arXiv AI
4d ago

Stratified Sparse Attention: Reducing the Sparse-to-Dense Gap at Extreme Sparsity

The paper introduces Stratified Sparse Attention (SSA), a framework that blends deterministic top‑k retrieval with score‑guided sampling to reduce the gap between sparse and dense attention in large language models. SSA attends to high‑scoring tokens deterministically while sampling the remaining attention mass using proxy scores, thereby recovering more of the attention distribution. Experiments on benchmarks such as RULER, LongBench, LOFT, and AIME show that SSA outperforms existing sparse methods across models ranging from 3B to 27B parameters, achieving significant accuracy gains and up to 2.96× decode speedup with optimized CUDA kernels.

By Sahil Joshi, Prithvi Dixit, Aryan Katiyar, Agniva Chowdhury, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Anshumali Shrivastava, Aditya Desai, Kumar Krishna Agrawal
arXiv AI
Jun 12

MiniMax Sparse Attention

arXiv:2606. 13392v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Ultra-long-context capability is becoming indispensable for frontier LLMs: agentic workflows, repository-scale code reasoning, and persistent memory all require the model to jointly attend over hundreds of thousands to millions of tokens, yet the quadratic cost of softmax attention makes this untenable at deployment scale.

By Xunhao Lai, Weiqi Xu, Yufeng Yang, Qiaorui Chen, Yang Xu, Lunbin Zeng, Xiaolong Li, Haohai Sun, Haichao Zhu, Vito Zhang, Pengyu Zhao
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 AI
Oct 16

FlashAttention with Statistics: Low-Overhead Attention Features for Compact Hallucination Detectors

The paper introduces FlashAttention with Statistics, a method that computes attention‑based detector features without materializing the full attention matrix, thereby reducing memory usage and latency. By accumulating statistics during the FlashAttention pass or via sparse lookups, the approach adds only a small overhead—16% at 2K tokens and 1.4% at 35K tokens on an H100 GPU—and stores just 22.5 KiB per response token. Experiments show that frozen Qwen3 proxy models, even as small as 0.6 B parameters, can serve as strong hallucination detectors, outperforming larger zero‑shot judges and specialized grounding checkers on several benchmarks, with attention features further boosting performance.

By Andrei Volodichev, Maksim Savichev, Nikita Sviridov, Artem Yuliy, Dmitry Simakov, Alexey Zaytsev