Kascade: A Practical Sparse Attention Method for Long-Context LLM Inference
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
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arXiv:2607. 19358v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in long chain-of-thought reasoning models such as DeepSeek-R1 have led to increasingly longer inference context lengths under the test-time scaling paradigm.
DeltaLLM is a training‑free framework that accelerates on‑device large language model inference by introducing delta‑key sparse attention and a vectorized structured sparse online softmax. It reuses delta keys across query heads, preserves exact attention near the diagonal while approximating non‑local regions, and exploits hardware‑friendly sparsity with a specialized vector‑processor architecture. Experiments on BitNet‑b1.58‑2B‑4T and LLaMA3.2‑1B‑Instruct show up to 60% delta‑key sparsity, 63% structured attention‑score sparsity, and a 1.62× speedup on the KV260 FPGA with minimal accuracy loss.
arXiv:2605.23200v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The linear growth of the Key-Value (KV) cache is a critical bottleneck in long-form LLM inference. Existing KV compression methods mitigate t...
arXiv:2606. 06467v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-context inference in modern LLMs is increasingly constrained by decoding efficiency, especially in reasoning-heavy settings where models generate long intermediate chains of thought.
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.
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.