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SampleAttention: Near-Lossless Acceleration of Long Context LLM Inference with Adaptive Structured Sparse Attention

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arxiv 2406.15486 v3 pith:HWHR52P5 submitted 2024-06-17 cs.CL cs.AIcs.LG

SampleAttention: Near-Lossless Acceleration of Long Context LLM Inference with Adaptive Structured Sparse Attention

classification cs.CL cs.AIcs.LG
keywords attentionsparsepatternssampleattentionlongnear-losslessaccuracyadaptive
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Large language models (LLMs) now support extremely long context windows, but the quadratic complexity of vanilla attention results in significantly long Time-to-First-Token (TTFT) latency. Existing approaches to address this complexity require additional pretraining or finetuning, and often sacrifice model accuracy. In this paper, we first provide both theoretical and empirical foundations for near-lossless sparse attention. We find dynamically capturing head-specific sparse patterns at runtime with low overhead is crucial. To address this, we propose SampleAttention, an adaptive structured and near-lossless sparse attention. Leveraging observed significant sparse patterns, SampleAttention attends to a fixed percentage of adjacent tokens to capture local window patterns, and employs a two-stage query-guided key-value filtering approach, which adaptively select a minimum set of key-values with low overhead, to capture column stripe patterns. Comprehensive evaluations show that SampleAttention can seamlessly replace vanilla attention in off-the-shelf LLMs with nearly no accuracy loss, and reduces TTFT by up to $2.42\times$ compared with FlashAttention.

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Forward citations

Cited by 6 Pith papers

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

  1. GhostServe: A Lightweight Checkpointing System in the Shadow for Fault-Tolerant LLM Serving

    cs.DC 2026-03 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    GhostServe applies erasure coding to KV cache in host memory for fast recovery from failures in LLM serving, cutting checkpointing latency up to 2.7x and recovery latency 2.1x versus prior methods.

  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. CSAttention: Centroid-Scoring Attention for Accelerating LLM Inference

    cs.LG 2026-03 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    CSAttention precomputes fixed-size query-centric lookup tables in offline prefill to enable fast table-lookup decoding, delivering near-identical accuracy to full attention and up to 4.6x speedup at 95% sparsity for 3...

  5. vAttention: Verified Sparse Attention

    cs.LG 2025-10 conditional novelty 6.0

    vAttention is a sparse attention method that mixes heavy-hitter tokens with a statistically sized random sample to provide (ε, δ)-guaranteed approximation of full attention.

  6. SIFT: Selective-Index For Fast Compute of RAG Prefill by Exploiting Attention Invariance

    cs.AI 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    SIFT precomputes selective attention indices via local and cross-attention invariance to speed RAG prefill 1.71x while keeping accuracy within 1% of full recompute, storing only bit vectors 24,000x smaller than KV tensors.