arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

EFQ-Softmax: Exp-Free Quantization for Softmax

EFQ-Softmax is a low‑bit probability‑generation technique that replaces the traditional exp‑then‑quantize path in Transformer attention. It maps shifted attention scores directly to block‑scaled E2M1 operands using an exponent‑only scale and a single affine rule, allowing the same low‑bit representation to be used for both numerator and denominator updates. Experiments on Qwen3‑8B, Qwen3‑VL‑8B‑Instruct, and WAN2.2‑TI2V‑5B show that EFQ‑Softmax maintains or improves model quality while reducing vector‑stage latency by about 40% on the A5 vector unit.

By Haohui Han (Xi'an Jiaotong University), Yuming Wan (Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd), Hongni Wang (Shandong University of Finance and Economics), Pengcheng Xie (Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd), Xiaodong Yan (Xi'an Jiaotong University), Runqi You (Xi'an Jiaotong University), Wencong Zhang (Xi'an Jiaotong University)
arXiv AI
Jun 4

Stochastic Sparse Attention for Memory-Bound Inference

arXiv:2605. 01910v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autoregressive decoding becomes bandwidth-limited at long contexts, as generating each token requires reading all $n_k$ key and value vectors from KV cache.

By Kyle Lee, Corentin Delacour, Kevin Callahan-Coray, Kyle Jiang, Can Yaras, Samet Oymak, Tathagata Srimani, Kerem Y. Camsari
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 9

iCATS: Fast Video Generation via Interaction-Aware Sparse Attention and Timestep-Adaptive Sparsity

iCATS introduces a training‑free sparse attention mechanism for Diffusion Transformers that accelerates video generation by reducing computations. It improves importance estimation by clustering query‑key dot‑product interactions and reformulates the objective as a quadratic form for low‑cost computation. The method also adapts sparsity dynamically across denoising timesteps using an SNR‑guided schedule and employs a tail‑merging strategy to enhance GPU kernel utilization, achieving significant speedups while maintaining high PSNR scores.

By Chengfeng Han, Baole Ai, Xianlu Bian, Jie Yao, Zilong Huang, Ang Wang, Dandan Ding