Understanding BigBird's Block Sparse Attention
Read the original on Hugging Face Blog →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at Hugging Face Blog.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at Hugging Face Blog.
arXiv:2607. 20457v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference with large language models (LLMs) on long sequences is computationally expensive due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention.
arXiv:2607. 21752v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data-adaptive sparse attention masks substantially outperform fixed patterns (e.
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.
arXiv:2607. 09052v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Block sparse attention is a hardware friendly way to alleviate the key-value (KV) cache read bottleneck in large language models (LLMs).
arXiv:2509. 10406v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Pretraining transformers on long sequences (entire code repositories, collections of related documents) is bottlenecked by quadratic attention costs.
Small language models are usually built like large ones and then squeezed onto a CPU afterwards. We did the opposite: we fixed the target first, one user, one token at a time, 4-bit weights, ordinary CPU, and chose the architecture to suit it.