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HySparse2: Hybrid Sparse Attention with Two-Level KV Sharing (arxiv.org)
2 points by ksec 10 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A shared memory of past text is built once by the first half and reused by the second, so long inputs can stop after the first half. It beat the earlier design at long-context retrieval and multi-turn agent tasks with less compute and storage.

Abstract

Long-horizon and multi-turn agents typically generate short actions and process long observations from tools and environments. This growing context demands efficient prefill, compact KV-cache storage, and accurate long-context retrieval. To meet these demands, we introduce HySparse2, a hybrid sparse attention architecture with two-level KV sharing. At the outer level, KV Bridging adopts a YOCO-style self-decoder and cross-decoder structure, but bridges only full-attention layers. The self-decoder uses hybrid sliding-window attention (SWA), while the cross-decoder uses hybrid sparse attention. The KV caches for full-attention layers in the cross-decoder are generated from the hidden states of full-attention layers in the self-decoder. At the inner level, HySparse2 retains HySparse's core KV Reuse design with two refinements. First, it replaces block-level sparsity with token-level sparsity for finer long-context retrieval. Second, it removes the separate SWA branch from sparse layers and instead forces a sliding window of recent tokens into the sparse selection. This two-level KV sharing allows all cross-decoder KV caches to be constructed from self-decoder hidden states. Prefill can therefore exit after the self-decoder, skipping all cross-decoder layers. On an 80B-A3B MoE model, HySparse2 outperforms HySparse and Hybrid SWA on long-context retrieval and multi-turn agentic tasks, while substantially reducing prefill computation and KV-cache storage.

Jianyu Wei, Yizhao Gao, Qihao Zhang, Shimao Chen, Zhengju Tang, Yu Cheng, Shengjie Zhou, Zihan Jiang, Yifan Song, Hailin Zhang, Liang Zhao, Bo Yang, et al.
arXiv:2609.26368 · cs.CL · submitted Sep 22, 2026
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