aiqbench analysis
BinaryPC addresses the self-attention bottleneck in long-context LLMs by introducing a training-free hashing method based on binary principal components, offering significant throughput gains over standard kernels without sacrificing accuracy. This approach eliminates the need for gradient-based optimization or expensive learned hash functions while preserving critical data structure during decoding phases. The technique represents a notable advancement in efficient sparse attention mechanisms for large-scale language model deployment.
Training-Free Hashing-Based Attention via Binary Principal Components
arXiv:2608.04405v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-context large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, yet self-attention remains a major efficiency bottleneck -- especially during decoding -- due to the necessity of repeatedly processing ever-growing key-value (KV) caches. Existing sparse attention reduce computation by attending to fewer KV pairs, but often suffer from substantial accuracy degradation, require additional training, or rely on expensive hashing. In this work, we present BinaryPC, a training-free, data-aware hashing-based sparse attention for long-context LLMs. BinaryPC constructs compact binary hash codes and corresponding hash function by computing binary principal components of data. Unlike Locality-Sensitive Hashing (LSH) with data-independent random projections or learned non-linear hashing methods, BinaryPC constructs binary codes that explicitly preserve the structural information of data without requiring gradient-based training. Comprehensive experiments across multiple model families and long-context benchmarks show that BinaryPC preserves accuracy relative to full attention while achieving superior performance among sparse and hashing-based baselines. On modern GPUs, BinaryPC improves end-to-end decoding throughput by 3.56$\times$ over the FlashAttention kernel. Our code is available at https://github.com/yudaohai666/BPC.
Abstract:Long-context large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, yet self-attention remains a major efficiency bottleneck -- especially during decoding -- due to the necessity of repeatedly processing ever-growing key-value (KV) caches. Existing sparse attention reduce computation by attending to fewer KV pairs, but often suffer from substantial accuracy degradation, require additional training, or rely on expensive hashing. In this work, we present BinaryPC, a training-free, data-aware hashing-based sparse attention for long-context LLMs. BinaryPC constructs compact binary hash codes and corresponding hash function by computing binary principal components of data. Unlike Locality-Sensitive Hashing (LSH) with data-independent random projections or learned non-linear hashing methods, BinaryPC constructs binary codes that explicitly preserve the structural information of data without requiring gradient-based training. Comprehensive experiments across multiple model families and long-context benchmarks show that BinaryPC preserves accuracy relative to full attention while achieving superior performance among sparse and hashing-based baselines. On modern GPUs, BinaryPC improves end-to-end decoding throughput by 3.56$\times$ over the FlashAttention kernel. Our code is available at this https URL.
Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL)
arXiv:2608.04405 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2608.04405v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.04405 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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