse attention reduces compute and memory bandwidth for long-context LLM inference.
arXiv:2607. 09052v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Block sparse attention is a hardware friendly way to alleviate the key-value (KV) cache read bottleneck in large language models (LLMs).
MWOP (Modality-aware Width-wise Operation Pruning) is a method that independently prunes visual‑to‑visual, text‑to‑visual, and text‑to‑text attention paths within each layer of multimodal large language models, and separately selects feed‑forward network channels for visual and textual inputs. It uses a first‑order Taylor criterion to guide pruning, re‑evaluates FFN importance after attention pruning, and applies LoRA‑based recovery training. The approach is paired with path‑sparse Triton attention kernels and compact visual‑side FFN execution to achieve practical acceleration, preserving token sequences while reducing computation. "whyItMatters":"MWOP achieves a 1.6× prefill speedup on LLaVA‑OneVision‑7B while retaining 99.7% performance, and further boosts token‑compression methods to 2.9× and 2.7× speedups, demonstrating its effectiveness across architectures."
arXiv:2609.13205v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse long-context inference requires efficient token retrieval in both prefill and decode. Existing methods often use different retrieval strategie...
arXiv:2511. 05313v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The substantial inference costs of attention in transformers motivated the development of efficient sequence mixers: namely sparse and sliding window attention, convolutions and linear attention.
arXiv:2610.00717v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Post-training compression of LLM attention is often formulated as independent matrix approximation, ignoring both the shared structure among attentio...
arXiv:2608. 04405v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-context large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, yet self-attention remains a major efficiency bottleneck -- especially during decoding -- due to the necessity of repeatedly processing ever-growing key-value (KV) caches.
arXiv:2512.20636v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many self-attention sublayers in large language models (LLMs) can be removed with little to no loss. We attribute this to the Attention Suppr...
The paper introduces Faster Flash Decoding (FFD), a hardware‑algorithm co‑design that fuses the selector and computation into a single kernel to eliminate memory‑bandwidth bottlenecks in long‑context decoding. By replacing metadata indices with low‑bit quantized, content‑aware scanning and employing a top‑delta strategy for dynamic block filtering, FFD achieves up to 11.6× kernel‑level speedup and scales to 256K context length while preserving model accuracy. The approach is training‑free, plug‑and‑play, and demonstrates significant throughput gains on benchmarks such as RULER and LongBench.