Daily Papers

Sparse attention reduces the KV-cache traffic that dominates long-context LLM decoding, but practical methods largely operate at coarse granularity. Token-level selection offers finer control, yet presents two challenges: low-dimensional scoring may lose query--key structure needed for accurate ranking, while gathering scattered selected tokens can offset the resulting latency benefit. We introduce Joint Subspace Sparse Attention (JSSA) to address both challenges. For selection quality, JSSA learns a shared low-dimensional query--key subspace by minimizing token-score preservation error. We upper-bound the resulting non-convex objective with a tractable marginal objective that admits a closed-form spectral solution; direct refinement of the exact objective provides no measurable improvement in the tested settings. For execution efficiency, we develop a gather-free token-level indexed-attention kernel that supports distinct per-KV-head selections under the standard grouped-query attention (GQA) KV-cache layout. Across standard GQA, hybrid sliding-window/global attention, and Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) models, JSSA consistently remains close to full-KV accuracy while avoiding the substantial generation-length inflation and architecture-dependent failures observed with competing methods. On an NVIDIA B200 GPU, JSSA achieves up to 6.43times the decoding throughput of full-KV attention at 128K context. JSSA achieves reasoning accuracy comparable to model-native DSA without model training and reaches 96--99\% of its decoding throughput even at 700B scale large models.

Visual Geometry Grounded Transformers (VGGT) have set new benchmarks in high-fidelity 3D scene reconstruction. However, as the sequence length increases, these models suffer from catastrophic geometric forgetting and accumulation drift, primarily due to the quadratic complexity of global attention which necessitates truncated temporal windows. To overcome the resulting geometric drift, we present Mamba-VGGT, an enhanced VGGT framework capable of persistent long-range reasoning. Our key contribution is a Sliding Window Mamba (SWM) memory module that maintains an explicit external memory token across temporal windows. This module leverages selective state-space modeling to distill and propagate global geometric priors, effectively bypassing the memory constraints of traditional transformers. To integrate these long-term temporal cues without disrupting the highly optimized spatial features of the pre-trained VGGT, we propose a Zero-Init Spatial Memory Injector. Utilizing zero-convolutional layers, this injector adaptively fuses persistent memory into the patch token stream, ensuring structural stability and seamless feature alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing VGGT-based methods in maintaining spatial consistency and reducing trajectory accumulation errors. Our work provides a scalable, linear-complexity solution for geometry-grounded world modeling in extensive 3D environments.

Listwise rerankers are the discriminative core of agentic retrieval pipelines, yet production deployment demands efficiency, domain robustness, and fluency on semi-structured data at the same time. We present jina-reranker-v3.5, a 0.6B-parameter listwise reranker that meets these demands together without sacrificing the cross-document comparison that makes its predecessor jina-reranker-v3 effective. jina-reranker-v3.5 keeps the last-but-not-late (LBNL) interaction of jina-reranker-v3 and reworks it along three axes. It replaces uniform global attention with a hybrid schedule of three sliding-window layers followed by two global layers, pinning the terminal layer to global as LBNL readout requires. It trains on a curated multi-domain mixture that spans legal, medical, financial, multilingual, and structured retrieval. It transfers quality through a three-stage self-distillation recipe in which a full-attention teacher sets an upper bound that a sparse-attention student then recovers under a staged adaptation protocol. jina-reranker-v3.5 reaches 63.20 nDCG@10 on BEIR, matching a 4B model at roughly 7x fewer parameters, and improves over jina-reranker-v3 on MIRACL and RTEB as well. Its largest gains come on semi-structured retrieval, where it lifts nDCG@10 by 9.6 points over jina-reranker-v3 and leads all rerankers of comparable size. The hybrid schedule further cuts listwise inference latency by up to 1.56x. We release the model weights on Hugging Face under a non-commercial license.

The ability to process ultra-long contexts is crucial for large language models (LLMs) to perform long-horizon tasks. While recent efforts have extended context windows to 1M and beyond, model performance degrades when sequence length exceeds the pre-trained range of positional encodings (e.g., RoPE), i.e., position exhaustion. This fundamental limitation must be overcome to achieve a truly infinite context. To address it, we propose Periodic RoPE (P-RoPE), a positional encoding mechanism designed to circumvent this exhaustion. It operates in conjunction with sliding window attention (SWA) to capture local dependencies and relative positions within each window. This local layer is then complemented by a global attention layer with No Positional Encoding (NoPE), enabling unbounded interaction across the entire sequence without positional constraints. By stacking these two types of layers, the model avoids the need for positional extrapolation to generalize longer and theoretically supports an infinite context window. Empirical results show that our model, MiniWin, outperforms MiniMInd with standard GPT architectures in long-context efficiency and stability. Our work provides a possible pathway toward LLMs with genuine infinite-context understanding. The code is available at https://github.com/Cominder/miniwin{https://github.com/Cominder/miniwin}.

We present MiMo-V2-Flash, a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with 309B total parameters and 15B active parameters, designed for fast, strong reasoning and agentic capabilities. MiMo-V2-Flash adopts a hybrid attention architecture that interleaves Sliding Window Attention (SWA) with global attention, with a 128-token sliding window under a 5:1 hybrid ratio. The model is pre-trained on 27 trillion tokens with Multi-Token Prediction (MTP), employing a native 32k context length and subsequently extended to 256k. To efficiently scale post-training compute, MiMo-V2-Flash introduces a novel Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD) paradigm. In this framework, domain-specialized teachers (e.g., trained via large-scale reinforcement learning) provide dense and token-level reward, enabling the student model to perfectly master teacher expertise. MiMo-V2-Flash rivals top-tier open-weight models such as DeepSeek-V3.2 and Kimi-K2, despite using only 1/2 and 1/3 of their total parameters, respectively. During inference, by repurposing MTP as a draft model for speculative decoding, MiMo-V2-Flash achieves up to 3.6 acceptance length and 2.6x decoding speedup with three MTP layers. We open-source both the model weights and the three-layer MTP weights to foster open research and community collaboration.

Transformers with linear attention (i.e., linear transformers) and state-space models have recently been suggested as a viable linear-time alternative to transformers with softmax attention. However, these models still underperform transformers especially on tasks that require in-context retrieval. While more expressive variants of linear transformers which replace the additive outer-product update in linear transformers with the delta rule have been found to be more effective at associative recall, existing algorithms for training such models do not parallelize over sequence length and are thus inefficient to train on modern hardware. This work describes a hardware-efficient algorithm for training linear transformers with the delta rule, which exploits a memory-efficient representation for computing products of Householder matrices. This algorithm allows us to scale up DeltaNet to standard language modeling settings. We train a 1.3B model for 100B tokens and find that it outperforms recent linear-time baselines such as Mamba and GLA in terms of perplexity and zero-shot performance on downstream tasks (including on tasks that focus on recall). We also experiment with two hybrid models which combine DeltaNet layers with (1) sliding-window attention layers every other layer or (2) two global attention layers, and find that these hybrid models outperform strong transformer baselines.

In this work, we conduct a systematic analysis of Native Sparse Attention (NSA) and propose targeted improvements that enhance long-context modeling. A key insight is that alternating between local (sliding-window) and global (compression, selective) attention across layers, rather than using fixed patterns, enables more effective propagation of long-range dependencies and substantially boosts performance on long-sequence tasks. Meanwhile, we further refine NSA's branches with Latent Attention that the sliding-window branch is enhanced with Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) while compression and selective branches adopt Group-head Latent Attention (GLA). These changes reduce KV-cache memory by 50\% versus NSA while improving the model's common-sense reasoning and long-text understanding capabilities. Experiments on models from 340M to 1.3B parameters (trained on 15B and 100B tokens) show our method matches or exceeds full attention and native sparse attention in both common-sense reasoning and long-context understanding tasks.

Modern large language models based on softmax scaled-dot-product attention are constrained by their training sequence length: as the key-value sequence grows, softmax probability mass can dilute across a wider distribution, inducing activation shift and long-context performance collapse. Moreover, long-context language modeling faces a structural tension: a sliding-window attention core maintains a bounded local representation and low perplexity but is blind to long-range dependencies, while full-context attention preserves global recall but suffers from out-of-distribution perplexity explosion. To resolve these limitations, we introduce ATMA, a hybrid convolutional-attention architecture that integrates a novel three-channel attention mechanism. ATMA factorizes the attention mixing step into: (1) a count-blind, unit-vector direction channel, (2) a bounded magnitude channel driven by the participation ratio of effective matches over an extreme-value-corrected null sink, and (3) a long-term recurrent compression memory optimized via a gated-delta fast-weights rule. Neither the Polar Attention core nor the recurrent memory is sufficient alone; their combination enables monotonic perplexity reduction and high-fidelity long-range retrieval simultaneously. We evaluate ATMA using a 100-run factorial ablation sweep, demonstrating that the combined Polar + memory model maintains induction needle-in-a-haystack retrieval accuracy above 90% out to 64K tokens (32 times the training length of 2K) while its document perplexity improves monotonically, outperforming softmax-based memory baselines which collapse at extreme context lengths. Code: https://github.com/kreasof-ai/atma

We propose Lizard, a linearization framework that transforms pretrained Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) into flexible, subquadratic architectures for infinite-context generation. Transformer-based LLMs face significant memory and computational bottlenecks as context lengths increase, due to the quadratic complexity of softmax attention and the growing key-value (KV) cache. Lizard addresses these limitations by introducing a subquadratic attention mechanism that closely approximates softmax attention while preserving the output quality. Unlike previous linearization methods, which are often limited by fixed model structures and therefore exclude gating mechanisms, Lizard incorporates a gating module inspired by recent state-of-the-art linear models. This enables adaptive memory control, supports constant-memory inference, offers strong length generalization, and allows more flexible model design. Lizard combines gated linear attention for global context compression with sliding window attention enhanced by meta memory, forming a hybrid mechanism that captures both long-range dependencies and fine-grained local interactions. Moreover, we introduce a hardware-aware algorithm that accelerates the training speed of our models. Extensive experiments show that Lizard achieves near-lossless recovery of the teacher model's performance across standard language modeling tasks, while significantly outperforming previous linearization methods. On the 5-shot MMLU benchmark, Lizard improves over prior models by 18 points and shows significant improvements on associative recall tasks.

The quadratic time and memory complexity of the attention mechanism in modern Transformer based video generators makes end-to-end training for ultra high resolution videos prohibitively expensive. Motivated by this limitation, we introduce a training-free approach that leverages video Diffusion Transformers pretrained at their native scale to synthesize higher resolution videos without any additional training or adaptation. At the core of our method lies an inward sliding window attention mechanism, which originates from a key observation: maintaining each query token's training scale receptive field is crucial for preserving visual fidelity and detail. However, naive local window attention, unfortunately, often leads to repetitive content and exhibits a lack of global coherence in the generated results. To overcome this challenge, we devise a dual-path pipeline that backs up window attention with a novel cross-attention override strategy, enabling the semantic content produced by local attention to be guided by another branch with a full receptive field and, therefore, ensuring holistic consistency. Furthermore, to improve efficiency, we incorporate a cross-attention caching strategy for this branch to avoid the frequent computation of full 3D attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method delivers ultra-high-resolution videos with fine-grained visual details and high efficiency in a training-free paradigm. Meanwhile, it achieves superior performance on VBench, even compared to training-based alternatives, with competitive or improved efficiency. Codes are available at: https://github.com/WillWu111/FreeSwim

The whole-brain connectome of a fruit fly comprises over 130K neurons connected with a probability of merely 0.02%, yet achieves an average shortest path of only 4.4 hops. Despite being highly structured at the circuit level, the network's long-range connections are broadly distributed across brain regions, functioning as stochastic shortcuts that enable efficient global communication. Inspired by this observation, we propose Stochastic Attention (SA), a drop-in enhancement for sliding-window attention (SWA) that applies a random permutation to the token sequence before windowed attention and restores the original order afterward. This transforms the fixed local window into a stochastic global one within the same O(nw) per-layer budget. Through depth, independently sampled permutations yield exponentially growing receptive fields, achieving full sequence coverage in O(log_w n) layers versus O(n/w) for SWA. We validate SA in two settings: pre-training language models from scratch, where a gated SA + SWA combination achieves the best average zero-shot accuracy, and training-free inference on Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-30B-A3B, where SA consistently outperforms SWA and matches or exceeds Mixture of Block Attention at comparable compute budgets. These results suggest that connectome-inspired stochastic routing is a practical primitive for improving the expressivity of efficient attention, complementary to existing linear and sparse approaches.

Linearizing pretrained large language models (LLMs) primarily relies on intra-layer hybrid attention mechanisms to alleviate the quadratic complexity of standard softmax attention. Existing methods perform token routing based on sliding-window partitions, resulting in position-based selection and fails to capture token-specific global importance. Meanwhile, linear attention further suffers from distribution shift caused by learnable feature maps that distort pretrained feature magnitudes. Motivated by these limitations, we propose STILL, an intra-layer hybrid linearization framework for efficiently linearizing LLMs. STILL introduces a Self-Saliency Score with strong local-global consistency, enabling accurate token selection using sliding-window computation, and retains salient tokens for sparse softmax attention while summarizing the remaining context via linear attention. To preserve pretrained representations, we design a Norm-Preserved Feature Map (NP-Map) that decouples feature direction from magnitude and reinjects pretrained norms. We further adopt a unified training-inference architecture with chunk-wise parallelization and delayed selection to improve hardware efficiency. Experiments show that STILL matches or surpasses the original pretrained model on commonsense and general reasoning tasks, and achieves up to a 86.2% relative improvement over prior linearized attention methods on long-context benchmarks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful but often too slow and costly for real-world use during inference. Looped transformers save on parameters by reusing the same weights for multiple computational steps, or "loops." However, this approach has a major flaw: the loops run one after another, causing inference latency and memory requirements to increase with each added loop. This makes them impractical for fast applications. To solve this problem, we introduce the Parallel Loop Transformer (PLT). PLT is a new architecture that delivers the performance benefits of a deep, looped model but with the low latency of a standard, non-looped model. PLT works using two key techniques. First, Cross-Loop Parallelism (CLP) breaks the sequential dependency by computing different loops for different tokens at the same time, all within a single pass. Second, to prevent memory costs from growing, we use an Efficient Representation Enhancement strategy. This method shares the memory (KV cache) from the first loop with all other loops. It then uses a Gated Sliding-Window Attention (G-SWA) to combine this shared global information with local information, maintaining high accuracy. Our experiments show that PLT achieves the high accuracy of a traditional looped model but with almost no extra latency or memory cost compared to a standard transformer.

We present MagicInfinite, a novel diffusion Transformer (DiT) framework that overcomes traditional portrait animation limitations, delivering high-fidelity results across diverse character types-realistic humans, full-body figures, and stylized anime characters. It supports varied facial poses, including back-facing views, and animates single or multiple characters with input masks for precise speaker designation in multi-character scenes. Our approach tackles key challenges with three innovations: (1) 3D full-attention mechanisms with a sliding window denoising strategy, enabling infinite video generation with temporal coherence and visual quality across diverse character styles; (2) a two-stage curriculum learning scheme, integrating audio for lip sync, text for expressive dynamics, and reference images for identity preservation, enabling flexible multi-modal control over long sequences; and (3) region-specific masks with adaptive loss functions to balance global textual control and local audio guidance, supporting speaker-specific animations. Efficiency is enhanced via our innovative unified step and cfg distillation techniques, achieving a 20x inference speed boost over the basemodel: generating a 10 second 540x540p video in 10 seconds or 720x720p in 30 seconds on 8 H100 GPUs, without quality loss. Evaluations on our new benchmark demonstrate MagicInfinite's superiority in audio-lip synchronization, identity preservation, and motion naturalness across diverse scenarios. It is publicly available at https://www.hedra.com/, with examples at https://magicinfinite.github.io/.

