ESTRA: Enabling Extreme Attention Sparsity for Training-Free Video Diffusion Acceleration

Video diffusion transformers generate high-quality videos, but attention over long spatiotemporal sequences makes inference computationally expensive. Sparse attention reduces this cost by computing only a subset of query-key interactions exactly, and recent training-free methods further approximate the remaining interactions. These methods, however, degrade quickly at high sparsity, which limits the achievable speedup. We present ESTRA (Extreme Sparsity Through Refined Attention), a training-free acceleration method that preserves generation quality even at extreme sparsity. ESTRA concentrates exact attention computation on a small set of important key-value tokens and approximates the remaining contributions with cluster representatives. To identify these tokens efficiently, it groups similar queries and uses their representatives to score individual keys. A variance-based correction further refines the attention weights of the cluster representatives, improving the accuracy of the approximation. Experiments on Wan2.1-14B and HunyuanVideo-13B show that ESTRA establishes a new quality-efficiency frontier for training-free sparse attention, achieving 3.26× and 4.71× end-to-end speedups at 5% attention density while surpassing Sol-Attn and SVG-EAR in fidelity to dense generation and on most VBench dimensions. Even at 1% density, ESTRA remains more faithful to dense generation than Sol-Attn at 12.5%, while reaching up to 5.39× speedup.