SLA

This repository provides the implementation of SLA (Sparse–Linear Attention), a trainable attention method that fuses sparse and linear attention to accelerate diffusion models.

SLA: Beyond Sparsity in Diffusion Transformers via Fine-Tunable Sparse–Linear Attention
Jintao Zhang, Haoxu Wang, Kai Jiang, Shuo Yang, Kaiwen Zheng, Haocheng Xi, Ziteng Wang, Hongzhou Zhu, Min Zhao, Ion Stoica, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Jianfei Chen, Jun Zhu
Paper: https://www.arxiv.org/pdf/2509.24006

We provide two versions of SLA: you can use either the SLA-1 branch or the main branch.

Motivation

Effectiveness

Efficiency

Installation

git clone https://github.com/thu-ml/SLA.git
cd SLA
pip install -e .

Usage

import torch
from sparse_linear_attention import SparseLinearAttention

attn = SparseLinearAttention(
    head_dim=128,
    topk=0.2,                 # = 1 - sparsity
    feature_map="softmax",    # options: elu, relu, softmax
    BLKQ=64,
    BLKK=64,
).cuda()

B, H, L, D = 2, 4, 4096, 128
q = torch.randn((B, H, L, D), dtype=torch.bfloat16, device='cuda')
k = torch.randn((B, H, L, D), dtype=torch.bfloat16, device='cuda')
v = torch.randn((B, H, L, D), dtype=torch.bfloat16, device='cuda')

o = attn(q, k, v)

SageSLA

We provide SageSLA, a very fast SLA (Sparse-Linear Attention) forward pass based on SageAttention. It uses some code from SpargeAttn. Please refer to the SageSLA/ directory for the usage of SageSLA.

Citation

If you find this work useful, please cite:

@article{zhang2025sla,
  title={SLA: Beyond Sparsity in Diffusion Transformers via Fine-Tunable Sparse-Linear Attention},
  author={Zhang, Jintao and Wang, Haoxu and Jiang, Kai and Yang, Shuo and Zheng, Kaiwen and Xi, Haocheng and Wang, Ziteng and Zhu, Hongzhou and Zhao, Min and Stoica, Ion and others},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.24006},
  year={2025}
}

@article{zhang2026sla2,
  title={SLA2: Sparse-Linear Attention with Learnable Routing and QAT},
  author={Zhang, Jintao and Wang, Haoxu and Jiang, Kai and Zheng, Kaiwen and Jiang, Youhe and Stoica, Ion and Chen, Jianfei and Zhu, Jun and Gonzalez, Joseph E},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.12675},
  year={2026}
}

@inproceedings{zhang2025sageattention,
  title={SageAttention: Accurate 8-Bit Attention for Plug-and-play Inference Acceleration}, 
  author={Zhang, Jintao and Wei, Jia and Zhang, Pengle and Zhu, Jun and Chen, Jianfei},
  booktitle={International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
  year={2025}
}