arXiv:2508. 18224v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in sparse attention mechanisms have demonstrated strong potential for reducing the computational cost of long-context training and inference in large language models (LLMs).
By Ran Yan, Youhe Jiang, Zhuoming Chen, Haohui Mai, Beidi Chen, Binhang Yuan
arXiv:2608. 19920v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A lot of prior work addressed key-value (KV) cache selection and compression by sparse attention to enable long-context inference for transformer language models without excessive hardware budgets.
By Matthias Seeger, Zeyu Zhang, Vihang Patil, Konstantinos Benidis, Sebastian Schelter
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:2608. 19758v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-context modeling is a pivotal capability for Large Language Models, yet the quadratic complexity of attention remains a critical bottleneck, particularly during the compute-intensive prefilling phase.
By Qihang Fan, Huaibo Huang, Zhiying Wu, Bingning Wang, Ran He
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
A lot of prior work addressed key-value (KV) cache selection and compression by sparse attention to enable long-context inference for transformer language models without excessive hardware budgets. We provide a new method for fine-tuning models with sparse attention.