SSA: Achieving Sparser Attention by Aligning Full and Sparse Attention Outputs in Feature Space “ When large language models process long texts, the computational cost of the attention mechanism remains a critical bottleneck for efficiency. Sparse attention reduces computational complexity by limiting the number of tokens each query can attend to, but traditional methods face an unexpected paradox: attention mechanisms designed to be sparser instead become more dispersed than full attention. Today, we dive deep into an innovative solution—SSA (Sparse Sparse Attention). Why We Need to Rethink Sparse Attention With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), the demand …