arXiv Computer Vision
6d ago

Understanding and Exploiting Diagonal Attention Sparsity in Autoregressive Image Generation

The paper investigates how attention sparsity behaves in autoregressive image generation, finding a distinct diagonal sparsity pattern due to spatial locality of visual tokens. It introduces a diagonal‑aware sparse attention mechanism that skips KV entries along the diagonal within a recent window, achieving up to 3.1× higher throughput and 1.19× lower latency with less than 2% quality loss compared to dense inference.

By Daeun Kim, Junwha Hong, Changhun Oh, Yoonsung Kim, Yoonhyeong Lee, Jongse Park