arXiv:2608. 19920v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A lot of prior work addressed key-value (KV) cache selection and compression by sparse attention to enable long-context inference for transformer language models without excessive hardware budgets.
By Matthias Seeger, Zeyu Zhang, Vihang Patil, Konstantinos Benidis, Sebastian Schelter
arXiv:2606. 31519v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-context Large Language Model inference is severely bottlenecked by the massive Key-Value (KV) cache, yet existing sparse attention methods often suffer from static fixed-budget (Top-k) retrieval or rely on proxy scores that are computationally expensive and biased.
By Wenhao Li, Jinhao Dong, Hailin Zhang, Wenhang Shi, Wei Lu, Xiaoyong Du
The paper introduces Memory Attention (MA), a new attention mechanism for language models that replaces the traditional value projection with token-indexed memory combined with contextual keys. MA generates values by merging layer‑specific token memory with contextual information, allowing normalization to be folded into memory tables and reducing value construction to a simple lookup and addition. Experiments show that, with matched training token budgets and additional memory parameters, MA improves language modeling performance and average downstream task results across various attention configurations.
By Jiale Kang
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
Language models typically construct attention values from contextual hidden states, even when some of their content may be reusable across contexts. We investigate whether token-indexed memory can rep...
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