Feedforward geometric foundation models achieve strong short-window reconstruction, yet scaling them to minutes-long videos is bottlenecked by quadratic attention complexity or limited effective memory in recurrent designs. We present LoGeR (Long-context Geometric Reconstruction), a novel architecture that scales dense 3D reconstruction to extremely long sequences without post-optimization. LoGeR processes video streams in chunks, leveraging strong bidirectional priors for high-fidelity intra-chunk reasoning. To manage the critical challenge of coherence across chunk boundaries, we propose a learning-based hybrid memory module. This dual-component system combines a parametric Test-Time Training (TTT) memory to anchor the global coordinate frame and prevent scale drift, alongside a non-parametric Sliding Window Attention (SWA) mechanism to preserve uncompressed context for high-precision adjacent alignment. Remarkably, this memory architecture enables LoGeR to be trained on sequences of 128 frames, and generalize up to thousands of frames during inference. Evaluated across standard benchmarks and a newly repurposed VBR dataset with sequences of up to 19k frames, LoGeR substantially outperforms prior state-of-the-art feedforward methods--reducing ATE on KITTI by over 74%--and achieves robust, globally consistent reconstruction over unprecedented horizons.

Real-time portrait animation is essential for interactive applications such as virtual assistants and live avatars, requiring high visual fidelity, temporal coherence, ultra-low latency, and responsive control from dynamic inputs like reference images and driving signals. While diffusion-based models achieve strong quality, their non-causal nature hinders streaming deployment. Causal autoregressive video generation approaches enable efficient frame-by-frame generation but suffer from error accumulation, motion discontinuities at chunk boundaries, and degraded long-term consistency. In this work, we present a novel streaming framework named Knot Forcing for real-time portrait animation that addresses these challenges through three key designs: (1) a chunk-wise generation strategy with global identity preservation via cached KV states of the reference image and local temporal modeling using sliding window attention; (2) a temporal knot module that overlaps adjacent chunks and propagates spatio-temporal cues via image-to-video conditioning to smooth inter-chunk motion transitions; and (3) A "running ahead" mechanism that dynamically updates the reference frame's temporal coordinate during inference, keeping its semantic context ahead of the current rollout frame to support long-term coherence. Knot Forcing enables high-fidelity, temporally consistent, and interactive portrait animation over infinite sequences, achieving real-time performance with strong visual stability on consumer-grade GPUs.

Electroencephalography (EEG) provides real-time insights into brain activity and supports diverse applications in neuroscience. While EEG foundation models (EFMs) have emerged to address the scalability issues of task-specific models, current approaches still yield clinically uninterpretable and weakly discriminative representations, inefficiently capture global dependencies, and neglect important local neural events. We present CodeBrain, a two-stage EFM designed to fill this gap. In the first stage, we introduce the TFDual-Tokenizer, which decouples heterogeneous temporal and frequency EEG signals into discrete tokens, quadratically expanding the representation space to enhance discriminative power and offering domain-specific interpretability by suggesting potential links to neural events and spectral rhythms. In the second stage, we propose the multi-scale EEGSSM architecture, which combines structured global convolution with sliding window attention to efficiently capture both sparse long-range and local dependencies, reflecting the brain's small-world topology. Pretrained on the largest public EEG corpus, CodeBrain achieves strong generalization across 8 downstream tasks and 10 datasets under distribution shifts, supported by comprehensive ablations, scaling-law analyses, and interpretability evaluations. Both code and pretraining weights will be released in the future version.

World models are transitioning from passive visual generators to foundational, operational infrastructure for Physical AI: they must natively acquire world knowledge from heterogeneous experience, maintain persistent states over long horizons, and execute efficiently within real deployment constraints. We introduce Kairos, a native world model stack designed around these requirements. (1) Kairos learns the world by pioneering a Native Pre-training Paradigm governed by a Cross-Embodiment Data Curriculum, which organizes open-world videos, human behavioral data, and robot interactions into a progressive developmental pathway. (2) Kairos maintains the world by unified world understanding, generation, and prediction within a Native Unified Architecture equipped with Hybrid Linear Temporal Attention, where sliding-window attention captures local dynamics, dilated sliding windows capture mid-range dependencies, and gated linear attention maintains persistent global memory. We establish formal theoretical bounds demonstrating that this temporal factorization strictly limits error accumulation, mathematically guaranteeing state propagation across extended horizons. (3) Kairos runs the world by incorporating a Deployment-Aware System Co-Design to support low-latency rollout generation on server and consumer-grade hardware for real-world observation-action-feedback loops. Experiments on embodied world-model, long-horizon, and action-policy benchmarks show that Kairos achieves top level performance while offering a strong efficiency-capability trade-off. Together, these results position Kairos as a cohesive operational foundation for future self-evolving physical intelligence.

Simulating physics using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) is predominantly driven by message-passing architectures, which face challenges in scaling and efficiency, particularly in handling large, complex meshes. These architectures have inspired numerous enhancements, including multigrid approaches and K-hop aggregation (using neighbours of distance K), yet they often introduce significant complexity and suffer from limited in-depth investigations. In response to these challenges, we propose a novel Graph Transformer architecture that leverages the adjacency matrix as an attention mask. The proposed approach incorporates innovative augmentations, including Dilated Sliding Windows and Global Attention, to extend receptive fields without sacrificing computational efficiency. Through extensive experimentation, we evaluate model size, adjacency matrix augmentations, positional encoding and K-hop configurations using challenging 3D computational fluid dynamics (CFD) datasets. We also train over 60 models to find a scaling law between training FLOPs and parameters. The introduced models demonstrate remarkable scalability, performing on meshes with up to 300k nodes and 3 million edges. Notably, the smallest model achieves parity with MeshGraphNet while being 7times faster and 6times smaller. The largest model surpasses the previous state-of-the-art by 38.8\% on average and outperforms MeshGraphNet by 52\% on the all-rollout RMSE, while having a similar training speed. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/DonsetPG/graph-physics.

The quadratic cost of attention hinders the scalability of long-context LLMs, especially in resource-constrained settings. Existing static sparse methods such as sliding windows or global tokens utilizes the sparsity of attention to reduce the cost of attention, but poorly adapts to the content-dependent variations in attention due to their staticity. While previous work has proposed several dynamic approaches to improve flexibility, they still depend on predefined templates or heuristic mechanisms. Such strategies reduce generality and prune tokens that remain contextually important, limiting their accuracy across diverse tasks. To tackle these bottlenecks of existing methods for long-context modeling, we introduce Dynamic Hierarchical Sparse Attention (DHSA), a data-driven framework that dynamically predicts attention sparsity online without retraining. Our proposed DHSA adaptively segments sequences into variable-length chunks, then computes chunk representations by aggregating the token embeddings within each chunk. To avoid the bias introduced by varying chunk lengths, we apply length-normalized aggregation that scales the averaged embeddings by the square root of the chunk size. Finally, DHSA upsamples the chunk-level similarity scores to token level similarities to calculate importance scores that determine which token-level interactions should be preserved. Our experiments on Gemma2 with Needle-in-a-Haystack Test and LongBench show that DHSA matches dense attention in accuracy, while reducing prefill latency by 20-60% and peak memory usage by 35%. Compared to other representative baselines such as block sparse attention, DHSA achieves consistently higher accuracy (6-18% relative gains) with comparable or lower cost, offering an efficient and adaptable solution for long-context on-device LLMs.

Transformer-based LLMs have achieved exceptional performance across a wide range of NLP tasks. However, the standard self-attention mechanism suffers from quadratic time complexity and linearly increased cache size. Sliding window attention (SWA) solves this problem by restricting the attention range to a fixed-size local context window. Nevertheless, SWA employs a uniform window size for each head in each layer, making it inefficient in capturing context of varying scales. To mitigate this limitation, we propose Multi-Scale Window Attention (MSWA) which applies diverse window sizes across heads and layers in the Transformer. It not only allows for different window sizes among heads within the same layer but also progressively increases window size allocation from shallow to deep layers, thus enabling the model to capture contextual information with different lengths and distances. Experimental results on language modeling and common-sense reasoning tasks substantiate that MSWA outperforms traditional local attention in both effectiveness and efficiency.

Many sparse attention mechanisms such as Neighborhood Attention have typically failed to consistently deliver speedup over the self attention baseline. This is largely due to the level of complexity in attention infrastructure, and the rapid evolution of AI hardware architecture. At the same time, many state-of-the-art foundational models, particularly in computer vision, are heavily bound by attention, and need reliable sparsity to escape the O(n^2) complexity. In this paper, we study a class of promising sparse attention mechanisms that focus on locality, and aim to develop a better analytical model of their performance improvements. We first introduce Generalized Neighborhood Attention (GNA), which can describe sliding window, strided sliding window, and blocked attention. We then consider possible design choices in implementing these approaches, and create a simulator that can provide much more realistic speedup upper bounds for any given setting. Finally, we implement GNA on top of a state-of-the-art fused multi-headed attention (FMHA) kernel designed for the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture in CUTLASS. Our implementation can fully realize the maximum speedup theoretically possible in many perfectly block-sparse cases, and achieves an effective utilization of 1.3 petaFLOPs/second in FP16. In addition, we plug various GNA configurations into off-the-shelf generative models, such as Cosmos-7B, HunyuanVideo, and FLUX, and show that it can deliver 28% to 46% end-to-end speedup on B200 without any fine-tuning. We will open source our simulator and Blackwell kernels directly through the NATTEN project.

When reading books, humans focus primarily on the current page, flipping back to recap prior context only when necessary. Similarly, we demonstrate that Large Language Models (LLMs) can learn to dynamically determine when to attend to global context. We propose All-or-Here Attention (AHA), which utilizes a binary router per attention head to dynamically toggle between full attention and local sliding window attention for each token. Our results indicate that with a window size of 256 tokens, up to 93\% of the original full attention operations can be replaced by sliding window attention without performance loss. Furthermore, by evaluating AHA across various window sizes, we identify a long-tail distribution in context dependency, where the necessity for full attention decays rapidly as the local window expands. By decoupling local processing from global access, AHA reveals that full attention is largely redundant, and that efficient inference requires only on-demand access to the global context.

We present Neighborhood Attention (NA), the first efficient and scalable sliding-window attention mechanism for vision. NA is a pixel-wise operation, localizing self attention (SA) to the nearest neighboring pixels, and therefore enjoys a linear time and space complexity compared to the quadratic complexity of SA. The sliding-window pattern allows NA's receptive field to grow without needing extra pixel shifts, and preserves translational equivariance, unlike Swin Transformer's Window Self Attention (WSA). We develop NATTEN (Neighborhood Attention Extension), a Python package with efficient C++ and CUDA kernels, which allows NA to run up to 40% faster than Swin's WSA while using up to 25% less memory. We further present Neighborhood Attention Transformer (NAT), a new hierarchical transformer design based on NA that boosts image classification and downstream vision performance. Experimental results on NAT are competitive; NAT-Tiny reaches 83.2% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, 51.4% mAP on MS-COCO and 48.4% mIoU on ADE20K, which is 1.9% ImageNet accuracy, 1.0% COCO mAP, and 2.6% ADE20K mIoU improvement over a Swin model with similar size. To support more research based on sliding-window attention, we open source our project and release our checkpoints at: https://github.com/SHI-Labs/Neighborhood-Attention-Transformer .

Modern autoregressive models rely on attention, yet the Softmax full attention in Transformers scales quadratically with sequence length. Sliding Window Attention (SWA) achieves linear-time encoding/decoding by constraining the attention pattern, but under an Associative Memory interpretation, its difference-style update renders the training objective effectively unbounded. In contrast, Softmax attention normalizes updates, leading to memory shrinkage and gradient vanishing. We propose GatedFWA: a Memory-Gated (Flash) Windowed Attention mechanism that preserves SWAs efficiency while stabilizing memory updates and making gradient flow controllable. In essence, GatedFWA accumulate a per-token/head gate into a decay bias added to the attention logits, acting as a learnable contraction in the memory recurrence. We implement a fused one-pass gate preprocessing and a FlashAttention-compatible kernel that injects the gate under a sliding mask, ensuring I/O efficiency and numerical stability. On language modelling benchmarks, GatedFWA delivers competitive throughput with negligible overhead and better use of global context, and it integrates cleanly with token compression/selection methods such as NSA and generalizes to various autoregressive domains.

The architectural design of Large Language Models (LLMs) is shifting from traditional full-attention-only models to hybrid models, which combine different attention modules to improve long-context efficiency and performance in length extrapolation and context extension. To explain why hybrid models work and how to design them better, we propose Mechanics of Long-Context Hybrid Models. As Part 1.1 of this series, we begin with hybrids of full attention and either sliding-window attention (SWA) or gated variants of linear attention (LA), represented by GLA and GDN. We first observe a Seesaw Effect in Context Extension: LA hybrids benefit more from long-context continual pretraining, whereas SWA hybrids perform better under length extrapolation. We attribute this behavior to differences in the positional inductive biases induced by these attention mechanisms. We find that SWA hybrids suffer from a Short-Context Learning Trap, Short-Window Weariness, and Long-Window Laziness, and require extended windows to enhance performance in continual long-context pretraining. For LA hybrids, we summarize the Matthew Effect of Hybrid Position Extrapolation and propose Sliding-Window Linear Attention, achieving 16times training-free length extrapolation while maintaining 100\% accuracy on NIAH-SK1 in 64k context length.

Humans' internal states play a key role in human-machine interaction, leading to the rise of human state estimation as a prominent field. Compared to swift state changes such as surprise and irritation, modeling gradual states like trust and satisfaction are further challenged by label sparsity: long time-series signals are usually associated with a single label, making it difficult to identify the critical span of state shifts. Windowing has been one widely-used technique to enable localized analysis of long time-series data. However, the performance of downstream models can be sensitive to the window size, and determining the optimal window size demands domain expertise and extensive search. To address this challenge, we propose a Selective Windowing Attention Network (SWAN), which employs window prompts and masked attention transformation to enable the selection of attended intervals with flexible lengths. We evaluate SWAN on the task of trust prediction on a new multimodal driving simulation dataset. Experiments show that SWAN significantly outperforms an existing empirical window selection baseline and neural network baselines including CNN-LSTM and Transformer. Furthermore, it shows robustness across a wide span of windowing ranges, compared to the traditional windowing approach.

We present Neural Attention Search (NAtS), a framework that automatically evaluates the importance of each token within a sequence and determines if the corresponding token can be dropped after several steps. This approach can efficiently reduce the KV cache sizes required by transformer-based models during inference and thus reduce inference costs. In this paper, we design a search space that contains three token types: (i) Global Tokens will be preserved and queried by all the following tokens. (ii) Local Tokens survive until the next global token appears. (iii) Sliding Window Tokens have an impact on the inference of a fixed size of the next following tokens. Similar to the One-Shot Neural Architecture Search approach, this token-type information can be learned jointly with the architecture weights via a learnable attention mask. Experiments on both training a new transformer from scratch and fine-tuning existing large language models show that NAtS can efficiently reduce the KV cache size required for the models while maintaining the models' performance.

Neighborhood attention reduces the cost of self attention by restricting each token's attention span to its nearest neighbors. This restriction, parameterized by a window size and dilation factor, draws a spectrum of possible attention patterns between linear projection and self attention. Neighborhood attention, and more generally sliding window attention patterns, have long been bounded by infrastructure, particularly in higher-rank spaces (2-D and 3-D), calling for the development of custom kernels, which have been limited in either functionality, or performance, if not both. In this work, we first show that neighborhood attention can be represented as a batched GEMM problem, similar to standard attention, and implement it for 1-D and 2-D neighborhood attention. These kernels on average provide 895% and 272% improvement in full precision latency compared to existing naive kernels for 1-D and 2-D neighborhood attention respectively. We find certain inherent inefficiencies in all unfused neighborhood attention kernels that bound their performance and lower-precision scalability. We also developed fused neighborhood attention; an adaptation of fused dot-product attention kernels that allow fine-grained control over attention across different spatial axes. Known for reducing the quadratic time complexity of self attention to a linear complexity, neighborhood attention can now enjoy a reduced and constant memory footprint, and record-breaking half precision latency. We observe that our fused kernels successfully circumvent some of the unavoidable inefficiencies in unfused implementations. While our unfused GEMM-based kernels only improve half precision performance compared to naive kernels by an average of 496% and 113% in 1-D and 2-D problems respectively, our fused kernels improve naive kernels by an average of 1607% and 581% in 1-D and 2-D problems respectively.

