Lingkun Long
2026
Focus-dLLM: Accelerating Long-Context Diffusion LLM Inference via Confidence-Guided Context Focusing
Lingkun Long | Yushi Huang | Shihao Bai | Ruihao Gong | Jun Zhang | Ao Zhou | Jianlei Yang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Lingkun Long | Yushi Huang | Shihao Bai | Ruihao Gong | Jun Zhang | Ao Zhou | Jianlei Yang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) deliver strong long-context processing capability in a non-autoregressive decoding paradigm. However, the considerable computational cost of bidirectional full attention limits the inference efficiency. Although sparse attention is promising, existing methods remain ineffective. This stems from the need to estimate attention importance for tokens yet to be decoded, while the unmasked token positions are unknown during diffusion. In this paper, we present **Focus-dLLM**, a novel training-free attention sparsification framework tailored for accurate and efficient long-context dLLM inference. Based on the finding that token confidence strongly correlates across adjacent steps, we first design a *past confidence-guided indicator* to predict unmasked regions. Built upon this, we propose a *sink-aware pruning strategy* to accurately estimate and remove redundant attention computation, while preserving highly influential attention sinks. To further reduce overhead, this strategy reuses identified sink locations across layers, leveraging the observed cross-layer consistency. Experimental results show that our method offers more than 29× lossless speedup under 32K context length.