A curated list of recent papers on efficient video attention for video diffusion models, including sparsification, quantization, and caching, etc.
📌 Sorted in reverse chronological order by arXiv submission date.
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SLA: Beyond Sparsity in Diffusion Transformers via Fine-Tunable Sparse-Linear Attention (Sep 2025) SLA, a trainable attention method combining sparse and linear attention, accelerates Diffusion Transformer models for video generation with minimal quality loss. SLA reduces attention computation by 95% without degrading end-to-end generation quality. An efficient GPU kernel for SLA is implemented, which yields a 13.7× speedup in attention computation and a 2.2× end-to-end speedup in video generation on Wan2.1-1.3B.
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Mixture of Contexts for Long Video Generation (Aug 2025) This work recasts long-context video generation as an internal information retrieval task and proposes a simple, learnable sparse attention routing module, Mixture of Contexts, as an effective long-term memory retrieval engine. By discarding 85% of the context, this approach achieves a 2.2× speedup.
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Sparse-vDiT: Unleashing the Power of Sparse Attention to Accelerate Video Diffusion Transformers (Jun 2025)
This paper provides a detailed analysis of attention maps in Video Diffusion Transformers and identifies three recurring sparsity patterns: diagonal, multi-diagonal, and vertical-stripe structures. It achieves 2.09× theoretical FLOP reduction and 1.76× inference speedup on CogVideoX while maintaining visual fidelity. -
Chipmunk: Training-Free Acceleration of Diffusion Transformers with Dynamic Column‑Sparse Deltas (Jun 2025)
Exploits step-to-step activation redundancy in DiTs via dynamic sparsity and voxel-based token reordering. Implements efficient column-sparse GPU kernels and overlapping strategies to hide latency. Achieves up to 3.72× speedup (HunyuanVideo) without retraining or quality loss. -
Astraea: A GPU‑Oriented Token‑wise Acceleration Framework for Video Diffusion Transformers (Jun 2025)
Proposes an automatic framework combining lightweight token selection and GPU-parallel sparse attention. Uses evolutionary search to optimize token budgets across timesteps. Achieves up to 2.4× speedup on 1 GPU and 13.2× on 8 GPUs with <0.5% quality drop on VBench. -
PAROAttention: Pattern-Aware ReOrdering for Efficient Sparse and Quantized Attention in Visual Generation Models (Jun 2025)
Proposes a token reordering method that transforms irregular attention into hardware-friendly block-wise patterns, simplifying both sparsification and quantization. Achieves lossless visual generation with INT8/INT4 at ~20–30% density, yielding 1.9×–2.7× latency speedup. -
VMoBA: Mixture‑of‑Block Attention for Video Diffusion Models (Jun 2025)
Proposes a sparse mixture-of-block attention mechanism that partitions video tokens into 1D, 2D, and 3D blocks to exploit spatio-temporal locality, achieving ≈2.9× lower FLOPs and 1.35× faster training/inference in long video generation. -
Radial Attention: Sparse Attention with Energy Decay for Long Video Generation (Jun 2025)
Introduces a static$O(n\log n)$ attention mask inspired by spatiotemporal energy decay, enabling ~4× longer videos with up to 1.9× speedup over dense attention in pretrained video diffusion models. -
FPSAttention: Training-Aware FP8 and Sparsity Co-Design for Fast Video Diffusion (Jun 2025)
Develops a training-aware co-design of FP8 quantization and structured sparsity for 3D attention, yielding 7.09× attention speedup (≈4.96× end-to-end) at 720p with negligible quality loss. -
Interspatial Attention for Efficient 4D Human Video Generation (May 2025)
Introduces interspatial attention (ISA) mechanism for diffusion transformer-based video generation models, using relative positional encodings tailored for human videos. Achieves state-of-the-art 4D human video synthesis with motion consistency and identity preservation. -
MAGI-1: Autoregressive Video Generation at Scale (May 2025)
MagiAttentionis a distributed attention mechanism, or context-parallel (CP) strategy, which aims to support a wide variety of attention mask types with kernel-level flexibility, while achieving linear scalability with respect to context-parallel (CP) size across a broad range of scenarios, particularly suitable for training tasks involving ultra-long, heterogeneous mask training like video-generation for Magi-1. -
GRAT: Grouping First, Attending Smartly – Training-Free Acceleration for Diffusion Transformers (May 2025)
Proposes GRAT, a training-free strategy that partitions tokens into GPU-friendly groups and restricts attention to structured regions. Delivers up to 35.8× speedup in 8192×8192 generation on A100, while preserving quality on pretrained Flux and HunyuanVideo. -
