Unifying Sparse Attention with Hierarchical Memory for Scalable Long-Context LLM Serving
Long-context LLM serving is bottlenecked by the cost of attending over ever-growing KV caches. Dynamic sparse attention promises relief by accessing only a small, query-dependent subset of the KV state per decoding step and extending the KV storage to CPU memory. In practice, however, these algorithmic savings rarely translate into end-to-end system-level gains because sparse methods typically operate at different granularities and thus rely on ad hoc, per-algorithm implementations. At the same time, hierarchical KV storage introduces a new systems bottleneck: retrieving fine-grained, irregular KV subsets across the GPU-CPU boundary can easily erase the benefits of sparsity. We present SP...
| Authors | Zihan Zhao, Baotong Lu, Shengjie Lin et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 29 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 April 2026 |
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