RouteSparse: Input-Conditional Pattern Routing for Budgeted Long-Context Prefilling

Long-context large language model inference is increasingly limited by prefill, where dense self-attention processes the entire prompt before generation begins. Sparse block selection can reduce this cost, but a block centroid may hide a highly relevant token among many irrelevant ones. We call this failure mode mean dilution and propose RBS-Attention, a training-free sparse-prefill method with two complementary selection branches. A centroid base branch captures average relevance, while a rescue branch uses the maximum key-block radius and its prompt-, layer-, and head-dependent distribution to identify blocks at risk of underestimation. Independently thresholding the two branches and combining their masks controls the contribution of rescue blocks while preserving regular block-sparse FlashAttention execution. On H100 GPUs, RBS-Attention achieves 20.65$\times$ standalone prefill-attention speedup, 11.92$\times$ vLLM prefill-attention speedup, and 5.97$\times$ end-to-end time-to-first-token speedup at 128K on Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507-FP8. On the dense Qwen3-32B model, it obtains 88.65 overall RULER accuracy versus 89.52 for dense attention; LongBench-v2, InfiniteBench, and Video-MME provide additional quality evaluation. Supporting experiments measure actual retention, compare selectors at matched density, and characterize block-size, threshold, and memory behavior. Together, these results support radius-adaptive dual-branch selection as an effective approach to long-context prefill.

Long contexts have become standard in pretrained LLMs, yet they remain expensive to run: prefill compute grows quadratically with sequence length, and every decode step re-reads a key-value cache that grows linearly with it. Sparse attention cuts these costs by attending only to a relevant subset of past tokens, but selecting that subset is itself expensive. We present SpotAttention, a lightweight selector that attaches to a frozen pretrained transformer and learns by KL distillation to estimate its attention distribution. The selector picks the top-K keys each query attends to, and because its estimate is a calibrated distribution, a dual top-p rule reads the per-query, per-layer budget directly from it. Across Qwen3 (dense, 4B-32B) and Qwen3.5 (hybrid linear/full attention, 4B-9B), SpotAttention matches dense accuracy at contexts up to 128K tokens, eight times the training length. Decode at L=128K runs 3.9x faster than FlashAttention and 1.8x faster than Twilight, the strongest training-free baseline. Quantizing the selector's K-cache to INT4 or FP4 microscale shrinks it 3.5x at no accuracy cost.

The attention prefilling phase of long-context LLM inference scales quadratically, making self-attention a severe computational bottleneck. Traditional sparse attention methods mitigate this through fixed patterns or offline profiling, but lack the flexibility to adapt to input-dependent attention structure. Recent dynamic methods address this by routing heads to sparse patterns in real-time, but rely on indirect routing proxies with overhead and budget allocation mechanisms that overlook the post-softmax mass hierarchy. We present CRISP (Cliff-awaRe Input-adaptive Sparse Prefilling), which identifies and addresses two structural challenges in this dynamic routing paradigm. First, we show that the routing decision can be read directly off the structure of the proxy attention map. We replace the Jensen-Shannon Divergence (JSD) routing with C_struct, a structural proxy that measures mass at Vertical-Slash compatible positions and reproduces JSD's routing decisions while eliminating both the pooled matmul and subsequent KL divergence overhead. Second, we formalize the post-softmax mass cliff and demonstrate theoretically that strictly cumulative coverage thresholds accumulate O(n) background noise at long contexts. CRISP navigates this via a sink-aware threshold grounded in the noise floor. Empirically, across InfiniteBench, RULER and LongBench on two model families, CRISP is the strongest sparse method overall and matches or exceeds exact dense attention on retrieval-heavy benchmarks, recovering up to +28.0 pp on retrieval tasks over baselines and achieving up to a 5.30x attention speedup at 512k tokens, driven primarily by our O(n) noise elimination during selection while preserving structural integrity.