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INTRA routed long-range attention through relay groups across layers, and cut 2048-pixel FLUX.1-dev generation to 43.72 seconds while keeping better image quality than the sparse baseline

AspireAI community · arXiv
Sparse attention usually has to choose between covering every token pair directly and accepting that long-range information never gets through. INTRA takes a relay view: instead of covering all token-to-token interactions inside one sparse layer, complementary sparse groups create short mediated paths across layers. Scatter forms relay groups that sample broadly across local neighbourhoods, and Gather reconnects those groups in the next layer, giving static connectivity global reachability without runtime pattern selection. On an A100 it cut 2K FLUX.1-dev generation to 43.72 seconds with an FID of 15.67, against 32.46 FID and 47.81 seconds for the CLEAR sparse baseline at radius 8. Attention-only benchmarks on LLaMA-3.1-8B ran 3.6 to 8.4 times faster than MoBA and 7.3 to 10.4 times faster than density-constrained NSA across 4K to 64K contexts, while mean needle-in-a-haystack retrieval held at 0.923. The honest caveat: on the VBench video setting the 13-dimension mean was 0.4677 against dense attention's 0.4745, so the quality trade is not free, and the results require LoRA adaptation of the pretrained model.
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One distance function matched sparse-autoencoder features across layers and compressed feature circuits into supernodes
Two sparse-autoencoder analyses have resisted scaling: matching semantically similar features across layers, and compressing large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes. This paper argues both are the same underlying problem, estimating semantic distances between SAE features that sit on different activation manifolds. Its representation treats each feature not as a single decoder vector but as an activation-weighted distribution over the hidden states expressing it, projects those distributions into a shared reference space, and compares them with Wasserstein distance. The representation is proved invariant to activation rescaling and stable under perturbation, and recovers true matches under finite-sample margin conditions. Empirically it outperformed decoder-vector and LLM-based baselines and captured subtle functional distinctions between related features, and it compressed large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes automatically. The limitation is that this is interpretability tooling: the paper demonstrates better feature matching and circuit compression, not that downstream interpretability claims become more accurate.
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