arXiv AI

FreeSolo: Linear-time Sparse Attention with Zero-Shot Length Extrapolation

arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 1

Scaling Parameter and Context in Attention: Native Sparse Attention from Mixture-of-Head

The paper introduces NAMOH, a native sparse attention mechanism that activates only a subset of heads per token, allowing each head to attend to a limited subsequence of tokens. By scaling the number of heads while keeping the active heads per token fixed, the method shortens head histories and reduces key‑value access without increasing overall storage. Experiments demonstrate that NAMOH can outperform fully activated models with the same parameter count and enable more efficient long‑context inference than smaller dense models.

By Zizhuo Fu, Runsheng Wang, Meng Li
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 AI
Jun 30

MATCH: Modulating Attention via In-Context Retrieval for Long-Context Transformers

arXiv:2606. 29844v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The quadratic computational cost of traditional attention mechanisms poses a major bottleneck to the scalability and practical deployment of large language models (LLMs), particularly in long-context scenarios.

By Linrui Ma, Chun Hei Lo, Xinyu Wang, Peng Lu, Xihao Yuan, Hanting Chen, Kai Han, Xinghao Chen, Chengjun Zhan, Hanlin Xu, Yichun Yin, Lifeng Shang, Feng Wen, Boxing Chen, Yufei Cui
arXiv Computation and Language
5d ago

Subquadratic Attention with a Hierarchical Tree-Structured Indexer

The paper introduces Zyphra Hierarchical Attention (ZHA), a subquadratic sparse attention mechanism that uses a tree-structured indexer to compress key-value pairs and retrieve a sparse subset of keys during query time. By iteratively deepening the tree, ZHA achieves sublinear routing and attention costs, resulting in overall subquadratic scaling for long-context processing. The method can be applied to existing pretrained models with minimal distillation training, maintains performance on diverse evaluation tasks, and remains robust even with very deep trees.

By Leon Lufkin, Cutter Dawes, Alexander Speicher, Kamesh Krishnamurthy, Tom\'as Figliolia, Beren Millidge
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Sliding-window beats linear attention

arXiv:2608.28444v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Due to the nature of quadratic attention, Large Language Models (LLMs) consume a lot of memory and energy. Every new token costs more than the previo...

By Alexia Jolicoeur-Martineau, Rhea Sanjay Sukthanker, Pashmina Cameron, Emy Gervais
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 7

RAM-Net: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Sparsely Addressable State

RAM‑Net introduces a linear‑time sequence model that replaces dense access to a shared recurrent state with sparse, address‑based access. The model arranges the state as a fixed‑size array of independent slots and uses an Address Decoder to map each token’s key or query to a small subset of slots, thereby reducing inter‑token interference. Empirical results show that RAM‑Net outperforms strong recurrent baselines on fine‑grained long‑range retrieval, achieves the lowest perplexity in commonsense reasoning, and accesses far fewer state elements per step than competing models.

By Kaicheng Xiao, Haotian Li, Liran Dong, Guoliang Xing