AdaSplash-2: Faster Differentiable Sparse Attention

Abstract

Sparse attention has been proposed as a way to alleviate the quadratic cost of transformers, a central bottleneck in long-context training. A promising line of work is \alpha-entmax attention, a differentiable sparse alternative to softmax that enables input-dependent sparsity yet has lagged behind softmax due to the computational overhead necessary to compute the normalizer \tau. In this paper, we introduce AdaSplash-2, which addresses this limitation through a novel histogram-based initialization that reduces the number of iterations needed to compute \tau to typically 1--2. The key idea is to compute a coarse histogram of attention scores on the fly and store it in on-chip SRAM, yielding a more accurate initialization that enables fast forward and backward computation. Combined with a sparsity-aware GPU implementation that skips zero blocks with low overhead, AdaSplash-2 matches or improves per-step training time relative to FlashAttention-2 when block sparsity is moderate-to-high (e.g., >60\%), which often occurs at long-context lengths. On downstream tasks, models trained with our efficient \alpha-entmax attention match softmax baselines at short-context lengths and achieve substantial gains in long-context settings.