Sparse VideoGen2: Accelerate Video Generation with Sparse Attention via Semantic-Aware Permutation (May 2025)
Proposes a training-free method that reorders tokens based on semantic clustering to form dense blocks. Achieves up to 2.3× speedup with minimal quality drop. -
DraftAttention: Fast Video Diffusion via Low-Resolution Attention Guidance (May 2025)
Proposes a training-free method using low-res draft attention to reorder tokens for structured sparse computation. Enables up to 1.75× speedup on GPUs with superior video generation quality. -
VSA: Efficient Video Diffusion via Routing Sparse Attention (May 2025)
Proposes a trainable sparse attention mechanism that routes attention to important tokens in video diffusion models, reducing training FLOPs by 2.5× and cutting inference latency from 31s to 18s without degrading generation quality. -
VORTA: Efficient Video Diffusion via Routing Sparse Attention (May 2025)
Introduces a routing-based framework to replace full 3D attention with specialized sparse patterns during sampling. Delivers 1.76× end-to-end speedup (14.4× with distillation) without quality degradation. -
FastCAR: Cache Attentive Replay for Fast Auto-regressive Video Generation on the Edge (May 2025)
Exploits temporal redundancy by caching MLP outputs between frames to skip redundant decoding steps. Achieves >2.1× faster decoding and better energy efficiency for edge devices. -
SageAttention3: Microscaling FP4 Attention and 8-Bit Training (May 2025)
Leverages FP4 Tensor Cores on Blackwell GPUs to reach 1038 TOPS attention throughput and explores 8-bit attention training with promising results. -
Analysis of Attention in Video Diffusion Transformers (Apr 2025)
Provides an in-depth study of attention in VDiTs, identifying three key attention properties—Structure, Sparsity, and Sinks. Shows that attention patterns are prompt-agnostic, sparsity methods aren’t universally effective, and attention sinks differ from language models. Suggests future directions to improve the efficiency-quality tradeoff :contentReference[oaicite:1]{index=1}. -
Generalized Neighborhood Attention: Multi-dimensional Sparse Attention at the Speed of Light (Apr 2025)
Introduces a unified framework (GNA) for local sparse attention patterns—sliding window, strided, and blocked—and provides an analytical performance simulator. Implements GNA on NVIDIA Blackwell FMHA kernels, achieving up to 1.3 PFLOPs/s and 28%–46% end-to-end speedup on Cosmos-7B, FLUX, and HunyuanVideo without fine-tuning. -
[ICML 25]XAttention: Block Sparse Attention with Antidiagonal Scoring (Mar 2024) Proposes a sparse attention method using antidiagonal scoring for efficient block pruning, achieving up to 13.5× speedup with minimal accuracy loss on long-context language and video benchmarks.
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Training-free and Adaptive Sparse Attention for Efficient Long Video Generation (Feb 2025)
AdaSpa uses blockified adaptive sparse attention with online cached search to reduce PFLOPs in long video generation while maintaining fidelity. -
[ICML 25]SpargeAttention: Accurate Sparse Attention Accelerating Any Model Inference (Feb 2025)
Introduces a training-free two-stage filter for fast sparse attention inference. Achieves high speedup with no quality loss across LLMs, image, and video models. -
DSV: Exploiting Dynamic Sparsity to Accelerate Large-Scale Video DiT Training (Feb 2025)
Leverages dynamic attention sparsity and hybrid parallelism to achieve 3.02× training throughput on large-scale VDiT models. -
[ICML 25]Fast Video Generation with Sliding Tile Attention (Feb 2025)
Restricts attention to a sliding 3D window, accelerating attention by 2.8–17× over FlashAttention-2 and reducing end-to-end latency by 27% without quality loss. -
[ICML 25]Sparse VideoGen: Accelerating Video Diffusion Transformers with Spatial-Temporal Sparsity (Feb 2025)
Classifies heads as spatial vs. temporal and skips irrelevant computations. Yields ≈2.3× end-to-end speedups on modern video diffusion models. -
[ICML 25]SageAttention2: Efficient Attention with INT4 Quantization (Nov 2024)
Combines INT4$QK^\top$ and FP8$PV$ with outlier smoothing to reach 3× higher throughput than FlashAttention2 while retaining high accuracy. -
[ICLR 24]SageAttention: Accurate 8-Bit Attention for Plug-and-Play Inference Acceleration (Oct 2024)
Pioneers 8-bit attention using INT8+FP16 strategy with smoothing. Achieves 2.1×–2.7× speedups over baselines with negligible accuracy drop.
If you find your paper related to attention in video generation, feel free to open a pull request!
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