The self-attention mechanism in Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) scales quadratically with input length, making long-context inference expensive. Sliding window attention (SWA) reduces this cost to linear complexity, but naively enabling complete SWA at inference-time for models pretrained with full attention (FA) causes severe long-context performance degradation due to training-inference mismatch. This makes us wonder: Can FA-pretrained LLMs be well adapted to SWA without pretraining? We investigate this by proposing Sliding Window Attention Adaptation (SWAA), a set of practical recipes that combine five methods for better adaptation: (1) applying SWA only during prefilling; (2) preserving "sink" tokens; (3) interleaving FA/SWA layers; (4) chain-of-thought (CoT); and (5) fine-tuning. Our experiments show that SWA adaptation is feasible while non-trivial: no single method suffices, yet specific synergistic combinations effectively recover the original long-context performance. We further analyze the performance-efficiency trade-offs of different SWAA configurations and provide recommended recipes for diverse scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/yuyijiong/sliding-window-attention-adaptation

Large Language Models (LLMs) encounter significant performance bottlenecks in long-sequence tasks due to the computational complexity and memory overhead inherent in the self-attention mechanism. To address these challenges, we introduce AllMem, a novel and efficient hybrid architecture that integrates Sliding Window Attention (SWA) with non-linear Test-Time Training (TTT) memory networks. AllMem enables models to effectively scale to ultra-long contexts while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. This approach not only overcomes the representation constraints typical of linear memory models but also significantly reduces the computational and memory footprint during long-sequence inference. Furthermore, we implement a Memory-Efficient Fine-Tuning strategy to replace standard attention layers in pre-trained models with memory-augmented sliding window layers. This framework facilitates the efficient transformation of any off-the-shelf pre-trained LLM into an AllMem-based architecture. Empirical evaluations confirm that our 4k window model achieves near-lossless performance on 37k LongBench with a marginal 0.83 drop compared to full attention. Furthermore, on InfiniteBench at a 128k context, our 8k window variant outperforms full attention, which validates the effectiveness of our parameterized memory in mitigating noise and maintaining robust long-range modeling without the prohibitive costs of global attention.

Foundation models offer a promising paradigm for Electroencephalography (EEG) analysis, leveraging generalizable representations from vast unlabeled datasets. Yet, Transformer-based architectures face a critical bottleneck: global attention mechanisms couple the attention memory state to the signal duration, causing memory overflow during continuous monitoring. To address this, we introduce S-CEReBrO (Streaming CEReBrO), an evolution of the CEReBrO architecture designed for continuous monitoring. Our novel Windowed Alternating Attention mechanism factorizes attention computation into fixed-size spatiotemporal windows, guaranteeing constant KV cache memory as only the active window requires resident attention maps. Empirical scaling analysis confirms that windowed alternating attention can process signals 100X longer than full self-attention and 3X longer than low-rank linear attention. Compared to low-rank linear attention on long contexts, windowed alternating attention requires 55% of the memory while increasing inference throughput by 2.1X. Pre-trained on >25,000 hours of recordings from >12,000 subjects, S-CEReBrO achieves state-of-the-art performance on 7 of 11 downstream tasks, with up to 60% fewer parameters. This work represents a significant step toward the realization of efficient, generalizable, and continuous EEG monitoring. An accompanying code repository is available.

Recently, self-attention mechanisms have shown impressive performance in various NLP and CV tasks, which can help capture sequential characteristics and derive global information. In this work, we explore how to extend self-attention modules to better learn subtle feature embeddings for recognizing fine-grained objects, e.g., different bird species or person identities. To this end, we propose a dual cross-attention learning (DCAL) algorithm to coordinate with self-attention learning. First, we propose global-local cross-attention (GLCA) to enhance the interactions between global images and local high-response regions, which can help reinforce the spatial-wise discriminative clues for recognition. Second, we propose pair-wise cross-attention (PWCA) to establish the interactions between image pairs. PWCA can regularize the attention learning of an image by treating another image as distractor and will be removed during inference. We observe that DCAL can reduce misleading attentions and diffuse the attention response to discover more complementary parts for recognition. We conduct extensive evaluations on fine-grained visual categorization and object re-identification. Experiments demonstrate that DCAL performs on par with state-of-the-art methods and consistently improves multiple self-attention baselines, e.g., surpassing DeiT-Tiny and ViT-Base by 2.8% and 2.4% mAP on MSMT17, respectively.

Modern language models increasingly adopt hybrid architectures that combine full attention with efficient attention modules, such as sliding-window attention (SWA) and recurrent sequence mixers. However, how these efficient modules shape model capabilities remains poorly understood. To address this gap, we conduct a systematic analysis across hybrid architectures from three perspectives: scaling behavior, mechanism analysis, and architecture design. First, from a scaling perspective, we find that efficient-attention design primarily affects how fast long-context capability emerges, while different hybrids eventually converge to comparable long-context performance under sufficient training. Second, mechanistically, we show that long-range retrieval is mainly carried by full attention, whereas efficient attention shapes its optimization trajectory. This explains a counter-intuitive phenomenon we call Large-Window Laziness: larger SWA windows can delay the formation of retrieval heads in full-attention layers. Third, guided by this mechanism, we show that applying NoPE to only the full-attention layers of a small-window SWA hybrid substantially improves long-context performance with negligible impact on short-context performance.

Streaming video generation (SVG) distills a pretrained bidirectional video diffusion model into an autoregressive model equipped with sliding window attention (SWA). However, SWA inevitably loses distant history during long video generation, and its computational overhead remains a critical challenge to real-time deployment. In this work, we propose Hybrid Forcing, which jointly optimizes temporal information retention and computational efficiency through a hybrid attention design. First, we introduce lightweight linear temporal attention to preserve long-range dependencies beyond the sliding window. In particular, we maintain a compact key-value state to incrementally absorb evicted tokens, retaining temporal context with negligible memory and computational overhead. Second, we incorporate block-sparse attention into the local sliding window to reduce redundant computation within short-range modeling, reallocating computational capacity toward more critical dependencies. Finally, we introduce a decoupled distillation strategy tailored to the hybrid attention design. A few-step initial distillation is performed under dense attention, then the distillation of our proposed linear temporal and block-sparse attention is activated for streaming modeling, ensuring stable optimization. Extensive experiments on both short- and long-form video generation benchmarks demonstrate that Hybrid Forcing consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. Notably, our model achieves real-time, unbounded 832x480 video generation at 29.5 FPS on a single NVIDIA H100 GPU without quantization or model compression. The source code and trained models are available at https://github.com/leeruibin/hybrid-forcing.

To address the high resolution of image pixels, the Swin Transformer introduces window attention. This mechanism divides an image into non-overlapping windows and restricts attention computation to within each window, significantly enhancing computational efficiency. To further optimize this process, one might consider replacing standard attention with flash attention, which has proven to be more efficient in language models. However, a direct substitution is ineffective. Flash attention is designed for long sequences, whereas window attention deals with shorter sequences but must handle numerous of them in parallel. In this report, we present an optimized solution called Flash Window Attention, tailored specifically for window attention. Flash Window Attention improves attention computation efficiency by up to 300% and enhances end-to-end runtime efficiency by up to 30%. Our code is available online.

Recent works show that hybrid architectures combining sliding window softmax attention layers with linear recurrent neural network (RNN) layers outperform both of these architectures taken separately. However, the impact of the window length and the interplay between softmax attention and linear RNN layers remain under-studied. In this work, we introduce SWAX, a hybrid architecture consisting of sliding-window attention and xLSTM linear RNN layers. A counter-intuitive finding with SWAX is that larger sliding windows do not improve the long-context performance. In fact, short window attention encourages the model to better train the long-term memory of the xLSTM, by relying less on the softmax attention mechanism for long context-retrieval. The issue with small sliding windows is that they are detrimental for short-context tasks, which could be solved with information from moderately larger sliding windows otherwise. Therefore, we train SWAX by stochastically changing the sliding window size, forcing the model to leverage both a longer context window and the xLSTM memory. SWAX trained with stochastic window sizes significantly outperforms regular window attention both on short and long-context problems.

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) with 3D full attention power state-of-the-art video generation, but suffer from prohibitive compute cost -- when generating just a 5-second 720P video, attention alone takes 800 out of 945 seconds of total inference time. This paper introduces sliding tile attention (STA) to address this challenge. STA leverages the observation that attention scores in pretrained video diffusion models predominantly concentrate within localized 3D windows. By sliding and attending over the local spatial-temporal region, STA eliminates redundancy from full attention. Unlike traditional token-wise sliding window attention (SWA), STA operates tile-by-tile with a novel hardware-aware sliding window design, preserving expressiveness while being hardware-efficient. With careful kernel-level optimizations, STA offers the first efficient 2D/3D sliding-window-like attention implementation, achieving 58.79% MFU. Precisely, STA accelerates attention by 2.8-17x over FlashAttention-2 (FA2) and 1.6-10x over FlashAttention-3 (FA3). On the leading video DiT, HunyuanVideo, STA reduces end-to-end latency from 945s (FA3) to 685s without quality degradation, requiring no training. Enabling finetuning further lowers latency to 268s with only a 0.09% drop on VBench.

End-to-end models reach state-of-the-art performance for speech recognition, but global soft attention is not monotonic, which might lead to convergence problems, to instability, to bad generalisation, cannot be used for online streaming, and is also inefficient in calculation. Monotonicity can potentially fix all of this. There are several ad-hoc solutions or heuristics to introduce monotonicity, but a principled introduction is rarely found in literature so far. In this paper, we present a mathematically clean solution to introduce monotonicity, by introducing a new latent variable which represents the audio position or segment boundaries. We compare several monotonic latent models to our global soft attention baseline such as a hard attention model, a local windowed soft attention model, and a segmental soft attention model. We can show that our monotonic models perform as good as the global soft attention model. We perform our experiments on Switchboard 300h. We carefully outline the details of our training and release our code and configs.

Attention within windows has been widely explored in vision transformers to balance the performance, computation complexity, and memory footprint. However, current models adopt a hand-crafted fixed-size window design, which restricts their capacity of modeling long-term dependencies and adapting to objects of different sizes. To address this drawback, we propose Varied-Size Window Attention (VSA) to learn adaptive window configurations from data. Specifically, based on the tokens within each default window, VSA employs a window regression module to predict the size and location of the target window, i.e., the attention area where the key and value tokens are sampled. By adopting VSA independently for each attention head, it can model long-term dependencies, capture rich context from diverse windows, and promote information exchange among overlapped windows. VSA is an easy-to-implement module that can replace the window attention in state-of-the-art representative models with minor modifications and negligible extra computational cost while improving their performance by a large margin, e.g., 1.1\% for Swin-T on ImageNet classification. In addition, the performance gain increases when using larger images for training and test. Experimental results on more downstream tasks, including object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation, further demonstrate the superiority of VSA over the vanilla window attention in dealing with objects of different sizes. The code will be released https://github.com/ViTAE-Transformer/ViTAE-VSA.

MANAR (Memory-augmented Attention with Navigational Abstract Conceptual Representation), contextualization layer generalizes standard multi-head attention (MHA) by instantiating the principles of Global Workspace Theory (GWT). While MHA enables unconstrained all-to-all communication, it lacks the functional bottleneck and global integration mechanisms hypothesized in cognitive models of consciousness. MANAR addresses this by implementing a central workspace through a trainable memory of abstract concepts and an Abstract Conceptual Representation (ACR). The architecture follows a two-stage logic that maps directly to GWT mechanics: (i) an integration phase, where retrieved memory concepts converge to form a collective "mental image" (the ACR) based on input stimuli; and (ii) a broadcasting phase, where this global state navigates and informs the contextualization of individual local tokens. We demonstrate that efficient linear-time scaling is a fundamental architectural byproduct of instantiating GWT functional bottleneck, as routing global information through a constant-sized ACR resolves the quadratic complexity inherent in standard attention. MANAR is a compatible re-parameterization of MHA with identical semantic roles for its projections, enabling knowledge transfer from pretrained transformers via weight-copy and thus overcoming the adoption barriers of structurally incompatible linear-time alternatives. MANAR enables non-convex contextualization, synthesizing representations that provably lie outside the convex hull of input tokens - a mathematical reflection of the creative synthesis described in GWT. Empirical evaluations confirm that MANAR matches or exceeds strong baselines across language (GLUE score of 85.1), vision (83.9% ImageNet-1K), and speech (2.7% WER on LibriSpeech), positioning it as an efficient and expressive alternative to quadratic attention.

Recent work has shown that attention-based language models excel at recall, the ability to ground generations in tokens previously seen in context. However, the efficiency of attention-based models is bottle-necked during inference by the KV-cache's aggressive memory consumption. In this work, we explore whether we can improve language model efficiency (e.g. by reducing memory consumption) without compromising on recall. By applying experiments and theory to a broad set of architectures, we identify a key tradeoff between a model's state size and recall ability. We show that efficient alternatives to attention (e.g. H3, Mamba, RWKV) maintain a fixed-size recurrent state, but struggle at recall. We propose BASED a simple architecture combining linear and sliding window attention. By varying BASED window size and linear attention feature dimension, we can dial the state size and traverse the pareto frontier of the recall-memory tradeoff curve, recovering the full quality of attention on one end and the small state size of attention-alternatives on the other. We train language models up to 1.3b parameters and show that BASED matches the strongest sub-quadratic models (e.g. Mamba) in perplexity and outperforms them on real-world recall-intensive tasks by 6.22 accuracy points. Implementations of linear attention are often less efficient than optimized standard attention implementations. To make BASED competitive, we develop IO-aware algorithms that enable 24x higher throughput on language generation than FlashAttention-2, when generating 1024 tokens using 1.3b parameter models. Code for this work is provided at: https://github.com/HazyResearch/based.

The reasoning pattern of Large language models (LLMs) remains opaque, and Reinforcement learning (RL) typically applies uniform credit across an entire generation, blurring the distinction between pivotal and routine steps. This work positions attention as a privileged substrate that renders the internal logic of LLMs legible, not merely as a byproduct of computation, but as a mechanistic blueprint of reasoning itself. We first distinguish attention heads between locally and globally focused information processing and reveal that locally focused heads produce a sawtooth pattern near the diagonal indicating phrasal chunks, while globally focused heads expose tokens that exert broad downstream influence over future tokens. We formalize these with two metrics: 1) Windowed Average Attention Distance, which measures the extent of backward attention within a clipped window; 2) Future Attention Influence, which quantifies a token's global importance as the average attention it receives from subsequent tokens. Taken together, these signals reveal a recurring preplan-and-anchor mechanism, where the model first performs a long-range contextual reference to generate an introductory token, which is immediately followed by or coincides with a semantic anchor token that organizes subsequent reasoning. Leveraging these insights, we introduce three novel RL strategies that dynamically perform targeted credit assignment to critical nodes (preplan tokens, anchor tokens, and their temporal coupling) and show consistent performance gains across various reasoning tasks. By aligning optimization with the model's intrinsic reasoning rhythm, we aim to transform opaque optimization into an actionable structure-aware process, hoping to offer a potential step toward more transparent and effective optimization of LLM reasoning.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have recently taken computer vision by storm. However, the softmax attention underlying ViTs comes with a quadratic complexity in time and memory, hindering the application of ViTs to high-resolution images. We revisit the attention design and propose a linear attention method to address the limitation, which doesn't sacrifice ViT's core advantage of capturing global representation like existing methods (e.g. local window attention of Swin). We further investigate the key difference between linear attention and softmax attention. Our empirical results suggest that linear attention lacks a fundamental property of concentrating the distribution of the attention matrix. Inspired by this observation, we introduce a local concentration module to enhance linear attention. By incorporating enhanced linear global attention and local window attention, we propose a new ViT architecture, dubbed L^2ViT. Notably, L^2ViT can effectively capture both global interactions and local representations while enjoying linear computational complexity. Extensive experiments demonstrate the strong performance of L^2ViT. On image classification, L^2ViT achieves 84.4% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K without any extra training data or label. By further pre-training on ImageNet-22k, it attains 87.0% when fine-tuned with resolution 384^2. For downstream tasks, L^2ViT delivers favorable performance as a backbone on object detection as well as semantic segmentation.

