Skip to content (access key 's')
Logo of Technion
Logo of CS Department
Events

The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Block Sparse Flash Attention
event speaker icon
Daniel Ohayon (M.Sc. Thesis Seminar)
event date icon
Monday, 19.10.2026, 15:00
event location icon
506 Zisapel Building & Zoom
event speaker icon
Advisor: Prof. Israel Cohen

Modern large language models increasingly require long contexts for reasoning and multi-document tasks, but attention’s quadratic complexity creates a severe computational bottleneck. We present Block Sparse Flash Attention (BSFA), a drop-in replacement that accelerates long-context inference while preserving model quality. Unlike methods that predict importance before computing scores, BSFA computes exact query-key similarities to select the top-k most important value blocks for each query. By comparing per-block maximum scores against calibrated thresholds, we skip approximately 50% of the computation and memory transfers for pruned blocks. Our training-free approach needs only a single calibration step on a small dataset to set the thresholds for each layer and head. We provide a CUDA kernel implementation that can be used as a drop-in replacement for FlashAttention. On Llama-3.1-8B, BSFA achieves up to 1.13× end-to-end speedup on LongBench with only a 1.1% accuracy drop, and up to 1.24× on Needle-in-a-Haystack retrieval at a 1% accuracy drop. The attention kernel itself accelerates by up to 1.38×. We compare BSFA against five recent sparse attention baselines (SpargeAttention, MInference, FlexPrefill, XAttention, and BLASST), and verify the method on Qwen2.5-7B and on A6000 and H100 GPUs. The implementation is available at https://github.com/Danielohayon/Block-Sparse-Flash-Attention.