Fangmin Chen


2026

Attention scales quadratically with sequence length, fundamentally limiting long-context inference.Existing block-granularity sparsification can reduce latency, but coarse blocks impose an intrinsic sparsity ceiling, making further improvements difficult even with carefully engineered designs.We present S2O, which performs early stopping for sparse attention via online permutation.Inspired by virtual-to-physical address mapping in memory systems, S2O revisits and factorizes FlashAttention execution, enabling inference to load non-contiguous tokens rather than a contiguous span in the original order.Motivated by fine-grained structures in attention heatmaps, we transform explicit permutation into an online, index-guided, discrete loading policy; with extremely lightweight preprocessing and index-remapping overhead, it concentrates importance on a small set of high-priority blocks.Building on this importance-guided online permutation for loading, S2O further introduces an early-stopping rule: computation proceeds from high to low importance; once the current block score falls below a threshold, S2O terminates early and skips the remaining low-contribution blocks, thereby increasing effective sparsity and reducing computation under a controlled error budget.As a result, S2O substantially raises the practical sparsity ceiling.On Llama-3.1-8B under a 128K context, S2O reduces single-operator MSE by 3.82× at matched sparsity, and reduces prefill compute density by 3.31× at matched MSE; meanwhile, it preserves end-to-end accuracy and achieves 7.51× attention and 3.81× end-to-end speedups.

2025

Model compression has emerged as a mainstream solution to reduce memory usage and computational overhead. This paper proposes GQSA, a novel model compression framework specifically designed for LLMs. Traditional methods typically focus exclusively on either quantization or sparsification, but relying on a single strategy often results in significant performance loss at high compression rates. In contrast, GQSA integrates quantization and sparsification in a tightly coupled manner, leveraging GPU-friendly structured group sparsity and quantization for efficient acceleration. Building upon system-algorithm co-design principles, we propose a two-stage sparse optimization strategy that ensures the performance superiority of the compressed model. On the engine side, we introduce a “task-centric” parallel strategy, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first application in the domain of sparse computing. Compared to the traditional 2:4 sparse method, the GQSA offers a more flexible and adjustable sparsity rate, as well as a higher weight compression rate, and is efficiently compatible with weight-only quantization methods. Experimental results demonstrate that, under the GQSA W4S50% compression setting, the model’s accuracy surpasses that of both 2:4 pruning and W2 quantization. Furthermore, at the inference level, GQSA outperforms W2 by 1.26 × and 2:4 pruning by 2.35 × in terms of speed.