arXiv:2608. 19758v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-context modeling is a pivotal capability for Large Language Models, yet the quadratic complexity of attention remains a critical bottleneck, particularly during the compute-intensive prefilling phase.
By Qihang Fan, Huaibo Huang, Zhiying Wu, Bingning Wang, Ran He
arXiv:2608. 01662v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA) enables efficient long-context modeling through its Lightning Indexer.
By Wen Zan, Jiaqi Zhang, Jianchao Tan, Hong Liu, Cunguang Wang, Xiang Li, Duyue Ma, Guanyu Wu, Yifan Lu, Fengcun Li, Yerui Sun, Peng Pei, Yuchen Xie, Xunliang Cai
arXiv:2606. 09079v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conventional LLMs keep the full KV cache loaded during decoding, causing a severe GPU memory bottleneck for ultra-long context serving.
By Yan Wang, Qifan Zhang, Jiachen Yu, Tian Liang, Dongyang Ma, Xiang Hu, Zibo Lin, Chunyang Li, Zhichao Wang, Jia Li, Yujiu Yang, Haitao Mi, Dong Yu
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).
By Ran Yan, Youhe Jiang, Zhuoming Chen, Haohui Mai, Beidi Chen, Binhang Yuan
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×.
By Daniel Ohayon, Itay Lamprecht, Itay Hubara, Israel Cohen, Daniel Soudry, Noam Elata
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