Stratified Sparse Attention: Reducing the Sparse-to-Dense Gap at Extreme Sparsity

arXiv:2610.28441v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Model inference over long contexts is increasingly bottlenecked by the cost of attending to a growing Key-Value (KV) cache. Sparse attention reduces this cost by accessing only a fraction of the cache, but existing methods face a trade-off between deterministic retrieval, which captures high-scoring tokens but discards residual attention mass, and sampling, which improves coverage at the cost of higher variance. Hybrid methods combine top-$k$ retrieval with uniform sampling, yet still exhibit a substantial gap from dense attention

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