QUILT: Rethinking Sparse-Attention Prefill through Shared Query Execution

The paper introduces QUILT, a new sparse‑attention execution mechanism that jointly processes neighboring queries to reuse shared key‑value (KV) entries, thereby reducing redundant memory traffic and computation. QUILT employs Shift‑and‑Compare Set Decomposition (SCSD) to convert irregular set operations into regular data‑parallel primitives and pipelines this with attention computation to hide overhead. The approach includes cascaded sharing across multiple granularities and a tile‑aware strategy that balances sharing with hardware utilization, achieving up to 55.1% lower kernel latency and 36.8% faster time‑to‑first‑token on LongBench benchmarks with negligible accuracy loss.

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