We design a new family of hybrid CNN-ViT neural networks, named FasterViT, with a focus on high image throughput for computer vision (CV) applications. FasterViT combines the benefits of fast local representation learning in CNNs and global modeling properties in ViT. Our newly introduced Hierarchical Attention (HAT) approach decomposes global self-attention with quadratic complexity into a multi-level attention with reduced computational costs. We benefit from efficient window-based self-attention. Each window has access to dedicated carrier tokens that participate in local and global representation learning. At a high level, global self-attentions enable the efficient cross-window communication at lower costs. FasterViT achieves a SOTA Pareto-front in terms of accuracy \vs image throughput. We have extensively validated its effectiveness on various CV tasks including classification, object detection and segmentation. We also show that HAT can be used as a plug-and-play module for existing networks and enhance them. We further demonstrate significantly faster and more accurate performance than competitive counterparts for images with high resolution. Code is available at https://github.com/NVlabs/FasterViT.

Sliding Window Sum algorithms have been successfully used for training and inference of Deep Neural Networks. We have shown before how both pooling and convolution 1-D primitives could be expressed as sliding sums and evaluated by the compute kernels with a shared structure. In this paper, we present an extensive study of the Sliding Window convolution technique as a more efficient alternative to the commonly used General Matrix Multiplication (GEMM) based convolution in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). The Sliding Window technique addresses the memory bloating problem and demonstrates a significant speedup in 2-D convolution. We explore the performance of this technique on a range of implementations, including custom kernels for specific filter sizes. Our results suggest that the Sliding Window computation kernels can outperform GEMM-based convolution on a CPU and even on dedicated hardware accelerators. This could promote a wider adoption of AI on low-power and low-memory devices without the need for specialized hardware. We also discuss the compatibility of model compression methods and optimized network architectures with the Sliding Window technique, encouraging further research in these areas.

Transformers are quickly becoming one of the most heavily applied deep learning architectures across modalities, domains, and tasks. In vision, on top of ongoing efforts into plain transformers, hierarchical transformers have also gained significant attention, thanks to their performance and easy integration into existing frameworks. These models typically employ localized attention mechanisms, such as the sliding-window Neighborhood Attention (NA) or Swin Transformer's Shifted Window Self Attention. While effective at reducing self attention's quadratic complexity, local attention weakens two of the most desirable properties of self attention: long range inter-dependency modeling, and global receptive field. In this paper, we introduce Dilated Neighborhood Attention (DiNA), a natural, flexible and efficient extension to NA that can capture more global context and expand receptive fields exponentially at no additional cost. NA's local attention and DiNA's sparse global attention complement each other, and therefore we introduce Dilated Neighborhood Attention Transformer (DiNAT), a new hierarchical vision transformer built upon both. DiNAT variants enjoy significant improvements over strong baselines such as NAT, Swin, and ConvNeXt. Our large model is faster and ahead of its Swin counterpart by 1.6% box AP in COCO object detection, 1.4% mask AP in COCO instance segmentation, and 1.4% mIoU in ADE20K semantic segmentation. Paired with new frameworks, our large variant is the new state of the art panoptic segmentation model on COCO (58.5 PQ) and ADE20K (49.4 PQ), and instance segmentation model on Cityscapes (45.1 AP) and ADE20K (35.4 AP) (no extra data). It also matches the state of the art specialized semantic segmentation models on ADE20K (58.1 mIoU), and ranks second on Cityscapes (84.5 mIoU) (no extra data).

Generating images beyond the training resolution of Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) remains challenging, as the number of tokens grows rapidly with resolution, full attention becomes expensive, and outputs often suffer from structural distortions and degraded detail. We identify uniform full attention as the common source of both problems. Attending to all tokens at every step causes quadratic cost and exposes the model to more tokens and relative distances beyond the training range, pushing the model out of distribution. We observe that attention's effective receptive field narrows during denoising, from global in early steps that form structure to local in later steps that refine details. We propose AReA, a training-free attention mechanism whose receptive field evolves from coarse to fine, following the denoising progression. In early steps, AReA applies cross-scale coarse attention over downsampled keys and values, capturing global context, while in later steps it applies local attention within progressively shrinking windows. Without additional parameters or training, experiments show that AReA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art training-free baselines across target resolutions and different models, while also being faster and more efficient.

Window attention and linear attention represent two principal strategies for mitigating the quadratic complexity and ever-growing KV cache in Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, we observe that window-based VLMs suffer performance degradation when sequence length exceeds the window size, while linear attention underperforms on information-intensive tasks such as OCR and document understanding. To overcome these limitations, we propose InfiniteVL, a linear-complexity VLM architecture that synergizes sliding window attention (SWA) with Gated DeltaNet. For achieving competitive multimodal performance under constrained resources, we design a three-stage training strategy comprising distillation pretraining, instruction tuning, and long-sequence SFT. Remarkably, using less than 2\% of the training data required by leading VLMs, InfiniteVL not only substantially outperforms previous linear-complexity VLMs but also matches the performance of leading Transformer-based VLMs, while demonstrating effective long-term memory retention. Compared to similar-sized Transformer-based VLMs accelerated by FlashAttention-2, InfiniteVL achieves over 3.6\times inference speedup while maintaining constant latency and memory footprint. In streaming video understanding scenarios, it sustains a stable 24 FPS real-time prefill speed while preserving long-term memory cache. Code and models are available at https://github.com/hustvl/InfiniteVL.

Reasoning and agentic workloads increasingly demand efficient long-context inference. Yet full-attention decoding reads the growing history at every step, although the benefit of global access varies across prediction positions. We find that, before global attention is computed for the current step, the decoding states available after local computation in frozen pretrained models already contain information predictive of its benefit over local attention. Building on this finding, we introduce On-Demand Attention (ODA), a local-first decoding method: after local computation, a lightweight recall head decides whether to recompute the current step with global attention. ODA trains only the recall head with modest data and compute budgets, leaving pretrained weights unchanged and retaining the complete historical KV cache so that information skipped at one step remains available for later access. Experiments across model scales and families, including hybrid attention backbones, show that ODA recovers most of the performance lost under local attention while substantially reducing the frequency of global attention. Controlled long-context measurements in vLLM further show that GPU-side conditional execution translates fewer global reads into practical decoding speedups over full attention. These findings show that pretrained decoding states can support both token prediction and decisions about accessing distant information, allowing models to allocate global computation as needed during decoding.

Precise localization of GUI elements is crucial for the development of GUI agents. Traditional methods rely on bounding box or center-point regression, neglecting spatial interaction uncertainty and visual-semantic hierarchies. Recent methods incorporate attention mechanisms but still face two key issues: (1) ignoring processing background regions causes attention drift from the desired area, and (2) uniform labeling fails to distinguish between center and edges of the target UI element, leading to click imprecision. Inspired by how humans visually process and interact with GUI elements, we propose the Valley-to-Peak (V2P) method to address these issues. To mitigate background distractions, V2P introduces a suppression attention mechanism that minimizes the model's focus on irrelevant regions to highlight the intended region. For the issue of center-edge distinction, V2P applies a Fitts' Law-inspired approach by modeling GUI interactions as 2D Gaussian heatmaps where the weight gradually decreases from the center towards the edges. The weight distribution follows a Gaussian function, with the variance determined by the target's size. Consequently, V2P effectively isolates the target area and teaches the model to concentrate on the most essential point of the UI element. The model trained by V2P achieves the performance with 92.3% and 50.5% on two benchmarks ScreenSpot-v2 and ScreenSpot-Pro. Ablations further confirm each component's contribution, highlighting V2P's generalizability for precise GUI grounding tasks.

Linear-attention models that compress the entire input sequence into a fixed-size recurrent state offer an efficient alternative to Transformers, but their finite memory induces forgetfulness that harms retrieval-intensive tasks. To mitigate the issue, we explore a series of hybrid models that restore direct access to past tokens. We interleave token mixers with intermediate time and space complexity between linear and full attention, including sparse attention with token eviction, and the query-aware native sparse attention. Particularly, we propose a novel learnable token eviction approach. Combined with sliding-window attention, an end-to-end trainable lightweight CNN aggregates information from both past and future adjacent tokens to adaptively retain a limited set of critical KV-pairs per head, maintaining linear attention's constant time and space complexity. Efficient Triton kernels for the sparse attention mechanisms are provided. Empirical evaluations on retrieval-intensive benchmarks support the effectiveness of our approaches.

Recent advances in video generation have made it possible to produce visually compelling videos, with wide-ranging applications in content creation, entertainment, and virtual reality. However, most existing diffusion transformer based video generation models are limited to low-resolution outputs (<=720P) due to the quadratic computational complexity of the attention mechanism with respect to the output width and height. This computational bottleneck makes native high-resolution video generation (1080P/2K/4K) impractical for both training and inference. To address this challenge, we present UltraGen, a novel video generation framework that enables i) efficient and ii) end-to-end native high-resolution video synthesis. Specifically, UltraGen features a hierarchical dual-branch attention architecture based on global-local attention decomposition, which decouples full attention into a local attention branch for high-fidelity regional content and a global attention branch for overall semantic consistency. We further propose a spatially compressed global modeling strategy to efficiently learn global dependencies, and a hierarchical cross-window local attention mechanism to reduce computational costs while enhancing information flow across different local windows. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UltraGen can effectively scale pre-trained low-resolution video models to 1080P and even 4K resolution for the first time, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods and super-resolution based two-stage pipelines in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations.

Leveraging the paradigm of autoregressive diffusion, text-conditioned interactive video world models aim to simulate temporally coherent environments guided by textual instructions. While enabling low-latency, long-duration generation is pivotal for embodied AI and simulation-based planning, current frameworks primarily rely on sliding-window mechanisms to bound computational complexity. However, this approach inherently sacrifices historical context, undermining the long-range interactive capabilities. Conversely, maintaining a full-history cache remains computationally prohibitive and memory-intensive: the quadratic complexity of attention leads to excessive computational overhead, while the linear growth of the KV cache inevitably leads to GPU memory saturation. To overcome these limitations, we propose WorldAttention, a system-oriented attention architecture that achieves high efficiency through the co-design of specialized attention kernels and hierarchical KV cache management. First, we introduce Hybrid Sparse Attention (HSA), which integrates linear global attention supplemented with head-adaptive sparse attention. Additionally, we design a Hierarchical KV Cache (HKV) that organizes historical KV pairs into semantically indexed pages across multi-tier memory, enabling fine-grained retrieval and controlled GPU residency. These two designs are supported by tailored kernels to effectively translate their theoretical efficiency into real-world performance. Extensive experiments on VBench-Long and InterVBench demonstrate that WorldAttention consistently surpasses prior state-of-the-art methods, achieving subject consistency scores of 0.9472 on VBench-Long and 0.9668 on InterVBench, respectively.

Precise localization of GUI elements is crucial for the development of GUI agents. Traditional methods rely on bounding box or center-point regression, neglecting spatial interaction uncertainty and visual-semantic hierarchies. Recent methods incorporate attention mechanisms but still face two key issues: (1) ignoring processing background regions causes attention drift from the desired area, and (2) uniform modeling the target UI element fails to distinguish between its center and edges, leading to click imprecision. Inspired by how humans visually process and interact with GUI elements, we propose the Valley-to-Peak (V2P) method to address these issues. To mitigate background distractions, V2P introduces a suppression attention mechanism that minimizes the model's focus on irrelevant regions to highlight the intended region. For the issue of center-edge distinction, V2P applies a Fitts' Law-inspired approach by modeling GUI interactions as 2D Gaussian heatmaps where the weight gradually decreases from the center towards the edges. The weight distribution follows a Gaussian function, with the variance determined by the target's size. Consequently, V2P effectively isolates the target area and teaches the model to concentrate on the most essential point of the UI element. The model trained by V2P achieves the performance with 92.4\% and 52.5\% on two benchmarks ScreenSpot-v2 and ScreenSpot-Pro (see Fig.~fig:main_results_charts). Ablations further confirm each component's contribution, underscoring V2P's generalizability in precise GUI grounding tasks and its potential for real-world deployment in future GUI agents.

Transformer-based methods have shown impressive performance in low-level vision tasks, such as image super-resolution. However, we find that these networks can only utilize a limited spatial range of input information through attribution analysis. This implies that the potential of Transformer is still not fully exploited in existing networks. In order to activate more input pixels for better reconstruction, we propose a novel Hybrid Attention Transformer (HAT). It combines both channel attention and window-based self-attention schemes, thus making use of their complementary advantages of being able to utilize global statistics and strong local fitting capability. Moreover, to better aggregate the cross-window information, we introduce an overlapping cross-attention module to enhance the interaction between neighboring window features. In the training stage, we additionally adopt a same-task pre-training strategy to exploit the potential of the model for further improvement. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed modules, and we further scale up the model to demonstrate that the performance of this task can be greatly improved. Our overall method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by more than 1dB. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/XPixelGroup/HAT.

We present a new computational model for gaze prediction in egocentric videos by exploring patterns in temporal shift of gaze fixations (attention transition) that are dependent on egocentric manipulation tasks. Our assumption is that the high-level context of how a task is completed in a certain way has a strong influence on attention transition and should be modeled for gaze prediction in natural dynamic scenes. Specifically, we propose a hybrid model based on deep neural networks which integrates task-dependent attention transition with bottom-up saliency prediction. In particular, the task-dependent attention transition is learned with a recurrent neural network to exploit the temporal context of gaze fixations, e.g. looking at a cup after moving gaze away from a grasped bottle. Experiments on public egocentric activity datasets show that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art gaze prediction methods and is able to learn meaningful transition of human attention.

As context lengths scale, attention increasingly becomes a primary computational bottleneck in large language models. Standard Transformers remain powerful but computationally inefficient, as they allocate the same attention budget to every token regardless of its contextual demand. Existing local-global hybrids provide a more efficient alternative by mixing restricted- and full-context attention, but they typically allocate span statically across layers or heads. To address these limitations, we propose LoGo, a token-level dynamic local-global attention mechanism that uses attention span as a direct proxy for attention budget allocation. Each LoGo layer contains coupled local and global branches: all tokens receive efficient local attention over a restricted context window, while a learned gate activates global attention with full-context access only for tokens requiring long-range information. A threshold-based budget controller maintains a target global ratio without auxiliary losses, and a progressive masking schedule stabilizes training before sparse routing takes effect. We further implement query-sparse Triton kernels that convert reduced global-attention computation into practical speedups. Extensive experiments validate LoGo's effectiveness, showing that it preserves the scaling behavior of full-attention Transformers across model sizes. In controlled comparisons, LoGo improves over the full-attention Transformer and matched-budget static local-global hybrids, with clear gains on long-range retrieval. Analysis further shows that LoGo learns interpretable span allocation patterns. These results suggest that learned token-level span allocation is an effective and scalable way to improve the long-context performance-compute trade-off.

Due to the nature of quadratic attention, Large Language Models (LLMs) consume a lot of memory and energy. Every new token costs more than the previous one. For each additional token, the keys and values must be stored in memory indefinitely, which is unsustainable. Several alternatives have been proposed to fix the quadratic scaling problem, one of which is retrofitting LLMs to use Linear Attention. This idea has attracted a lot of attention, given its promise to solve the quadratic scaling problem with state-of-the-art performance at low cost. However, this line of research has not been properly compared to simpler baselines. In this work, we show that Sliding Window Attention (SWA) with sinks performs as well or better than post-trained Linear Attention models. We observe this across multiple LLMs on various downstream tasks. For long-context reasoning tasks (Needle-in-a-Haystack and BABILong), SWA achieves massively higher performance (2 to 10 times higher than linear attention). SWA requires no post-training, is extremely fast, and requires low memory; therefore, making it an extremely cheap and reliable solution. To reduce inference memory cost, we strongly recommend switching to SWA instead of post-training linear models. Linear attention models may have shown some promise, but they likely require to be trained from scratch or extensive post-training in order to even match SWA.

