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Long-context training was bottlenecked on choosing which tokens to read, and removing that bottleneck sped up 1M-token training by 2.07 times

AspireAI community · arXiv (Deng, Huang, Wang, Liu, Hu, Tang, Zeng, Han, Ying, Zhang & Mai)
HyScale is a long-context training system for learned sparse attention, the architecture family behind million-token contexts that has been in production since DeepSeek-V3.2. The paper's argument is that selection, not the attention math, is the bottleneck: for every query the system scores every previous token even though sparse attention reads only k, and current stacks materialize a full score table and then repeat the selection during recomputation. The fix is to treat the output of selection as a set of indices rather than an activation. HyTopK finds each query's exact top-k on the fly without a score table, and selection replay reuses the forward pass's selection during recomputation. With those two changes plus end-to-end system work, GLM-5.1 training on 1M-token sequences runs 2.07x faster than Megatron-LM on 512 H20 GPUs. The same changes speed up the CSA layers of DeepSeek-V4-Flash by 2.01x and the QSA layers of Qwen3.8-Flash-Next by 1.57x at 1M tokens on 32 H800 GPUs. The limitation is scope: these are training-throughput numbers on named hardware and model configurations, and the abstract reports no quality measurement, so any trade-off in model quality is not stated. The gains also concentrate where a stack was already materializing score tables, which is precisely the pattern HyTopK removes. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32057
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