Block-Sparse FlashAttention vs Sliding Window Attention in LongBench Multilingual Reasoning for Llama-3 at 32K Context Lengths

Abstract

Abstract: Modern large language models increasingly require long contexts for reasoning and multi-document tasks, but attention's quadratic complexity creates a severe computational bottleneck. We present Block-Sparse FlashAttention (BSFA), a drop-in replacement that accelerates long-context inference while preserving model quality. Unlike methods that predict importance before computing scores, BSFA computes exact query-key similarities to select the top-k most important value blocks for each query. By comparing per-block maximum scores against calibrated thresholds, we skip approximately 50\% of the co

Research Question

How does Block-Sparse FlashAttention compare to sliding window attention in throughput and accuracy on the LongBench multilingual reasoning subset for Llama-3 models at 32K context lengths?

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