Zhigeng Liu, Zhiyuan Ning, Ruixiao Li +5cs.LG cs.AI
The development of long-context Large Language Models (LLMs) is constrained by the memory bandwidth bottleneck and quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism during decoding. To overcome the inherent trade-offs between the memory overhead of metadata-based metrics and the computational inefficiency of adaptive selection strategies, we present Faster Flash Decoding (FFD), a novel hardware-algorithm co-design framework designed to break the memory wall in long-context decoding. FFD integrates the selector and computer into a fully fused kernel, replacing external metadata indices with content-aware scanning via low-bit quantization. Furthermore, we introduce the top-delta strategy, which dynamically filters blocks to achieve distribution-adaptive sparsity without global synchronization. Offering a training-free and plug-and-play solution, FFD also enables the reuse of scanning results for computation, achieving up to 11.6x kernel-level speedup and scaling to 256K context length, with 2.37x end-to-end throughput improvement. Empirical validation on RULER and LongBench confirms that FFD maintains model accuracy while delivering high-ratio sparsity, with code available at https://github.com/qluoluo/faster-flash-decoding
Video diffusion transformers (vDiTs) generate high quality but pay quadratic self-attention cost, making inference prohibitive at video-token scales. The challenge is input-adaptive sparsity: selecting critical Q/K/V tokens with negligible overhead and executing them for end-to-end gains. We present SPADE, a training-free sparse-attention engine of three parts: (i) vDiT-SSR, a specification defining 3D blocking candidates and formalizing dynamic masks via Summarizer/Estimator expressions; (ii) runtime scheme generation using SICS and a head-wise policy; and (iii) an executor with low-overhead index search, flash block-sparse attention, and kernel grouping. Across Hunyuan-Video and Wan 2.1/2.2 for text-to-video and image-to-video generation, SPADE raises sparsity and speed while preserving quality, accelerating attention by 2.26x-3.40x and end-to-end inference by 1.49x-1.80x. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/6somehow/DAC-SPADE.
Graph attention normalizes neighborhood scores with softmax, the maximum-entropy choice under Shannon statistics. But homophilic and heterophilic graphs want different attention shapes, and one fixed normalization cannot serve both. We propose \textbf{LTGA} (\textbf{L}earnable \textbf{T}sallis \textbf{G}raph \textbf{A}ttention), a graph attention layer whose Tsallis entropic index $q$ is learned jointly with the weights, interpolating continuously between heavy-tailed ($q\!<\!1$), softmax ($q\!=\!1$) and compact-support ($q\!>\!1$) attention at four granularities from a global scalar to a per-edge index, under a bounded reparameterization that starts every model at the GAT baseline. Across eight benchmarks at ten seeds, LTGA-Edge takes the best average rank ($2.75$), but the omnibus test does not reject ($p\!=\!0.199$) and learning $q$ does not beat searching it: a validation-tuned frozen grid reaches $61.4\%$, tuned $α$-entmax $62.2\%$ and a capacity-matched $q\!\equiv\!1$ control $62.0\%$, against $61.7\%$ for LTGA-Edge. What the learned index buys is one run instead of a grid, and an interpretable mechanism: where $q$ leaves $1$, it prunes $42\%$ of attention coefficients to exactly zero, and those edges are selectively the wrong ones, restoring them costs $7.1$ points, while random pruning at the same rate costs $13.0$ more. Project page: https://kleyt0n.github.io/ltga
Video Diffusion Transformers (VDiTs) enable high-fidelity generation but incur quadratic cost from dense 3D self-attention. Existing head- and block-level sparse methods share computation budgets across queries, overlooking token-specific attention demand. We observe that retained density varies across queries yet correlates log-linearly with attention entropy, while dominant interactions form query-centered neighborhoods with token-dependent radii. Based on these findings, we propose Token Radius Attention (TRA), a training-free framework that maps query entropy to an analytic token budget and converts it into a temporally decayed radius without explicit key ranking. Fused entropy extraction, warm-up reuse, and block-sparse mask construction further reduce overhead. Across seven Wan2.1, Wan2.2, and HunyuanVideo T2V/I2V configurations, TRA retains only 9-19% of attention interactions and achieves 1.56x-2.05x speedup with competitive generation quality. Code is available at https://github.com/IF-LAB-PKU/Token-Radius-Attention.