Human visual reasoning is governed by active vision, a process where metacognitive control drives top-down goal-directed attention, dynamically routing foveal focus toward task-relevant details while maintaining peripheral awareness of the global scene. In contrast, modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) process visual information passively, relying on the static accumulation of massive token contexts that dilute spatial reasoning and induce linguistic hallucinations. Here we propose the following paradigm shift: GazeVLM, a multimodal architecture that internalizes this metacognitive oversight over its deployment of attention resources directly into the reasoning loop. By empowering the VLM to autonomously generate gaze tokens (<LOOK>), GazeVLM establishes a top-down control mechanism over its own causal attention mask. The model dynamically dictates its focal intent, triggering a continuous suppression bias that dampens irrelevant visual features, implementing spatial selective attention and simulating foveal fixation. Once local reasoning concludes, the bias lifts, seamlessly restoring the global view. This architecture enables the model to fluidly transition between global spatial awareness and localized focal reasoning without relying on external agentic contraptions like cropping tools, or inflating the context window with additional visual tokens derived from localized visual patches. Trained with a bespoke Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) procedure that rewards valid grounding, our 4B-parameter GazeVLM delivers strong high-resolution multimodal reasoning performance, surpassing state-of-the-art VLMs in its parameter class by nearly 4% and agentic multimodal pipelines built around thinking with images by more than 5% on HRBench-4k and HRBench-8k.

The design choices in the Transformer attention mechanism, including weak inductive bias and quadratic computational complexity, have limited its application for modeling long sequences. In this paper, we introduce Mega, a simple, theoretically grounded, single-head gated attention mechanism equipped with (exponential) moving average to incorporate inductive bias of position-aware local dependencies into the position-agnostic attention mechanism. We further propose a variant of Mega that offers linear time and space complexity yet yields only minimal quality loss, by efficiently splitting the whole sequence into multiple chunks with fixed length. Extensive experiments on a wide range of sequence modeling benchmarks, including the Long Range Arena, neural machine translation, auto-regressive language modeling, and image and speech classification, show that Mega achieves significant improvements over other sequence models, including variants of Transformers and recent state space models.

Contemporary diffusion models show remarkable capability in text-to-image generation, while still being limited to restricted resolutions (e.g., 1,024 X 1,024). Recent advances enable tuning-free higher-resolution image generation by recycling pre-trained diffusion models and extending them via regional denoising or dilated sampling/convolutions. However, these models struggle to simultaneously preserve global semantic structure and produce creative regional details in higher-resolution images. To address this, we present C-Upscale, a new recipe of tuning-free image upscaling that pivots on global-regional priors derived from given global prompt and estimated regional prompts via Multimodal LLM. Technically, the low-frequency component of low-resolution image is recognized as global structure prior to encourage global semantic consistency in high-resolution generation. Next, we perform regional attention control to screen cross-attention between global prompt and each region during regional denoising, leading to regional attention prior that alleviates object repetition issue. The estimated regional prompts containing rich descriptive details further act as regional semantic prior to fuel the creativity of regional detail generation. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that our C-Upscale manages to generate ultra-high-resolution images (e.g., 4,096 X 4,096 and 8,192 X 8,192) with higher visual fidelity and more creative regional details.

When humans describe a visual scene, they do not process the entire image uniformly; instead, they selectively fixate on regions relevant to their intended description. In contrast, current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) attend to all visual tokens at each generation step, leading to diluted focus and unnecessary computational overhead. In this work, we introduce Gaze Attention, a novel mechanism that enables MLLMs to selectively attend to task-relevant visual regions during generation. Specifically, we spatially group visual embeddings-stored as key-value caches-into compact gaze regions, each represented by a lightweight descriptor. At each decoding step, the model dynamically selects the most relevant regions and restricts attention to them, reducing redundant computation while enhancing focus. To mitigate the loss of global context caused by localized attention, we further propose learnable context tokens appended to each image or frame, allowing the model to maintain holistic visual awareness. Extensive experiments on image and video understanding benchmarks demonstrate that Gaze Attention matches or surpasses dense-attention baselines, while using up to 90% fewer visual KV entries in the attention computation.

How a vision-language model internally solves the task of describing an image is far from obvious. We find that the model develops a specific mechanism for this: a small set of attention heads in its language-model backbone, which we call gaze heads, whose attention tracks the image region the model is currently describing. We find them with a simple correlation score from a few forward passes, using comic strips as a controlled testbed where narrative order is laid out spatially. These gaze heads do not just track the image tokens being described: redirecting their attention to a chosen region forces the VLM to describe that region instead. A single attention-mask intervention on the top-100 gaze heads, fewer than 9% of all heads, steers the model's answer to any chosen comic panel at 83.1% accuracy, while the same intervention on random heads fails to redirect the answer, and intervening on all heads destroys generation. The same lever also extends to continuous control: switching the gaze target mid-generation makes the model wrap up its current panel description and move to the new one within a few tokens. Beyond comics, the same intervention redirects answers to chosen regions in natural COCO images. The mechanism further recurs across model sizes from 2B to 32B parameters and across other VLM architectures, although some frozen-encoder families show no comparable head set. More broadly, this shows that targeted edits identified through mechanistic analysis can serve as practical inference-time levers for steering multimodal model behavior, without any retraining. Our code, interactive demo, and datasets are available at https://gaze.baulab.info/

Attention guides our gaze to fixate the proper location of the scene and holds it in that location for the deserved amount of time given current processing demands, before shifting to the next one. As such, gaze deployment crucially is a temporal process. Existing computational models have made significant strides in predicting spatial aspects of observer's visual scanpaths (where to look), while often putting on the background the temporal facet of attention dynamics (when). In this paper we present TPP-Gaze, a novel and principled approach to model scanpath dynamics based on Neural Temporal Point Process (TPP), that jointly learns the temporal dynamics of fixations position and duration, integrating deep learning methodologies with point process theory. We conduct extensive experiments across five publicly available datasets. Our results show the overall superior performance of the proposed model compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Source code and trained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/phuselab/tppgaze.

Recently, Transformer architecture has been introduced into image restoration to replace convolution neural network (CNN) with surprising results. Considering the high computational complexity of Transformer with global attention, some methods use the local square window to limit the scope of self-attention. However, these methods lack direct interaction among different windows, which limits the establishment of long-range dependencies. To address the above issue, we propose a new image restoration model, Cross Aggregation Transformer (CAT). The core of our CAT is the Rectangle-Window Self-Attention (Rwin-SA), which utilizes horizontal and vertical rectangle window attention in different heads parallelly to expand the attention area and aggregate the features cross different windows. We also introduce the Axial-Shift operation for different window interactions. Furthermore, we propose the Locality Complementary Module to complement the self-attention mechanism, which incorporates the inductive bias of CNN (e.g., translation invariance and locality) into Transformer, enabling global-local coupling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our CAT outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods on several image restoration applications. The code and models are available at https://github.com/zhengchen1999/CAT.

Recent advances in diffusion-based video restoration (VR) demonstrate significant improvement in visual quality, yet yield a prohibitive computational cost during inference. While several distillation-based approaches have exhibited the potential of one-step image restoration, extending existing approaches to VR remains challenging and underexplored, particularly when dealing with high-resolution video in real-world settings. In this work, we propose a one-step diffusion-based VR model, termed as SeedVR2, which performs adversarial VR training against real data. To handle the challenging high-resolution VR within a single step, we introduce several enhancements to both model architecture and training procedures. Specifically, an adaptive window attention mechanism is proposed, where the window size is dynamically adjusted to fit the output resolutions, avoiding window inconsistency observed under high-resolution VR using window attention with a predefined window size. To stabilize and improve the adversarial post-training towards VR, we further verify the effectiveness of a series of losses, including a proposed feature matching loss without significantly sacrificing training efficiency. Extensive experiments show that SeedVR2 can achieve comparable or even better performance compared with existing VR approaches in a single step.

We study architectural and optimization techniques for sample-efficient language modeling under the constraints of the BabyLM 2025 shared task. Our model, BLaLM, replaces self-attention with a linear-time mLSTM token mixer and explores lightweight enhancements, including short convolutions, sliding window attention with dynamic modulation, and Hedgehog feature maps. To support training in low-resource settings, we curate a high-quality corpus emphasizing readability and pedagogical structure. Experiments across both STRICT and STRICT-SMALL tracks show that (1) linear attention combined with sliding window attention consistently improves zero-shot performance, and (2) the Muon optimizer stabilizes convergence and reduces perplexity over AdamW. These results highlight effective strategies for efficient language modeling without relying on scale.

Recently, Vision Transformer (ViT)-based models have exhibited remarkable performance in image super-resolution. However, the quadratic computational complexity of ViTs with respect to spatial resolution severely constrains their efficiency, leading to high latency and massive memory consumption. To alleviate this, various window-based attention mechanisms have been proposed; yet, they inherently compromise the long-range dependency modeling that is the primary advantage of ViTs. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Clustered Unit-level Similarity Transformer (CUST), a novel architecture that efficiently integrates global and local information. Specifically, CUST enables each patch to aggregate and attend to similar patches within a broadened regional scope outside its local window, thereby capturing extensive contextual understanding. Furthermore, it employs overlapping attention windows to capture local dependencies, while explicitly extracting high-frequency details by computing the residual difference between the original features and their downsampled-upsampled counterparts. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed model achieves a practical balance between computational efficiency and restoration performance. It achieves a lower memory footprint and faster inference speed compared to recent global context or lightweight models under realistic constraints. Code is available at [https://github.com/jwgdmkj/CUST].

Understanding human visual attention on a scene over time has applications in domains such as interface design and inferring cognitive states. Modeling visual scanpaths has historically relied on specialized architectures with hand-crafted priors. While these architectures can model fixation sequences, their rigid structural biases restrict easy extendability and flexible conditioning. For instance, integrating task-specific instructions or adapting to distinct viewer identities requires custom, disjoint architectural additions. We frame scanpath prediction purely as a discrete sequence modeling task. By mapping coordinates into a text vocabulary, we leverage the pretrained representations of Vision-Language Models. This framing absorbs diverse factors of variation: simple prompting allows for global conditioning, such as providing viewer identities to capture personalized biases, or task-specific objectives like visual search. The framework can also integrate per-fixation attributes, such as individual fixation durations, alongside spatial locations. The autoregressive alignment enables the scalable, exact computation of per-fixation log-likelihoods, directly equivalent to the commonly used Information Gain (IG) metric. Our model, DeepGaze3.5-VL, establishes a new state-of-the-art across multiple datasets, achieving 2.18 bits of IG on MIT1003, a 46% improvement over DeepGaze III. This advantage persists even when baselines use identical high-capacity vision encoders. Beyond predictive performance, our generative framework serves as a powerful computational tool for direct behavioral interventions, allowing for controlled in-silico simulations that would be experimentally difficult or impossible to conduct in vivo. We demonstrate this ability by performing controlled interventions on the durations of pre-saccadic fixations, recovering known oculomotor phenomena purely from data.

Linear attention methods offer a compelling alternative to softmax attention due to their efficiency in recurrent decoding. Recent research has focused on enhancing standard linear attention by incorporating gating while retaining its computational benefits. Such Gated Linear Attention (GLA) architectures include competitive models such as Mamba and RWKV. In this work, we investigate the in-context learning capabilities of the GLA model and make the following contributions. We show that a multilayer GLA can implement a general class of Weighted Preconditioned Gradient Descent (WPGD) algorithms with data-dependent weights. These weights are induced by the gating mechanism and the input, enabling the model to control the contribution of individual tokens to prediction. To further understand the mechanics of this weighting, we introduce a novel data model with multitask prompts and characterize the optimization landscape of learning a WPGD algorithm. Under mild conditions, we establish the existence and uniqueness (up to scaling) of a global minimum, corresponding to a unique WPGD solution. Finally, we translate these findings to explore the optimization landscape of GLA and shed light on how gating facilitates context-aware learning and when it is provably better than vanilla linear attention.

Existing research largely attributes the global sequence modeling capability of Transformers to the explicit computation of attention weights, a process that inherently incurs quadratic computational complexity. In this work, we offer a novel perspective: we demonstrate that attention can be mathematically reframed as a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) equipped with dynamically predicted parameters. Through this lens, we explain attention's global modeling power not as explicit token-wise aggregation, but as an implicit process where dynamically generated parameters act as a compressed representation of the global context. Inspired by this insight, we investigate a fundamental question: can we achieve Transformer-level sequence global modeling entirely through dynamic parameterization while maintaining linear complexity, effectively replacing explicit attention? To explore this, we design various dynamic parameter prediction strategies and integrate them into standard network layers. Extensive empirical studies on vision models demonstrate that dynamic parameterization can indeed serve as a highly effective, linear-complexity alternative to explicit attention, opening new pathways for efficient sequence modeling. Code is available at https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/WeightFormer.

A striking feature of the human visual system is that it ingests visual information through a series of local foveated glimpses, rather than a single global computation. This makes human vision distinctly different from most popular computer vision models in use today, which input images globally and in a single shot. A natural question therefore is whether local, sequential vision models may provide any fundamental computational benefits in addition to being biologically more plausible than global models. In this work, we investigate this question from the perspective of visual state tracking and length generalization. Inspired by recent studies of length generalization in language models, we study the behavior of vision models trained on simple vision tasks that require the aggregation of local information across an image. Our experiments reveal that, similar to language models, vision models can learn to exploit global shortcuts and thereby fail to generalize over task length or complexity. We also show that recurrent vision policies based on strictly local perception can mitigate these failures, thereby allowing models to generalize on these tasks. Our results show that local attention may be an essential overlooked requirement for robust compositional generalization.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become the central paradigm in artificial intelligence, yet the core computational primitive of attention has remained structurally unchanged. Local Linear Attention (LLA) is an attention mechanism derived from nonparametric statistics in the test-time regression framework. In contrast to prior research on efficient attention variants, LLA upgrades the local constant estimate in softmax attention to a local linear estimate, yielding provably superior bias-variance tradeoffs for associative memory. However, LLA has not been scaled in LLM pretraining due to computational and numerical stability concerns. We introduce Parallax, a parameterized Local Linear Attention that is scalable for LLMs. Parallax eliminates the numerical solver in LLA and learns an extra query-like projector that probes the KV covariance. We place Parallax within a family of attention mechanisms connected by the bandwidth, the probe construction and the affine structure. We propose a hardware-aware algorithm that increases the arithmetic intensity over FlashAttention, shifting attention into a more compute bound regime. Our prototype decode kernel matches or outperforms FlashAttention 2/3 across diverse batch sizes and context lengths. We pretrain Parallax at 0.6B and 1.7B scales and find consistent perplexity improvements throughout pretraining with gains that transfer to downstream benchmarks. The advantage persists under both parameter-matched and compute-matched controls, demonstrating a Pareto improvement. We perform careful pretraining ablations and identify a novel phenomenon whereby Muon unlocks the capacity of Parallax. To our knowledge, this is the first empirical demonstration of strong architecture-optimizer codesign for attention mechanisms in the architecture research literature.

Efficiently supporting long context length is crucial for Transformer models. The quadratic complexity of the self-attention computation plagues traditional Transformers. Sliding window-based static sparse attention mitigates the problem by limiting the attention scope of the input tokens, reducing the theoretical complexity from quadratic to linear. Although the sparsity induced by window attention is highly structured, it does not align perfectly with the microarchitecture of the conventional accelerators, leading to suboptimal implementation. In response, we propose a dataflow-aware FPGA-based accelerator design, SWAT, that efficiently leverages the sparsity to achieve scalable performance for long input. The proposed microarchitecture is based on a design that maximizes data reuse by using a combination of row-wise dataflow, kernel fusion optimization, and an input-stationary design considering the distributed memory and computation resources of FPGA. Consequently, it achieves up to 22times and 5.7times improvement in latency and energy efficiency compared to the baseline FPGA-based accelerator and 15times energy efficiency compared to GPU-based solution.

