SAS: Simple Attention Sparsification via End-to-End Optimization of Context Ranking
Post-training attention sparsification reduces the quadratic cumulative attention cost of pretrained Transformers by selecting a small set of context units (tokens or blocks) for each query. Existing trainable methods usually use a lightweight selector to score context units, followed by hard Top-K selection that blocks gradients from the language modeling loss. Consequently, these methods commonly distill layer-wise dense attention distributions. Although this encourages the selector to rank context units by dense attention weights in the original model, the ranking is not directly aligned with their impact on predictions under a fixed attention budget (i.e., the number of attended conte...
| Authors | Zhiwei Li, Lei Zhu, Hao Gu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 11 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 11 September 2026 |
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