Efficient long-context inference remains a major challenge for large language models (LLMs), as the cost of attention computation during auto-regressive decoding grows linearly with the context length. Recent sparse attention methods attempt to reduce the computational burden by selecting a subset of tokens at each step, while most rely on static importance scores that are repeatedly computed over the entire cache, overlooking the relational dynamics of the decoding process. In this work, we revisit sparse attention in LLMs and propose to model token importance as a dynamic process that evolves over decoding steps and propagates through model layers. To efficiently measure token importance, we propose two lightweight mechanisms: (1) Cross-Step Accumulation, which incrementally maintains long-term, query-agnostic importance via decayed accumulation of sparse attention scores, avoiding recomputing the importance of decoded tokens; and (2) Cross-Layer Propagation, which leverages the model’s intrinsic Retrieval Heads to compute query-aware indices and efficiently propagate them across layers; Together, these mechanisms preserve both stable context memory and adaptive query relevance while reduce redundant computation. We evaluate our approach on PG-19, RULER, LongBench, and mathematical reasoning benchmarks using models employing Multi-Head and Grouped-Query Attention. Under varying KV cache budgets, our method consistently outperforms prior sparse attention baselines, approaches full attention performance in most settings, and achieves speedups of up to 5.36× for attention latency and 2.33× for end-to-end decoding. Our code is available at: https://github.com/iLearn-Lab/ACL26-EvoSparse.

This paper investigates the problem of safe decoding for Large Language Models (LLMs) during inference, particularly under jailbreak attacks. Previous approaches typically either detect malicious content or regulate the decoding alignment of LLMs to mitigate such attacks. Although effective in defending against attacks, these methods often over-reject benign content, limiting their generalizability in real-world scenarios where harmful and benign information coexist. Towards this end, we propose an innovative framework named Sequence-level risk Accumulation for calibrating test-time alignment (SEAT). Specifically, SEAT introduces a reward-guided branch decoding paradigm to incorporate safety awareness during generation. To balance the detection of harmful content with the accurate response to benign information, SEAT employs a sequence-level risk monitor that smooths risk signals over the entire sequence, preventing over-confident refusals for certain tokens. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments on four attack benchmarks and two neutral datasets, comparing SEAT with eight state-of-the-art baselines. Consequently, the results demonstrate that SEAT achieves superior performance both in defending against jailbreak attacks and in generating high-quality responses on neutral datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/ShanwenTan/SEAT.

Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs) incorporate the temporal feature to express the transience of knowledge by describing when facts occur. TKG extrapolation aims to infer possible future facts based on known history, which has garnered significant attention in recent years. Some existing methods treat TKG as a sequence of independent subgraphs to model temporal evolution patterns, demonstrating impressive reasoning performance. However, they still have limitations: 1) In modeling subgraph semantic evolution, they usually neglect the internal structural interactions between subgraphs, which are actually crucial for encoding TKGs. 2) They overlook the potential smooth features that do not lead to semantic changes, which should be distinguished from the semantic evolution process. Therefore, we propose Disentangled Multi-span Evolutionary Network (DiMNet) for TKG reasoning. Specifically, we design a multi-span evolution strategy that captures local neighbor features while perceiving historical neighbor semantic information, thus enabling internal interactions between subgraphs during the evolution process. To maximize the capture of semantic change patterns, we design a disentangle component that adaptively separates nodes’ active and stable features, used to dynamically control the influence of historical semantics on future evolution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiMNet achieves substantial performance in TKG reasoning, outperforming the state-of-the-art up to 22.7% in MRR.

The recent advancements in language models have significantly catalyzed progress in computational biology. A growing body of research strives to construct unified foundation models for single-cell biology, with language models serving as the cornerstone. In this paper, we systematically review the developments in foundation language models designed specifically for single-cell biology. Our survey offers a thorough analysis of various incarnations of single-cell foundation language models, viewed through the lens of both pre-trained language models (PLMs) and large language models (LLMs). This includes an exploration of data tokenization strategies, pre-training/tuning paradigms, and downstream single-cell data analysis tasks. Additionally, we discuss the current challenges faced by these pioneering works and speculate on future research directions. Overall, this survey provides a comprehensive overview of the existing single-cell foundation language models, paving the way for future research endeavors.