Automatic radiology report generation is booming due to its huge application potential for the healthcare industry. However, existing computer vision and natural language processing approaches to tackle this problem are limited in two aspects. First, when extracting image features, most of them neglect multi-view reasoning in vision and model single-view structure of medical images, such as space-view or channel-view. However, clinicians rely on multi-view imaging information for comprehensive judgment in daily clinical diagnosis. Second, when generating reports, they overlook context reasoning with multi-modal information and focus on pure textual optimization utilizing retrieval-based methods. We aim to address these two issues by proposing a model that better simulates clinicians' perspectives and generates more accurate reports. Given the above limitation in feature extraction, we propose a Globally-intensive Attention (GIA) module in the medical image encoder to simulate and integrate multi-view vision perception. GIA aims to learn three types of vision perception: depth view, space view, and pixel view. On the other hand, to address the above problem in report generation, we explore how to involve multi-modal signals to generate precisely matched reports, i.e., how to integrate previously predicted words with region-aware visual content in next word prediction. Specifically, we design a Visual Knowledge-guided Decoder (VKGD), which can adaptively consider how much the model needs to rely on visual information and previously predicted text to assist next word prediction. Hence, our final Intensive Vision-guided Network (IVGN) framework includes a GIA-guided Visual Encoder and the VKGD. Experiments on two commonly-used datasets IU X-Ray and MIMIC-CXR demonstrate the superior ability of our method compared with other state-of-the-art approaches.

Most models of visual attention aim at predicting either top-down or bottom-up control, as studied using different visual search and free-viewing tasks. In this paper we propose the Human Attention Transformer (HAT), a single model that predicts both forms of attention control. HAT uses a novel transformer-based architecture and a simplified foveated retina that collectively create a spatio-temporal awareness akin to the dynamic visual working memory of humans. HAT not only establishes a new state-of-the-art in predicting the scanpath of fixations made during target-present and target-absent visual search and ``taskless'' free viewing, but also makes human gaze behavior interpretable. Unlike previous methods that rely on a coarse grid of fixation cells and experience information loss due to fixation discretization, HAT features a sequential dense prediction architecture and outputs a dense heatmap for each fixation, thus avoiding discretizing fixations. HAT sets a new standard in computational attention, which emphasizes effectiveness, generality, and interpretability. HAT's demonstrated scope and applicability will likely inspire the development of new attention models that can better predict human behavior in various attention-demanding scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/cvlab-stonybrook/HAT.

Natively training joint video-audio generation models at higher resolutions empowers them to learn richer visual details and sharper motion dynamics. However, full attention incurs quadratic cost and, as resolution increases, spreads attention over increasingly redundant tokens, diluting learning signals for informative content and disrupting pretrained priors. Existing sparse attention methods either target training-free acceleration or overlook the unique structure of joint video-audio data, where cross-modal interactions are inherently concentrated around sound-producing regions. To address this, we propose Prism, a dynamic sparse attention framework for natively training joint video-audio generation models at 2K. In particular, Prism organizes the token sequence into spatiotemporal macro-zones, enabling the attention structure to adapt to local content. For each zone, it estimates local information structure via video feature variance along the channel and feature norms from the audio-to-video cross-attention, jointly capturing how visual content varies directionally and how strongly audio influences each visual region. Based on these signals, Prism dynamically assigns a tailored block shape to each zone, applying finer partitioning along axes of rapid visual content variation and strong audio-visual coupling. This encourages tokens within each block to remain semantically coherent, allowing block-level features to capture both visual content and joint video-audio interaction patterns. Prism further adopts a hybrid block selection strategy to dynamically determine per-query sparsity. Experiments show that Prism achieves 2.5times training speedup compared to full attention, while surpassing it in generation quality.

In real-world scene perception human observers generate sequences of fixations to move image patches into the high-acuity center of the visual field. Models of visual attention developed over the last 25 years aim to predict two-dimensional probabilities of gaze positions for a given image via saliency maps. Recently, progress has been made on models for the generation of scan paths under the constraints of saliency as well as attentional and oculomotor restrictions. Experimental research demonstrated that task constraints can have a strong impact on viewing behavior. Here we propose a scan path model for both fixation positions and fixation durations, which includes influences of task instructions and interindividual differences. Based on an eye-movement experiment with four different task conditions, we estimated model parameters for each individual observer and task condition using a fully Bayesian dynamical modeling framework using a joint spatial-temporal likelihood approach with sequential estimation. Resulting parameter values demonstrate that model properties such as the attentional span are adjusted to task requirements. Posterior predictive checks indicate that our dynamical model can reproduce task differences in scan path statistics across individual observers.

Attention-based arbitrary style transfer studies have shown promising performance in synthesizing vivid local style details. They typically use the all-to-all attention mechanism -- each position of content features is fully matched to all positions of style features. However, all-to-all attention tends to generate distorted style patterns and has quadratic complexity, limiting the effectiveness and efficiency of arbitrary style transfer. In this paper, we propose a novel all-to-key attention mechanism -- each position of content features is matched to stable key positions of style features -- that is more in line with the characteristics of style transfer. Specifically, it integrates two newly proposed attention forms: distributed and progressive attention. Distributed attention assigns attention to key style representations that depict the style distribution of local regions; Progressive attention pays attention from coarse-grained regions to fine-grained key positions. The resultant module, dubbed StyA2K, shows extraordinary performance in preserving the semantic structure and rendering consistent style patterns. Qualitative and quantitative comparisons with state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the superior performance of our approach.

This study explores the recently proposed challenging multi-view Anomaly Detection (AD) task. Single-view tasks would encounter blind spots from other perspectives, resulting in inaccuracies in sample-level prediction. Therefore, we introduce the Multi-View Anomaly Detection (MVAD) framework, which learns and integrates features from multi-views. Specifically, we proposed a Multi-View Adaptive Selection (MVAS) algorithm for feature learning and fusion across multiple views. The feature maps are divided into neighbourhood attention windows to calculate a semantic correlation matrix between single-view windows and all other views, which is a conducted attention mechanism for each single-view window and the top-K most correlated multi-view windows. Adjusting the window sizes and top-K can minimise the computational complexity to linear. Extensive experiments on the Real-IAD dataset for cross-setting (multi/single-class) validate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving state-of-the-art performance among sample 4.1\%uparrow/ image 5.6\%uparrow/pixel 6.7\%uparrow levels with a total of ten metrics with only 18M parameters and fewer GPU memory and training time.

Despite the ability to produce human-level speech for in-domain text, attention-based end-to-end text-to-speech (TTS) systems suffer from text alignment failures that increase in frequency for out-of-domain text. We show that these failures can be addressed using simple location-relative attention mechanisms that do away with content-based query/key comparisons. We compare two families of attention mechanisms: location-relative GMM-based mechanisms and additive energy-based mechanisms. We suggest simple modifications to GMM-based attention that allow it to align quickly and consistently during training, and introduce a new location-relative attention mechanism to the additive energy-based family, called Dynamic Convolution Attention (DCA). We compare the various mechanisms in terms of alignment speed and consistency during training, naturalness, and ability to generalize to long utterances, and conclude that GMM attention and DCA can generalize to very long utterances, while preserving naturalness for shorter, in-domain utterances.

Transformers are mostly relying on softmax attention, which introduces quadratic complexity with respect to sequence length and remains a major bottleneck for efficient inference. Prior work on linear or hybrid attention typically replaces softmax attention uniformly across all layers, often leading to significant performance degradation or requiring extensive retraining to recover model quality. This work proposes LayerBoost, a layer-aware attention reduction method that selectively modifies the attention mechanism based on the sensitivity of individual transformer layers. It first performs a systematic sensitivity analysis on a pretrained model to identify layers that are critical for maintaining performance. Guided by this analysis, three distinct strategies can be applied: retaining standard softmax attention in highly sensitive layers, replacing it with linear sliding window attention in moderately sensitive layers, and removing attention entirely in layers that exhibit low sensitivity. To recover performance after these architectural modifications, we introduce a lightweight distillation-based healing phase requiring only 10M additional training tokens. LayerBoost reduces inference latency and improves throughput by up to 68% at high concurrency, while maintaining competitive model quality. It matches base model performance on several benchmarks, exhibits only minor degradations on others, and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art attention linearization methods. These efficiency gains make our method particularly well-suited for high-concurrency serving and hardware-constrained deployment scenarios, where inference cost and memory footprint are critical bottlenecks.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved remarkable success in visual understanding, yet they struggle with knowledge-intensive queries involving long-tail entities or evolving information due to static parametric knowledge. Recent search-augmented approaches attempt to address this limitation, but existing methods rely on indiscriminate whole-image retrieval that introduces substantial visual redundancy and noise, and lack deep iterative reflection, limiting their effectiveness on complex visual queries. To overcome these challenges, we propose Glance-or-Gaze (GoG), a fully autonomous framework that shifts from passive perception to active visual planning. GoG introduces a Selective Gaze mechanism that dynamically chooses whether to glance at global context or gaze into high-value regions, filtering irrelevant information before retrieval. We design a dual-stage training strategy: Reflective GoG Behavior Alignment via supervised fine-tuning instills the fundamental GoG paradigm, while Complexity-Adaptive Reinforcement Learning further enhances the model's capability to handle complex queries through iterative reasoning. Experiments across six benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. Ablation studies confirm that both Selective Gaze and complexity-adaptive RL are essential for effective visual search. We will release our data and models for further exploration soon.

3D reconstruction from multi-view images is a core challenge in computer vision. Recently, feed-forward methods have emerged as efficient and robust alternatives to traditional per-scene optimization techniques. Among them, state-of-the-art models like the Visual Geometry Grounding Transformer (VGGT) leverage full self-attention over all image tokens to capture global relationships. However, this approach suffers from poor scalability due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention and the large number of tokens generated in long image sequences. In this work, we introduce FlashVGGT, an efficient alternative that addresses this bottleneck through a descriptor-based attention mechanism. Instead of applying dense global attention across all tokens, FlashVGGT compresses spatial information from each frame into a compact set of descriptor tokens. Global attention is then computed as cross-attention between the full set of image tokens and this smaller descriptor set, significantly reducing computational overhead. Moreover, the compactness of the descriptors enables online inference over long sequences via a chunk-recursive mechanism that reuses cached descriptors from previous chunks. Experimental results show that FlashVGGT achieves reconstruction accuracy competitive with VGGT while reducing inference time to just 9.3% of VGGT for 1,000 images, and scaling efficiently to sequences exceeding 3,000 images. Our project page is available at https://wzpscott.github.io/flashvggt_page/.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown remarkable success across various multi-modal tasks, yet large VLMs encounter significant efficiency challenges due to processing numerous visual tokens. A promising approach to accelerating large VLM inference is using partial information, such as attention maps from specific layers, to assess token importance and prune less essential tokens. However, our study reveals three key insights: (i) Partial attention information is insufficient for accurately identifying critical visual tokens, resulting in suboptimal performance, especially at low token retention ratios; (ii) Global attention information, such as the attention map aggregated across all layers, more effectively preserves essential tokens and maintains comparable performance under aggressive pruning. However, the attention maps from all layers requires a full inference pass, which increases computational load and is therefore impractical in existing methods; and (iii) The global attention map aggregated from a small VLM closely resembles that of a large VLM, suggesting an efficient alternative. Based on these findings, we introduce a training-free method, \textbf{S}mall VLM \textbf{G}uidance for accelerating \textbf{L}arge VLMs (SGL). Specifically, we employ the attention map aggregated from a small VLM to guide visual token pruning in a large VLM. Additionally, an early exiting mechanism is developed to fully use the small VLM's predictions, dynamically invoking the larger VLM only when necessary, yielding a superior trade-off between accuracy and computation. Extensive evaluations across 11 benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of SGL, achieving up to 91\% pruning ratio for visual tokens while retaining competitive performance.

Recently, deep learning technology has been successfully applied in the field of image compression, leading to superior rate-distortion performance. It is crucial to design an effective and efficient entropy model to estimate the probability distribution of the latent representation. However, the majority of entropy models primarily focus on one-dimensional correlation processing between channel and spatial information. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Channel-wise and Global-inter attention Context (ACGC) entropy model, which can efficiently achieve dual feature aggregation in both inter-slice and intraslice contexts. Specifically, we divide the latent representation into different slices and then apply the ACGC model in a parallel checkerboard context to achieve faster decoding speed and higher rate-distortion performance. In order to capture redundant global features across different slices, we utilize deformable attention in adaptive global-inter attention to dynamically refine the attention weights based on the actual spatial relationships and context. Furthermore, in the main transformation structure, we propose a high-performance S2LIC model. We introduce the residual SwinV2 Transformer model to capture global feature information and utilize a dense block network as the feature enhancement module to improve the nonlinear representation of the image within the transformation structure. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves faster encoding and decoding speeds and outperforms VTM-17.1 and some recent learned image compression methods in both PSNR and MS-SSIM metrics.

The rapid increase in the number of Computed Tomography (CT) scan examinations has created an urgent need for automated tools, such as organ segmentation, anomaly classification, and report generation, to assist radiologists with their growing workload. Multi-label classification of Three-Dimensional (3D) CT scans is a challenging task due to the volumetric nature of the data and the variety of anomalies to be detected. Existing deep learning methods based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) struggle to capture long-range dependencies effectively, while Vision Transformers require extensive pre-training, posing challenges for practical use. Additionally, these existing methods do not explicitly model the radiologist's navigational behavior while scrolling through CT scan slices, which requires both global context understanding and local detail awareness. In this study, we present CT-Scroll, a novel global-local attention model specifically designed to emulate the scrolling behavior of radiologists during the analysis of 3D CT scans. Our approach is evaluated on two public datasets, demonstrating its efficacy through comprehensive experiments and an ablation study that highlights the contribution of each model component.

Vision Transformers achieved outstanding performance in many computer vision tasks. Early Vision Transformers such as ViT and DeiT adopt global self-attention, which is computationally expensive when the number of patches is large. To improve efficiency, recent Vision Transformers adopt local self-attention mechanisms, where self-attention is computed within local windows. Despite the fact that window-based local self-attention significantly boosts efficiency, it fails to capture the relationships between distant but similar patches in the image plane. To overcome this limitation of image-space local attention, in this paper, we further exploit the locality of patches in the feature space. We group the patches into multiple clusters using their features, and self-attention is computed within every cluster. Such feature-space local attention effectively captures the connections between patches across different local windows but still relevant. We propose a Bilateral lOcal Attention vision Transformer (BOAT), which integrates feature-space local attention with image-space local attention. We further integrate BOAT with both Swin and CSWin models, and extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that our BOAT-CSWin model clearly and consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art CNN models and vision Transformers.

We introduce , a recurrent Transformer architecture with fixed-size memory that generalizes sliding-window attention while remaining parallelizable during training. consists of two coupled models: a prefiller Q, which leverages full attentionIn practice, we use interleaved full and sliding-window attention for Q, as this yields stronger performance. The essential requirement is that Q be more expressive than P, with access to the full history. to produce memory targets m'_t, and a decoder P, which uses only sliding-window attention and recurrent K/V injection to produce decoder memories m_t for next-token prediction. We train with a memory consistency loss that aligns m_t with m'_t, allowing inference to use P alone. Empirically, improves validation loss and downstream pretraining benchmarks over sliding-window and latent recurrent transformer baselines. Moreover, sharing parameters between P and Q reduces parameter memory while preserving most of the gains.

