CoSA: Accelerating Long-Context Inference via Proxy-Kernel Co-Designed Sparse Attention
The quadratic cost of self-attention makes long-context inference prohibitively expensive, and proxy-based block-sparse attention has become a practical remedy. Existing methods typically rely on a proxy to predict a binary sparse mask and a kernel to consume this mask and perform sparse attention computation. Such an approach is effective under moderate budgets. However, as the budget tightens, the estimated proxy inevitably drops some salient blocks, while the kernel can only apply the sparse mask mechanically, leading to an evident drop in model accuracy. We propose CoSA, a two-stage training-free Sparse Attention under proxy-kernel CO-design, which couples a Kernel-Aware Proxy (KAP) w...
| Authors | Yufei Xue, Lin Niu, Hong Liu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 28 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 August 2026 |
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