Sparse attention is widely deployed in long-context serving stacks, yet no framework audits how discarding blocks changes the influence of specific content on model output. We first establish that the phenomenon is real and causal: Block Sparse Flash Attention (BSFA) route replay across four architectures changes output decisions in 13 of 16 cells, with zero identity-replay label flips. We then introduce a dense-calibrated counterfactual audit using matched probe cards---Gold (carrying the correct answer label), Poison (carrying a target wrong label), and Benign (filler only)---under six-layout position symmetry, isolating the sparsification-specific effect. Two patterns compete. Signal concentration: the selector preserves Gold and Poison blocks far above filler-matched Benign blocks (G$\approx$P$\gg$B across all model--task pairs). Integration loss: discarding blocks severs cross-block attention---confirmed by an ablation where isolating the probe block collapses its influence from 4.48 logits to zero. Compression ratio governs the balance: a full sweep from mild ($c=0.25$) to aggressive ($c=0.75$) compression across four model--task pairs reveals that three of four cells move toward stronger sparse amplification at higher compression, with two exhibiting sign reversals. Three independent arms---BSFA route replay, controlled block-top-$k$, and KV-cache eviction---converge: sparsification changes content influence in ways aggregate accuracy cannot detect. We provide an open measurement framework deployable on any model exposing block identities.
Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) re-encode the entire prefix at every denoising step, causing recomputation that scales quadratically with context length and becomes prohibitive for long-context scenarios. We propose Prefilling-dLLM, a training-free prefill-decode disaggregation framework for dLLMs that partitions the prefix into N chunks, caches their KV representations once, and selects the top-K most relevant chunks with intra-chunk token sparsity for decoding, showing that sparse prefilling can outperform dense attention while reducing per-step complexity from quadratic in the full sequence length to quadratic only in the decode length. On LongBench and InfiniteBench, Prefilling-dLLM achieves state-of-the-art quality among dLLM acceleration methods, and an attention kernel that parallelizes decoding over the non-contiguously cached chunk KV yields 9.1--28.0x speedup at 8K--32K contexts. We further show that beginning-of-sequence tokens prepended to each chunk act as periodic attention anchors that eliminate the lost-in-the-middle phenomenon. Code is available at https://github.com/menik1126/Prefilling-dLLM.
Inference in diffusion large language models (dLLMs) is computationally expensive, as full self-attention must be repeatedly executed at each step of the denoising process without KV cache. Recent sparse attention methods for dLLMs mitigate this cost via block-sparse computation, which is applied only in later iterations when model performance is less sensitive to coarse-grained sparse approximation, but yields limited improvements in computational efficiency and acceleration. This motivates a finer-grained sparsification strategy that can be applied from earlier iterations and leverages reusable sparsity patterns, enabling further efficiency gains. In this work, we introduce PulseCol, a periodically refreshed column-sparse attention method for accelerating diffusion language models. PulseCol replaces coarse block-level sparsity with a finer-grained column-sparse structure, allowing important attention interactions to be retained more precisely while exposing greater sparsity. Built on this column-level formulation, PulseCol further identifies sparse patterns at the early denoising step and reuses them across subsequent iterations, refreshing them only at a small number of intermediate steps to track the evolution of sparse attention patterns during denoising. Experiments show that PulseCol achieves higher sparsity and greater practical speedup than prior sparse attention methods for dLLMs, while maintaining model quality. Enabled by optimized GPU kernels for column-sparse attention, PulseCol delivers up to 1.95$\times$ end-to-end speedup over FlashAttention across several context lengths.