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:2510. 07651v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) with extended context windows enable powerful applications but impose significant memory overhead, as caching all key-value (KV) states scales linearly with sequence length and batch size.
By Yuzhe Gu, Xiyu Liang, Jiaojiao Zhao, Enmao Diao
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.
By Themistoklis Haris, Henry Li, Maryam Karimzadehgan
arXiv:2604. 24432v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Long-context ability, has become one of the most important iteration direction of next-generation Large Language Models, particularly in semantic understanding/reasoning, code agentic intelligence and recommendation system.
By Chenglong Chu, Guorui Zhou, Guowang Zhang, Han Li, Hao Peng, Hongtao Cheng, Hui Wang, Jian Liang, Jiangxia Cao, Kun Gai, Lingzhi Zhou, Lu Ren, Qi Zhang, Ruiming Tang, Ruitao Wang, Xinchen Luo, Yi Su, Zhiyuan Liang, Ziqi Wang, Boyang Ding, Chengru Song, Dunju Zang, Jiao Ou, Jiaxin Deng, Jijun Shi, Jinghao Zhang, Junmin Chen, Lejian Ren, Minxuan Lv, Qianqian Wang, Qigen Hu, Shiyao Wang, Siyang Mao, Tao Wang, Xingmei Wang, Zhixin Ling, Ziming Li, Zixing Zhang
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...
By Zhiwei Li, Lei Zhu, Hao Gu, Xiang Hu, Yan Wang, Haitao Mi, Sirui Han, Leo Liang, Zhijiang Guo
arXiv:2606. 18587v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Decoder-only Transformers compute attention over the KV cache of preceding tokens.
By Zhiyuan Wang, Xuan Luo, Sirui Zeng, Xifeng Yan
arXiv:2607. 16213v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) generate text autoregressively, relying on a key-value (KV) cache whose memory footprint grows linearly with context length, creating a major bottleneck.
By Soumia Bouyahiaoui, Manel Kara laouar, Aicha Boutorh, Mohamed Hadj Ameur
arXiv:2602. 03681v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The quadratic computational complexity of softmax transformers has become a bottleneck in long-context scenarios.
By Difan Deng, Andreas Bentzen Winje, Lukas Fehring, Marius Lindauer
arXiv:2606. 01294v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Linear attention reduces the quadratic cost of softmax attention by maintaining a recurrent fast-weight state, but it consistently lags on in-context retrieval and long-context tasks.
By Dong Le, Thong Nguyen, Cong-Duy Nguyen, Anh Tuan Luu
arXiv:2609.25802v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We introduce latest exact match attention (LEMA), an attention variant for transformers where queries and keys are binarized and each query attends onl...
By Moritz Br\"osamle
arXiv:2608. 06776v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A standard self-attention layer consists of two interacting circuits: the query-key circuit that governs attention allocation, and the output-value circuit that maps attended representations to predictions.
By Rahul Vashisht, Harish G. Ramaswamy
arXiv:2607. 20524v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mean cross-positional attention degradation is widely reported in transformer interpretability, yet whether it causally limits contextual retrieval remains untested.
By Sagar Dangal, Manoj Shakya