mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

HySparse2: Hybrid Sparse Attention with Two-Level KV Sharing

arXiv 2609.26368 ↗First posted 22 Sep 2026cs.CLcited by 1

On the map: Efficient LLM inference and serving → KV cache optimization

Abstract (arXiv)

Long-horizon and multi-turn agents typically generate short actions and process long observations from tools and environments. This growing context demands efficient prefill, compact KV-cache storage, and accurate long-context retrieval. To meet these demands, we introduce HySparse2, a hybrid sparse attention architecture with two-level KV sharing. At the outer level, KV Bridging adopts a YOCO-style self-decoder and cross-decoder structure, but bridges only full-attention layers. The self-decoder uses hybrid sliding-window attention (SWA), while the cross-decoder uses hybrid sparse attention. The KV caches for full-attention layers in the cross-decoder are generated from the hidden states of full-attention layers in the self-decoder. At the inner level, HySparse2 retains HySparse's core KV Reuse design with two refinements. First, it replaces block-level sparsity with token-level sparsity for finer long-context retrieval. Second, it removes the separate SWA branch from sparse layers and instead forces a sliding window of recent tokens into the sparse selection. This two-level KV sharing allows all cross-decoder KV caches to be constructed from self-decoder hidden states. Prefill can therefore exit after the self-decoder, skipping all cross-decoder layers. On an 80B-A3B MoE model, HySparse2 outperforms HySparse and Hybrid SWA on long-context retrieval and multi-turn agentic tasks, while substantially reducing prefill computation and KV-cache storage.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in KV cache optimization, one of 12 directions in Efficient LLM inference and serving. Builds on 41 of its 47 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 Sep 2026.

Builds on

41 of 47 references.

Closest ancestors · 3

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash: Pushing the Limits of KV Cache Compression17 Sep
  2. 2026HySparse: A Hybrid Sparse Attention Architecture with Oracle Token Selection and KV Cache Sharing3 Feb
  3. 2024Reducing Transformer Key-Value Cache Size with Cross-Layer Attention21 May

Other references · 38

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  3. 2023GQA: Training Generalized Multi-Query Transformer Models from Multi-Head Checkpointscited by 1,346
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  5. 2024DeepSeek-V2: A Strong, Economical, and Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Language Modelcited by 1,135
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  17. 2026DFlash: Block Diffusion for Flash Speculative Decodingcited by 135
  18. 2025NoLiMa: Long-Context Evaluation Beyond Literal Matchingcited by 126
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  23. 2024What is Wrong with Perplexity for Long-context Language Modeling?cited by 69
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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

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  3. 2025Scaling Linear Attention with Sparse State Expansion
  4. 2026An Efficient Hybrid Sparse Attention with CPU-GPU Parallelism for Long-Context Inference
  5. 2026HieraSparse: Hierarchical Semi-Structured Sparse KV Attention
  6. 2026HiSparse: Scaling Sparse-Attention Decoding with Hierarchical KV Cache Management
  7. 2025Tactic: Adaptive Sparse Attention with Clustering and Distribution Fitting for Long-Context LLMs
  8. 2026Unifying Sparse Attention with Hierarchical Memory for Scalable Long-Context LLM Serving