In this paper, we demonstrate that an inherent waveform pattern in the attention allocation of large language models (LLMs) significantly affects their performance in tasks demanding a high degree of context awareness, such as utilizing LLMs for tool-use. Specifically, the crucial information in the context will be potentially overlooked by model when it is positioned in the trough zone of the attention waveform, leading to decreased performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel inference method named Attention Buckets. It allows LLMs to process their input through multiple parallel processes. Each process utilizes a distinct base angle for the rotary position embedding, thereby creating a unique attention waveform. By compensating an attention trough of a particular process with an attention peak of another process, our approach enhances LLM's awareness to various contextual positions, thus mitigating the risk of overlooking crucial information. In the largest tool-use benchmark, our method elevates a 7B model to achieve state-of-the-art performance, comparable to that of GPT-4. On other benchmarks and some RAG tasks, which also demand a thorough understanding of contextual content, Attention Buckets also exhibited notable enhancements in performance.

Recent advancements in video generation have been greatly driven by video diffusion models, with camera motion control emerging as a crucial challenge in creating view-customized visual content. This paper introduces trajectory attention, a novel approach that performs attention along available pixel trajectories for fine-grained camera motion control. Unlike existing methods that often yield imprecise outputs or neglect temporal correlations, our approach possesses a stronger inductive bias that seamlessly injects trajectory information into the video generation process. Importantly, our approach models trajectory attention as an auxiliary branch alongside traditional temporal attention. This design enables the original temporal attention and the trajectory attention to work in synergy, ensuring both precise motion control and new content generation capability, which is critical when the trajectory is only partially available. Experiments on camera motion control for images and videos demonstrate significant improvements in precision and long-range consistency while maintaining high-quality generation. Furthermore, we show that our approach can be extended to other video motion control tasks, such as first-frame-guided video editing, where it excels in maintaining content consistency over large spatial and temporal ranges.

Current video object removal methods suffer from prohibitive latency (minutes per video) and non-causal processing that prevents real-time interaction. We present StreamErase, enabling sub-second latency with up to 26 FPS streaming generation on a single GPU. Our approach first augments a text-to-video model with mask input to generate high-quality videos that erase target objects and synthesize coherent backgrounds, but does not perform inference on the fly. As such, we progressively transfer the erasing capability from a powerful bidirectional foundation model to an efficient unidirectional streaming eraser, enabling long-horizon erasing without sacrificing visual fidelity. Several key challenges arise when generating videos over long, potentially infinite horizons: (1) bridging the domain gap from training on finite length and extrapolating to long horizons, (2) sustaining high quality by preventing error accumulation, and (3) maintaining fast inference, without increasing computational cost as the context grows. To address these challenges, we carefully designed sliding-window causal attention with attention sinks. By incorporating self-rollout with attention sinks and KV cache rolling during training, we simulate inference-time extrapolations with a fixed context window, enabling constant-speed generation of arbitrarily long videos. Finally, we establish a dedicated benchmark, LongErase, for streaming long-video object removal. Our model achieves strong performance compared to existing video object erasing models and generalizes well to real-world video scenarios, uniquely enabling infinite-length streaming. With StreamErase, users can input a mask and see the erasing results unfold in real-time, delivering a truly interactive experience.

We introduce Gated-SwinRMT, a family of hybrid vision transformers that combine the shifted-window attention of the Swin Transformer with the Manhattan-distance spatial decay of Retentive Networks (RMT), augmented by input-dependent gating. Self-attention is decomposed into consecutive width-wise and height-wise retention passes within each shifted window, where per-head exponential decay masks provide a two-dimensional locality prior without learned positional biases. Two variants are proposed. Gated-SwinRMT-SWAT substitutes softmax with sigmoid activation, implements balanced ALiBi slopes with multiplicative post-activation spatial decay, and gates the value projection via SwiGLU; the Normalized output implicitly suppresses uninformative attention scores. Gated-SwinRMT-Retention retains softmax-normalized retention with an additive log-space decay bias and incorporates an explicit G1 sigmoid gate -- projected from the block input and applied after local context enhancement (LCE) but prior to the output projection~W_O -- to alleviate the low-rank W_V !cdot! W_O bottleneck and enable input-dependent suppression of attended outputs. We assess both variants on Mini-ImageNet (224{times}224, 100 classes) and CIFAR-10 (32{times}32, 10 classes) under identical training protocols, utilizing a single GPU due to resource limitations. At {approx}77--79\,M parameters, Gated-SwinRMT-SWAT achieves 80.22% and Gated-SwinRMT-Retention 78.20% top-1 test accuracy on Mini-ImageNet, compared with 73.74% for the RMT baseline. On CIFAR-10 -- where small feature maps cause the adaptive windowing mechanism to collapse attention to global scope -- the accuracy advantage compresses from +6.48\,pp to +0.56\,pp.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success across diverse visual tasks, yet their performance degrades in complex visual environments. While existing enhancement approaches require additional training, rely on external segmentation tools, or operate at coarse-grained levels, they overlook the innate ability within VLMs. To bridge this gap, we investigate VLMs' attention patterns and discover that: (1) visual complexity strongly correlates with attention entropy, negatively impacting reasoning performance; (2) attention progressively refines from global scanning in shallow layers to focused convergence in deeper layers, with convergence degree determined by visual complexity. (3) Theoretically, we prove that the contrast of attention maps between general queries and task-specific queries enables the decomposition of visual signal into semantic signals and visual noise components. Building on these insights, we propose Contrastive Attention Refinement for Visual Enhancement (CARVE), a training-free method that extracts task-relevant visual signals through attention contrasting at the pixel level. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CARVE consistently enhances performance, achieving up to 75% improvement on open-source models. Our work provides critical insights into the interplay between visual complexity and attention mechanisms, offering an efficient pathway for improving visual reasoning with contrasting attention.

Small language models trained on a single local machine leave little room for architectural trial and error. Kairos combines bidirectional gated-DeltaNet linear attention and sliding-window attention over shared projections (LiZAttention2), block-wise Attention-Residual aggregation, a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) feed-forward layer and a multi-scale byte-level codec, trained with a uniform-noise denoising objective over one byte space shared by text, image, audio, video, lidar and control streams; this report asks whether the combination optimizes at all before asking whether it is useful. We give code-derived algorithms for each component, including a cross-session recurrent-state memory gate, then run convergence sanity checks: overfittinga single 440-byte sentence at 1--15M parameters, text only, with three seeds for codec and attention choices and single-run sweeps for seven further factors. The two attention variants tested at 3\,000 steps (LiZAttention2 and window attention alone) reach a minimum loss near 10^{-3}. After 600 steps, the mean minimum loss ranges from 0.018 (patch codec) to 0.354 (depthwise convolutional codec) with an identical ranking on three seeds. An apparent advantage of shared over separate attention projections closes with more steps or more diverse data and reverses when the projections are frozen: it is a convergence-speed effect, not a capacity effect. These checks suggest that the implementation optimizes; they say nothing about generalization, multimodal training or comparison with existing models, which a planned pretraining run is meant to address. The Discussion sizes a 200M-total/25M-active target analytically; none of its throughput figures is measured. Code is available at https://github.com/fabienfrfr/Kairos . Python package at https://pypi.org/project/kairos-fm/ .

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown strong promise on Optical Character Recognition (OCR), yet the sheer number of visual tokens required to encode dense documents incurs prohibitive inference cost. Existing pruning methods rely on physical eviction, e.g., permanently discarding visual tokens during the prefill stage. While effective for natural images, this strategy fundamentally breaks down on OCR, where virtually every visual token may correspond to a character or structural element, and any irreversible loss leads to catastrophic accuracy degradation. We observe that, although document images appear globally dense and seemingly unprunable, the model's attention to them is in fact temporally sparse: at each decoding step it concentrates on a small region that shifts gradually across steps, much as a human reader fixates on successive words rather than perceiving an entire page at once. Motivated by this Dynamic Visual Fixation phenomenon, we recast the intractable global pruning problem as a tractable local, dynamic one and propose FastOCR, a training-free framework with two complementary modules. Specifically, Focal-Guided Pruning identifies a small set of focal layers and selects the most task-relevant visual tokens from them at each step, while Cross-Step Fixation Reuse exploits the gradual shift of fixation to warm-start each step from the previous one. By dynamically adjusting which tokens are attended rather than evicting any from the cache, FastOCR avoids permanent information loss. Extensive experiments show that FastOCR serves as a plug-and-play acceleration module, generalizing consistently across five VLMs of varying sizes and architectures. On Qwen2.5-VL, FastOCR retains 98% of the unpruned model's accuracy while attending to only 5% of the visual tokens per decoding step, reducing attention latency by 3.0times.

In retrieval-augmented generation and agentic LLM serving, prompts are assembled from independent segments into long contexts, making the prefill stage dominate per-request cost. Two directions have emerged to reduce this cost: position-independent caching (PIC) admits KV reuse for non-contiguous segments shared across requests, while hybrid-attention models cut computation by replacing most full-attention layers with linear attention. However, they cannot coexist: applying existing PIC methods to hybrid-attention models breaks down because per-token KV-cache reuse primitives do not transfer to the per-request recurrent state. We present Hypic, the first system to accelerate hybrid-attention LLM serving with position-independent caching. For linear-attention layers, we identify the segment-cumulative transition operator as the missing algebraic primitive and cache it alongside each segment's zero-start end-state, enabling near-exact and constant-time composition of independently cached segments. For the remaining full-attention layers, existing PIC methods also fail because linear layers do not expose the per-token hidden states needed for selective recomputation. We show that the largest deviations concentrate at segment beginnings and construct a small seam window that propagates hidden states through the hybrid-attention stack to repair cross-segment attention. Finally, Hypic introduces segment parallelism, which exploits PIC's segment-level self-containment to parallelize cache-miss prefill across instances, turning long cold requests into an accelerable workload. Evaluated across four hybrid-attention models and five workloads, Hypic reduces time-to-first-token by 3.25times on average and improves QPS by 1.66times over Prefix Cache, while preserving task quality with a 1.71-point gap from Full Recompute.

An attentional mechanism has lately been used to improve neural machine translation (NMT) by selectively focusing on parts of the source sentence during translation. However, there has been little work exploring useful architectures for attention-based NMT. This paper examines two simple and effective classes of attentional mechanism: a global approach which always attends to all source words and a local one that only looks at a subset of source words at a time. We demonstrate the effectiveness of both approaches over the WMT translation tasks between English and German in both directions. With local attention, we achieve a significant gain of 5.0 BLEU points over non-attentional systems which already incorporate known techniques such as dropout. Our ensemble model using different attention architectures has established a new state-of-the-art result in the WMT'15 English to German translation task with 25.9 BLEU points, an improvement of 1.0 BLEU points over the existing best system backed by NMT and an n-gram reranker.

Webpages have been a rich, scalable resource for vision-language and language only tasks. Yet only pieces of webpages are kept: image-caption pairs, long text articles, or raw HTML, never all in one place. Webpage tasks have resultingly received little attention and structured image-text data left underused. To study multimodal webpage understanding, we introduce the Wikipedia Webpage suite (WikiWeb2M) of 2M pages. We verify its utility on three generative tasks: page description generation, section summarization, and contextual image captioning. We design a novel attention mechanism Prefix Global, which selects the most relevant image and text content as global tokens to attend to the rest of the webpage for context. By using page structure to separate such tokens, it performs better than full attention with lower computational complexity. Experiments show that the new annotations from WikiWeb2M improve task performance compared to data from prior work. We also include ablations on sequence length, input features, and model size.

Current motion-conditioned video generation methods suffer from prohibitive latency (minutes per video) and non-causal processing that prevents real-time interaction. We present MotionStream, enabling sub-second latency with up to 29 FPS streaming generation on a single GPU. Our approach begins by augmenting a text-to-video model with motion control, which generates high-quality videos that adhere to the global text prompt and local motion guidance, but does not perform inference on the fly. As such, we distill this bidirectional teacher into a causal student through Self Forcing with Distribution Matching Distillation, enabling real-time streaming inference. Several key challenges arise when generating videos of long, potentially infinite time-horizons: (1) bridging the domain gap from training on finite length and extrapolating to infinite horizons, (2) sustaining high quality by preventing error accumulation, and (3) maintaining fast inference, without incurring growth in computational cost due to increasing context windows. A key to our approach is introducing carefully designed sliding-window causal attention, combined with attention sinks. By incorporating self-rollout with attention sinks and KV cache rolling during training, we properly simulate inference-time extrapolations with a fixed context window, enabling constant-speed generation of arbitrarily long videos. Our models achieve state-of-the-art results in motion following and video quality while being two orders of magnitude faster, uniquely enabling infinite-length streaming. With MotionStream, users can paint trajectories, control cameras, or transfer motion, and see results unfold in real-time, delivering a truly interactive experience.

Transformers excel at sequence modeling but face quadratic complexity, while linear attention offers improved efficiency but often compromises recall accuracy over long contexts. In this work, we introduce Native Hybrid Attention (NHA), a novel hybrid architecture of linear and full attention that integrates both intra \& inter-layer hybridization into a unified layer design. NHA maintains long-term context in key-value slots updated by a linear RNN, and augments them with short-term tokens from a sliding window. A single softmax attention operation is then applied over all keys and values, enabling per-token and per-head context-dependent weighting without requiring additional fusion parameters. The inter-layer behavior is controlled through a single hyperparameter, the sliding window size, which allows smooth adjustment between purely linear and full attention while keeping all layers structurally uniform. Experimental results show that NHA surpasses Transformers and other hybrid baselines on recall-intensive and commonsense reasoning tasks. Furthermore, pretrained LLMs can be structurally hybridized with NHA, achieving competitive accuracy while delivering significant efficiency gains. Code is available at https://github.com/JusenD/NHA.

We present Lightning Attention, the first linear attention implementation that maintains a constant training speed for various sequence lengths under fixed memory consumption. Due to the issue with cumulative summation operations (cumsum), previous linear attention implementations cannot achieve their theoretical advantage in a casual setting. However, this issue can be effectively solved by utilizing different attention calculation strategies to compute the different parts of attention. Specifically, we split the attention calculation into intra-blocks and inter-blocks and use conventional attention computation for intra-blocks and linear attention kernel tricks for inter-blocks. This eliminates the need for cumsum in the linear attention calculation. Furthermore, a tiling technique is adopted through both forward and backward procedures to take full advantage of the GPU hardware. To enhance accuracy while preserving efficacy, we introduce TransNormerLLM (TNL), a new architecture that is tailored to our lightning attention. We conduct rigorous testing on standard and self-collected datasets with varying model sizes and sequence lengths. TNL is notably more efficient than other language models. In addition, benchmark results indicate that TNL performs on par with state-of-the-art LLMs utilizing conventional transformer structures. The source code is released at github.com/OpenNLPLab/TransnormerLLM.

In this work, we upgrade the multi-head attention mechanism, the core of the Transformer model, to improve efficiency while maintaining or surpassing the previous accuracy level. We show that multi-head attention can be expressed in the summation form. Drawing on the insight that not all attention heads hold equal significance, we propose Mixture-of-Head attention (MoH), a new architecture that treats attention heads as experts in the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) mechanism. MoH has two significant advantages: First, MoH enables each token to select the appropriate attention heads, enhancing inference efficiency without compromising accuracy or increasing the number of parameters. Second, MoH replaces the standard summation in multi-head attention with a weighted summation, introducing flexibility to the attention mechanism and unlocking extra performance potential. Extensive experiments on ViT, DiT, and LLMs demonstrate that MoH outperforms multi-head attention by using only 50%-90% of the attention heads. Moreover, we demonstrate that pre-trained multi-head attention models, such as LLaMA3-8B, can be further continue-tuned into our MoH models. Notably, MoH-LLaMA3-8B achieves an average accuracy of 64.0% across 14 benchmarks, outperforming LLaMA3-8B by 2.4% by utilizing only 75% of the attention heads. We believe the proposed MoH is a promising alternative to multi-head attention and provides a strong foundation for developing advanced and efficient attention-based models.

