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Loki: Low-rank Keys for Efficient Sparse Attention

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arxiv 2406.02542 v2 pith:LLIL342S submitted 2024-06-04 cs.LG

Loki: Low-rank Keys for Efficient Sparse Attention

classification cs.LG
keywords attentioncostslokimodelsself-attentioncomputationcomputecomputed
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Inference on large language models (LLMs) can be expensive in terms of the compute and memory costs involved, especially when long sequence lengths are used. In particular, the self-attention mechanism used in LLM inference contributes significantly to these costs, which has sparked an interest in approximating the self-attention computation to reduce such costs. In this work, we propose to approximate self-attention by focusing on the dimensionality of key vectors computed in the attention block. Our analysis reveals that key vectors lie in a significantly lower-dimensional space, consistently across several datasets and models. Exploiting this observation, we propose Loki, a novel sparse attention method that ranks and selects tokens in the KV-cache based on attention scores computed in low-dimensional space. Our evaluations show that Loki is able to speed up the attention computation due to reduced data movement (load/store) and compute costs while maintaining the efficacy of the models better than other popular approximation methods.

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

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

  1. COBS: Cumulant Order Block Sparse Attention

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.0

    A compressed within-block key covariance lets block-sparse attention recover most of dense long-context retrieval quality at roughly first-order selector traffic.

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

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    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.

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

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    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...

  4. Why Attend to Everything? Focus is the Key

    cs.CL 2026-03 conditional novelty 6.0

    Focus learns a few centroids to gate long-range token attention, producing sparse attention that matches or beats full attention quality with up to 8.6x speedup at million-token lengths.

  5. RetrievalAttention: Accelerating Long-Context LLM Inference via Vector Retrieval

    cs.LG 2024-09 conditional novelty 6.0

    RetrievalAttention approximates full attention in long-context LLMs by retrieving relevant KV vectors from CPU-based ANNS indexes with an attention-aware algorithm, achieving near-full accuracy while accessing only 1-...

  6. HieraSparse: Hierarchical Semi-Structured Sparse KV Attention

    cs.DC 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    HieraSparse delivers a hierarchical semi-structured sparse KV attention system that achieves 1.2x KV compression and 4.57x decode attention speedup versus prior unstructured sparsity methods at equivalent sparsity, pl...