GLIDE: Guided Layerwise Hybrid Attention for Efficient LLM Inference

Abstract:As Large Language Models scale to increasingly long contexts, the memory I/O and computational overhead of the Key-Value (KV) cache during decoding emerges as the primary throughput bottleneck. To address this, we propose GLIDE, a Guided Layerwise Hybrid Attention that strategically integrates sliding-window softmax attention with linear recurrent aggregation. GLIDE is motivated by layer-wise heterogeneity: early layers exhibit high sensitivity to softmax removal, while deeper layers demonstrate redundancy and tolerate aggressive replacement by linear alternatives. Leveraging this insight, GLIDE introduces a layer-wise adaptive mechanism wherein each layer balances an efficient linear recurrence with a variable-sized softmax window. Unlike uniform hybrid approaches, GLIDE non-uniformly compresses the softmax footprint across the model, reducing aggregate KV cache I/O while preserving expressive power where most vital. Empirical evaluations demonstrate the GLIDE achieves superior performance-efficiency tradeoffs, reducing end-to-end latency for long-context generation without compromising quality.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2607.24788 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2607.24788v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.24788 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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