| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide array of text-centric tasks, however, their ‘large’ scale introduces significant computational and storage challenges, particularly in managing the key-value states of the transformer, which limits their wider applicability. |
| Approach: | They propose to release resources from caches and rebuild key-value states by a lightweight controller module to approximate an ideal top-K sparse attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a significant throughput improvement of 221.8% over full attention and a model with 7 billion tokens. |
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| Challenge: | Efficient long-context inference remains a major challenge for large language models (LLMs), as the cost of attention computation during auto-regressive decoding grows linearly with the context length. |
| Approach: | They propose to model token importance as a dynamic process that evolves over decoding steps and propagates through model layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline sparse attention methods and achieves speedups of up to 5.36 for attention latency and 2.33 for end-to-end decoding. |
Sparse-to-Dense: A Free Lunch for Lossless Acceleration of Video Understanding in LLMs (2025.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have achieved exceptional performance on tasks like video question answering and captioning. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoding strategy that leverages sparse top-K attention and dense full attention to accelerate Video-LLMs without loss. |
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Evaluating Tokenizer Adaptation Methods for Large Language Models on Low-Resource Programming Languages (2025.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) trained on high-resource programming languages perform sub-optimally for low-resourced programming languages (LRPLs). |
| Approach: | They evaluate the impact of tokenizer adaptation methods on improving code generation for LRPLs. |
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Attention Score is not All You Need for Token Importance Indicator in KV Cache Reduction: Value Also Matters (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on scaling the context size of large language models (LLMs) however, the enormous inference costs of LLMs limit their applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which uses attention scores and the l 1 norm to evaluate token importance. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on LLaMA2-7B-chat and Vicuna-v1.5-7B show that the proposed method outperforms attention-score-only baselines in over 12 tasks. |
Cross-layer Attention Sharing for Pre-trained Large Language Models (2026.tacl-1)
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Yongyu Mu, Yuzhang Wu, Yuchun Fan, Chenglong Wang, Hengyu Li, Jiali Zeng, Qiaozhi He, Murun Yang, Fandong Meng, Jie Zhou, Tong Xiao, Jingbo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on compressing the Key-Value cache or grouping attention heads, while overlooking redundancy between layers. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight substitute for self-attention in well-trained LLMs that uses feed-forward networks to align attention heads between adjacent layers and low-rank matrices to approximate differences in layer-wise attention weights. |
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Learning What to Remember: Adaptive Probabilistic Memory Retention for Memory-Efficient Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Adaptive Retention is a probabilistic, layer-wise token selection mechanism that learns which representations to keep under a strict global budget M. |
| Approach: | They propose a probabilistic token selection mechanism that learns which representations to keep under a strict global budget M. |
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HATA: Trainable and Hardware-Efficient Hash-Aware Top-k Attention for Scalable Large Model Inference (2025.findings-acl)
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Ping Gong, Jiawei Yi, Shengnan Wang, Juncheng Zhang, Zewen Jin, Ouxiang Zhou, Ruibo Liu, Guanbin Xu, Youhui Bai, Bowen Ye, Kun Yuan, Tong Yang, Gong Zhang, Renhai Chen, Feng Wu, Cheng Li
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| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves 7.2 speedup compared to current top-k attention methods while maintaining model accuracy. |
RaaS: Reasoning-Aware Attention Sparsity for Efficient LLM Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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Junhao Hu, Wenrui Huang, Weidong Wang, Zhenwen Li, Tiancheng Hu, Zhixia Liu, Xusheng Chen, Tao Xie, Yizhou Shan
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities across various domains, but their large-scale deployment faces a major obstacle: the high computational cost of long-sequence inference. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that retains key-value vectors until they are no longer needed to solve reasoning tasks. |
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SmartTrim: Adaptive Tokens and Attention Pruning for Efficient Vision-Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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Zekun Wang, Jingchang Chen, Wangchunshu Zhou, Haichao Zhu, Jiafeng Liang, Liping Shan, Ming Liu, Dongliang Xu, Qing Yang, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that SmartTrim accelerates the original model by 2-3 times with minimal performance degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive acceleration framework which prunes redundant token representations and attention heads within each layer of the original model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework accelerates the original model by 2-3 times with minimal performance degradation across vision-language tasks. |
IntactKV: Improving Large Language Model Quantization by Keeping Pivot Tokens Intact (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing quantization methods are compromising performance of large language models (LLMs) despite their high computational intensity, LLMs are still demanding intensive computation. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate the KV cache of pivot tokens losslessly from the full-precision model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates the KV cache of pivot tokens losslessly from the full-precision model with no extra inference overhead. |