Optical flow methods typically rely on task-specific inductive biases, such as correlation volumes, feature warping, and iterative refinement, among others, to reach high accuracy. While effective, such biases constrain the model to predefined heuristics, which can limit its expressivity and lead to more complex pipelines and additional computational cost. We present FreeFlow, a hierarchical transformer built without any flow-specific components, using instead a single feed-forward encoder--decoder. FreeFlow combines three attention variants: window attention for local processing, shifted-window attention for cross-window information exchange, and a global attention operating at a reduced resolution. The resulting architecture scales naturally with model capacity, enabling a consistent accuracy gain from small to large variants. Despite the absence of standard inductive biases, FreeFlow achieves state-of-the-art results on major benchmarks, including Sintel (0.68/1.48 EPE on Clean/Final), KITTI-2015 (3.23 Fl-all), and Spring (3.192 1px), while remaining memory efficient at 1080p inference.

Key-Value (KV) cache memory and bandwidth increasingly dominate large language model inference cost in long-context and long-generation regimes. Architectures such as multi-head latent attention (MLA) and hybrid sliding-window attention (SWA) can alleviate this bound, but integrating them into existing models remains difficult. Prior methods impose fine-grained structural requirements on both source and target attention modules, which cannot meet the feasible requirement in practical deployment. We present Attention Editing, a practical framework for converting already-trained large language models (LLMs) with new attention architectures without re-pretraining from scratch. Attention editing replaces the original attention with a learnable target module and trains it using progressive distillation, consisting of (1) layer-wise teacher-forced optimization with intermediate activation supervision to prevent cold-start error accumulation, and (2) model-level distillation on next-token distributions, optionally regularized by weak feature matching. We instantiate the framework on two different target--MLA and GateSWA, a gated hybrid SWA design, and apply it to Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-30B-A3B. The resulting models maintain competitive performance while delivering substantial efficiency improvements, demonstrating that large-scale attention conversion is both feasible and robust. Notably, experiments are conducted on an Ascend 910B clusters, offering a practical training case study on domestic hardware.

Recent advances in training-free attention control methods have enabled flexible and efficient text-guided editing capabilities for existing generation models. However, current approaches struggle to simultaneously deliver strong editing strength while preserving consistency with the source. This limitation becomes particularly critical in multi-round and video editing, where visual errors can accumulate over time. Moreover, most existing methods enforce global consistency, which limits their ability to modify individual attributes such as texture while preserving others, thereby hindering fine-grained editing. Recently, the architectural shift from U-Net to MM-DiT has brought significant improvements in generative performance and introduced a novel mechanism for integrating text and vision modalities. These advancements pave the way for overcoming challenges that previous methods failed to resolve. Through an in-depth analysis of MM-DiT, we identify three key insights into its attention mechanisms. Building on these, we propose ConsistEdit, a novel attention control method specifically tailored for MM-DiT. ConsistEdit incorporates vision-only attention control, mask-guided pre-attention fusion, and differentiated manipulation of the query, key, and value tokens to produce consistent, prompt-aligned edits. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ConsistEdit achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of image and video editing tasks, including both structure-consistent and structure-inconsistent scenarios. Unlike prior methods, it is the first approach to perform editing across all inference steps and attention layers without handcraft, significantly enhancing reliability and consistency, which enables robust multi-round and multi-region editing. Furthermore, it supports progressive adjustment of structural consistency, enabling finer control.

In this work, we propose a Multi-Window Masked Autoencoder (MW-MAE) fitted with a novel Multi-Window Multi-Head Attention (MW-MHA) module that facilitates the modelling of local-global interactions in every decoder transformer block through attention heads of several distinct local and global windows. Empirical results on ten downstream audio tasks show that MW-MAEs consistently outperform standard MAEs in overall performance and learn better general-purpose audio representations, along with demonstrating considerably better scaling characteristics. Investigating attention distances and entropies reveals that MW-MAE encoders learn heads with broader local and global attention. Analyzing attention head feature representations through Projection Weighted Canonical Correlation Analysis (PWCCA) shows that attention heads with the same window sizes across the decoder layers of the MW-MAE learn correlated feature representations which enables each block to independently capture local and global information, leading to a decoupled decoder feature hierarchy. Code for feature extraction and downstream experiments along with pre-trained models will be released publically.

We study the problem of human gaze modeling, which aims to generate the gaze patterns a viewer produces while observing a visual stimulus. Gaze is primarily captured through two modalities: continuous eye-tracking trajectories, which describe fine-grained motion dynamics, and discrete scanpaths, which describe high-level fixation structure. Because gaze varies substantially across viewers and trials, we treat this variability as a defining property rather than noise and model gaze as a stochastic generative process. Existing generative gaze models supervise on only one of these two representations in isolation. We hypothesize that trajectories and scanpaths describe gaze at complementary scales and are jointly informative during training, and test this hypothesis through ST-DiffEye, a joint trajectory-scanpath diffusion framework that couples both modalities by concatenating them as an additional raw input channel, requiring no architectural overhead beyond an input and output channel expansion. We further introduce a principled evaluation framework based on the Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS), which generalizes any existing sequence similarity metric into a proper scoring rule that jointly assesses the accuracy and diversity of generated gaze. Experiments on task-driven visual search, covering both target-present and target-absent scenarios, and on free-viewing benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. These results, along with detailed ablations, confirm the benefit of joint modeling and the value of distribution-aware evaluation in capturing the intrinsic variability of human gaze. Project webpage: https://st-diffeye.github.io/

Large Language Models (LLMs) face efficiency bottlenecks due to the quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism when processing long contexts. Sparse attention methods offer a promising solution, but existing approaches often suffer from incomplete effective context and/or require complex implementation of pipeline. We present a comprehensive analysis of sparse attention for autoregressive LLMs from the respective of receptive field, recognize the suboptimal nature of existing methods for expanding the receptive field, and introduce PowerAttention, a novel sparse attention design that facilitates effective and complete context extension through the theoretical analysis. PowerAttention achieves exponential receptive field growth in d-layer LLMs, allowing each output token to attend to 2^d tokens, ensuring completeness and continuity of the receptive field. Experiments demonstrate that PowerAttention outperforms existing static sparse attention methods by 5sim 40%, especially on tasks demanding long-range dependencies like Passkey Retrieval and RULER, while maintaining a comparable time complexity to sliding window attention. Efficiency evaluations further highlight PowerAttention's superior speedup in both prefilling and decoding phases compared with dynamic sparse attentions and full attention (3.0times faster on 128K context), making it a highly effective and user-friendly solution for processing long sequences in LLMs.

Modern vision models have achieved remarkable success in benchmarks where local features provide critical information about the target. There is now a growing interest in solving tasks that require more global reasoning, where local features offer no significant information. These tasks are reminiscent of the connectivity tasks discussed by Minsky and Papert in 1969, which exposed the limitations of the perceptron model and contributed to the first AI winter. In this paper, we revisit such tasks by introducing four global visual benchmarks involving path findings and mazes. We show that: (1) although today's large vision models largely surpass the expressivity limitations of the early models, they still struggle with the learning efficiency; we put forward the "globality degree" notion to understand this limitation; (2) we then demonstrate that the picture changes and global reasoning becomes feasible with the introduction of "visual scratchpads"; similarly to the text scratchpads and chain-of-thoughts used in language models, visual scratchpads help break down global tasks into simpler ones; (3) we finally show that some scratchpads are better than others, in particular, "inductive scratchpads" that take steps relying on less information afford better out-of-distribution generalization and succeed for smaller model sizes.

The attention module is the key component in Transformers. While the global attention mechanism offers high expressiveness, its excessive computational cost restricts its applicability in various scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel attention paradigm, Agent Attention, to strike a favorable balance between computational efficiency and representation power. Specifically, the Agent Attention, denoted as a quadruple (Q, A, K, V), introduces an additional set of agent tokens A into the conventional attention module. The agent tokens first act as the agent for the query tokens Q to aggregate information from K and V, and then broadcast the information back to Q. Given the number of agent tokens can be designed to be much smaller than the number of query tokens, the agent attention is significantly more efficient than the widely adopted Softmax attention, while preserving global context modelling capability. Interestingly, we show that the proposed agent attention is equivalent to a generalized form of linear attention. Therefore, agent attention seamlessly integrates the powerful Softmax attention and the highly efficient linear attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of agent attention with various vision Transformers and across diverse vision tasks, including image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation and image generation. Notably, agent attention has shown remarkable performance in high-resolution scenarios, owning to its linear attention nature. For instance, when applied to Stable Diffusion, our agent attention accelerates generation and substantially enhances image generation quality without any additional training. Code is available at https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/Agent-Attention.

This article introduces a sliding window model for defocus deblurring that achieves the best performance to date with extremely low memory usage. Named Swintormer, the method utilizes a diffusion model to generate latent prior features that assist in restoring more detailed images. It also extends the sliding window strategy to specialized Transformer blocks for efficient inference. Additionally, we have further optimized Multiply-Accumulate operations (Macs). Compared to the currently top-performing GRL method, our Swintormer model drastically reduces computational complexity from 140.35 GMACs to 8.02 GMacs, while also improving the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) for defocus deblurring from 27.04 dB to 27.07 dB. This new method allows for the processing of higher resolution images on devices with limited memory, significantly expanding potential application scenarios. The article concludes with an ablation study that provides an in-depth analysis of the impact of each network module on final performance. The source code and model will be available at the following website: https://github.com/bnm6900030/swintormer.

We introduce a novel segmental-attention model for automatic speech recognition. We restrict the decoder attention to segments to avoid quadratic runtime of global attention, better generalize to long sequences, and eventually enable streaming. We directly compare global-attention and different segmental-attention modeling variants. We develop and compare two separate time-synchronous decoders, one specifically taking the segmental nature into account, yielding further improvements. Using time-synchronous decoding for segmental models is novel and a step towards streaming applications. Our experiments show the importance of a length model to predict the segment boundaries. The final best segmental-attention model using segmental decoding performs better than global-attention, in contrast to other monotonic attention approaches in the literature. Further, we observe that the segmental model generalizes much better to long sequences of up to several minutes.

Query-based Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer low-latency inference that is attractive for bimanual robotic manipulation, but we observe that they can still exhibit discontinuous actions and execution failures in complex dual-arm tasks. We hypothesize that unstable multi-view and language fusion is one contributing factor in these failures, often coinciding with attention spreading to distracting regions. To improve robustness, we introduce the Modality Masking Mechanism (M3), an embarrassingly simple, training-only strategy that requires no architectural changes or large-scale robot pretraining. M3 stochastically masks subsets of modality channels during training, exposing the policy to controlled partial observations and encouraging it to rely less on distracting cues and more on evidence that remains reliable. We evaluate M3 on ten bimanual tasks from RoboTwin 2.0 and on three long-horizon real-world tasks. Compared with the Adapter baseline, M3 improves average success by 21.7% in the Clean setting and 11.4% in Clean2Rand, where policies are trained on clean demonstrations and evaluated on randomized scenes, while also improving averaged real-world full-task success by over 30%. These results suggest that structured training-time masking is a practical way to improve the robustness of query-based VLA policies for bimanual manipulation.

Large multimodal models (LMMs) inherit the self-attention mechanism of pretrained language backbones, yet standard attention can exhibit suboptimal allocation, including cross-modal misallocation between textual and visual evidence and intra-visual imbalance among visual tokens. We propose RAVE (Re-Allocating Visual Attention), a lightweight pair-gating mechanism that adds a learned query-key bias to pre-softmax attention scores over visual keys, derived from pre-RoPE query and key features. RAVE requires no architectural modification to the backbone and can be trained end-to-end with the rest of the model. Across a suite of multimodal benchmarks, RAVE improves over standard attention by an average of 3 points, with the largest gains on perception-intensive tasks -- including multilingual OCR, chart understanding, document VQA, and scene text VQA -- where accurate visual grounding is critical.

Decoder-only large language models are increasingly used as behavioral encoders for user representation learning, yet the impact of attention masking on the quality of user embeddings remains underexplored. In this work, we conduct a systematic study of causal, hybrid, and bidirectional attention masks within a unified contrastive learning framework trained on large-scale real-world Alipay data that integrates long-horizon heterogeneous user behaviors. To improve training dynamics when transitioning from causal to bidirectional attention, we propose Gradient-Guided Soft Masking, a gradient-based pre-warmup applied before a linear scheduler that gradually opens future attention during optimization. Evaluated on 9 industrial user cognition benchmarks covering prediction, preference, and marketing sensitivity tasks, our approach consistently yields more stable training and higher-quality bidirectional representations compared with causal, hybrid, and scheduler-only baselines, while remaining compatible with decoder pretraining. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of masking design and training transition in adapting decoder-only LLMs for effective user representation learning. Our code is available at https://github.com/JhCircle/Deepfind-GGSM.

Leveraging pre-trained conditional diffusion models for video editing without further tuning has gained increasing attention due to its promise in film production, advertising, etc. Yet, seminal works in this line fall short in generation length, temporal coherence, or fidelity to the source video. This paper aims to bridge the gap, establishing a simple and effective baseline for training-free diffusion model-based long video editing. As suggested by prior arts, we build the pipeline upon ControlNet, which excels at various image editing tasks based on text prompts. To break down the length constraints caused by limited computational memory, we split the long video into consecutive windows and develop a novel cross-window attention mechanism to ensure the consistency of global style and maximize the smoothness among windows. To achieve more accurate control, we extract the information from the source video via DDIM inversion and integrate the outcomes into the latent states of the generations. We also incorporate a video frame interpolation model to mitigate the frame-level flickering issue. Extensive empirical studies verify the superior efficacy of our method over competing baselines across scenarios, including the replacement of the attributes of foreground objects, style transfer, and background replacement. In particular, our method manages to edit videos with up to 128 frames according to user requirements. Code is available at https://github.com/zhijie-group/LOVECon.

Cross-domain few-shot object detection (CD-FSOD) aims to adapt pretrained detectors from a source domain to target domains with limited annotations, suffering from severe domain shifts and data scarcity problems. In this work, we find a previously overlooked phenomenon: models exhibit dispersed and unfocused attention in target domains, leading to imprecise localization and redundant predictions, just like a human cannot focus on visual objects. Therefore, we call it the target-domain Astigmatism problem. Analysis on attention distances across transformer layers reveals that regular fine-tuning inherently shows a trend to remedy this problem, but results are still far from satisfactory, which we aim to enhance in this paper. Biologically inspired by the human fovea-style visual system, we enhance the fine-tuning's inherent trend through a center-periphery attention refinement framework, which contains (1) a Positive Pattern Refinement module to reshape attention toward semantic objects using class-specific prototypes, simulating the visual center region; (2) a Negative Context Modulation module to enhance boundary discrimination by modeling background context, simulating the visual periphery region; and (3) a Textual Semantic Alignment module to strengthen center-periphery distinction through cross-modal cues. Our bio-inspired approach transforms astigmatic attention into focused patterns, substantially improving adaptation to target domains. Experiments on six challenging CD-FSOD benchmarks consistently demonstrate improved detection accuracy and establish new state-of-the-art results.

Recent advances in self-attention and pure multi-layer perceptrons (MLP) models for vision have shown great potential in achieving promising performance with fewer inductive biases. These models are generally based on learning interaction among spatial locations from raw data. The complexity of self-attention and MLP grows quadratically as the image size increases, which makes these models hard to scale up when high-resolution features are required. In this paper, we present the Global Filter Network (GFNet), a conceptually simple yet computationally efficient architecture, that learns long-term spatial dependencies in the frequency domain with log-linear complexity. Our architecture replaces the self-attention layer in vision transformers with three key operations: a 2D discrete Fourier transform, an element-wise multiplication between frequency-domain features and learnable global filters, and a 2D inverse Fourier transform. We exhibit favorable accuracy/complexity trade-offs of our models on both ImageNet and downstream tasks. Our results demonstrate that GFNet can be a very competitive alternative to transformer-style models and CNNs in efficiency, generalization ability and robustness. Code is available at https://github.com/raoyongming/GFNet