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SparQ Attention: Bandwidth-Efficient LLM Inference

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arxiv 2312.04985 v6 pith:FLFGC45X submitted 2023-12-08 cs.LG

classification cs.LG
keywords attentioninferencesparqdatalargellmstechniquewithout
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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The computational difficulties of large language model (LLM) inference remain a significant obstacle to their widespread deployment. The need for many applications to support long input sequences and process them in large batches typically causes token-generation to be bottlenecked by data transfer. For this reason, we introduce SparQ Attention, a technique for increasing the inference throughput of LLMs by utilising memory bandwidth more efficiently within the attention layers, through selective fetching of the cached history. Our proposed technique can be applied directly to off-the-shelf LLMs during inference, without requiring any modification to the pre-training setup or additional fine-tuning. We show that SparQ Attention brings up to 8x savings in attention data transfers without substantial drops in accuracy, by evaluating Llama 2 and 3, Mistral, Gemma and Pythia models on a wide range of downstream tasks.

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Cited by 9 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. MultiPath Memory Access: Breaking Host-GPU Bandwidth Bottlenecks in LLM Services

    cs.DC 2025-12 unverdicted novelty 7.0 of 10

    MMA routes host-GPU transfers over multiple available paths to deliver 4.62x higher peak bandwidth and lower latencies in LLM serving without hardware or driver changes.

  2. From Tensor Buffer to Distributed Memory Hierarchy: A Survey of KV Cache Management for LLM Serving

    cs.DC 2026-06 accept novelty 6.5 of 10

    KV-cache serving systems concentrate into five archetypes under a four-axis taxonomy, with ownership explaining residual distributed design variance and seven measurement gaps blocking next steps.

  3. Sparse Attention as a Range Searching Problem: Towards an Inference-Efficient Index for KV Cache

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    Louver is a new index structure that guarantees zero false negatives for sparse attention in LLM KV caches by casting the problem as halfspace range searching.

  4. Sparse Attention as a Range Searching Problem: Towards an Inference-Efficient Index for KV Cache

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    Louver is a new index for LLM KV caches that guarantees zero false negatives for keys above a relevance threshold, runs faster than prior sparse and some dense attention methods, and integrates lightly into existing p...

  5. Salca: A Sparsity-Aware Hardware Accelerator for Efficient Long-Context Attention Decoding

    cs.AR 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    Salca is a new ASIC accelerator that achieves 3.82× speedup and 74.19× energy efficiency over A100 for long-context attention via dual-compression dynamic sparse attention and pipelined hardware.

  6. An Efficient Hybrid Sparse Attention with CPU-GPU Parallelism for Long-Context Inference

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0 of 10

    Fluxion achieves 1.5x-3.7x speedup in long-context LLM inference with CPU KV caches while limiting accuracy degradation to at most 0.26 relative to full attention.

  7. AQUA: Attention via QUery mAgnitudes for Memory and Compute Efficient Inference in LLMs

    cs.LG 2025-09 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    A training-free method that prunes low-magnitude dimensions of projected query/key vectors in attention, cutting dot-product cost by 25% with small benchmark degradation.

  8. ReasonCache: Accelerating Large Reasoning Model Serving through KV Cache Sharing

    cs.LG 2025-07 unverdicted novelty 5.0 of 10

    ReasonCache reuses similar KV cache states across reasoning steps in LRMs via collaborative filtering to boost serving throughput by up to 89.2% while preserving accuracy.

  9. Sparse Attention Remapping with Clustering for Efficient LLM Decoding on PIM

    cs.CL 2025-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0 of 10

    STARC remaps sparse KV caches by semantic clustering for PIM hardware, delivering 19-31% lower attention latency and 19-27% lower energy versus token-wise sparsity, with larger gains under tight KV budgets.

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