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
Jun 19

StreamKL: Fast and Memory-Efficient KL Divergence for Boosting Attention Distillation

arXiv:2606. 20005v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Attention distillation, which trains one attention distribution to match another by minimizing their Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, is widely used in knowledge distillation, model compression, continual learning, and sparse-attention LLM training.

By Guangda Liu, Yiquan Wang, Chengwei Li, Wenhao Chen, Jing Lin, Yiwu Yao, Danning Ke, Wenchao Ding, Jieru Zhao
arXiv Computation and Language
2d ago

FlyWheel: Attention Kernels Built for the TPU

FlyWheel introduces optimized TPU kernels for softmax and linear attention, reducing vector work and improving matrix operand reuse. By overlapping independent computations, FlyWheel achieves up to 4.14× speedups over the RPA kernel and 1.80× over Splash Attention, reaching 81% of peak BF16 throughput on TPU v6e. It also boosts Gated DeltaNet prefill by up to 3.61× and enhances vLLM serving of Qwen3.8-27B prefill throughput by up to 1.56× while preserving accuracy.

By Zishuo Bao, Zeshen Zhang, Linkun Chen, Yucheng Lu
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 15

GQLA: Group-Query Latent Attention for Hardware-Adaptive Decoding

The paper introduces Group-Query Latent Attention (GQLA), a variant of Multi-head Latent Attention that shares group‑sharded up‑projections to enable a joint latent representation and a shardable expanded cache. GQLA supports both MQA‑absorb and GQA execution using the same weights and existing kernels, and roofline analysis shows how absorption trades traffic for computation while GQA shards KV groups. Experiments on DeepSeek‑V3.1‑Base and other models demonstrate that GQLA achieves comparable training losses to MLA, maintains high accuracy after checkpoint conversion, and improves output throughput by up to 35% on eight H20‑3e GPUs, while also allowing larger batch sizes due to a smaller per‑rank cache.

By Fanxu Meng, Zhixin Pan