We study long-context balanced entropic optimal transport (OT) attention on TPU hardware through a stopped-base, fixed-depth tail-refinement surrogate. After a stopped
T-step Sinkhorn solve, we unroll a short refinement tail and differentiate that surrogate exactly. For the reported
R=2 TPU path, the backward pass contains four staircase plan factors. We prove an exact one-reference-tile schedule: the
R=2 score cotangent is a single reference plan tile times an explicit modifier field built from vector cotangents and dual differences. This yields block-wise cost
O((T+R)LW),
O(Ld) input storage, and
O(L) additional HBM usage for fixed head dimension
d and band width
W on the balanced fixed-support path. We also formalize the current \texttt{dustbin_block} path as the same unit-target surrogate on an augmented support, so the adjoint schedule lifts to the single-active-dustbin path used in our TPU runs; this bridge is algebraic and does not claim a general KL-unbalanced or arbitrary-capacity gap model. We provide a local surrogate-bias bound, an a posteriori bias certificate, and a projective contraction certificate for strictly positive active blocks. On synthetic masked problems, the optimized kernel matches exact autodiff of the same centered surrogate to within
10−5--
10−10. On TPU v6e-8, a four-configuration Pfam screen completes end-to-end, and a promoted balanced
R=2 run sustains roughly
8.5 examples per second through a three-hour budget, reaching step
1437. Held-out Pfam test shards improve reconstruction from
5.57 to
2.05 and sparse CE from
5.53 to
5.30 relative to step
0, with CE logged diagnostically rather than optimized directly; target-barycenter alignment metrics do not materially improve, and a deterministic diagonal reference remains stronger on those metrics.