Latent Sparse Attention: Towards Subquadratic Ultra-Long Context Attention

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Article Summary

Agentic workflows are increasingly shifting towards long-horizon tasks, such as open-ended scientific work, where models benefit from long context windows. However, at ultra-long context (above 1M tokens), full attention is prohibitively expensive. A promising approach is sparse attention, in which a dedicated indexer selects a subset of keys for the attention. Yet current methods of indexing either still have quadratic cost in context size or lose accuracy at ultra-long context scale. We address this with Latent Sparse Attention (LSA), an efficient attention method that maintains accuracy at ultra-long context. In LSA, keys are hierarchically clustered in a learned latent space, and queries score the hierarchy of clusters instead of scoring every key, making prefill, decode and training faster at long context. We propose two variants, Distilled-LSA (D-LSA), which can be applied to pre-trained models via distillation, and Native-LSA (N-LSA), which is trained natively on the next-token loss alone. On GLM-5.3-FLASH (QWEN-3.8-27B) at 10M tokens, D-LSA speeds up one attention layer by 22.7x (72.4x) in prefill and 4.6x (42.5x) in decode over its original sparse attention (full attention), while keeping similar accuracy across a variety of tasks. N-LSA matches the accuracy of full attention with a training speedup of 1.6x per layer at 128k tokens. LSA offers practical and efficient attention for models to benefit from ultra-long context.

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