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 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
Sep 22

FlashBoB: I/O-Efficient Exact Backward-over-Backward for Softmax Attention

FlashBoB introduces an I/O‑efficient algorithm for exact backward‑over‑backward (BoB) in softmax attention, enabling precise second‑order differentiation without large intermediate tensors. By exploiting a hierarchical affine structure, the method confines computation to on‑chip tiles and limits off‑chip memory traffic, achieving θ(N² d²/M) HBM usage. Experiments show FlashBoB scales to sequence lengths of 262K on a single A100 GPU, outperforming prior exact baselines and FlashBack by up to 6.3×.

By Anthony Givans, Michael Crawshaw, Mingrui Liu