Attend at the Right Resolution: Head-Adaptive Sparse Attention via Query–Key Interaction Structure

Attention is a major scalability bottleneck in large language models (LLMs), with its computational cost and key-value (KV) memory traffic becoming increasingly prohibitive as context length grows. Sparse attention addresses this bottleneck by restricting each query to a subset of the context, but its effectiveness hinges on identifying relevant regions both cheaply and reliably. Existing training-free methods primarily rely on runtime relevance estimates, with selection dimensionality and granularity typically governed by fixed heuristics rather than the intrinsic interaction structure of pretrained attention heads. We take a different perspective: the query–key operator of each pretrained head defines a characteristic response structure that determines the resolution needed for sparse selection, both across feature directions and across context tokens. Building on this insight, we propose Head-Adaptive Sparse Attention (HASA), a training-free sparse attention framework that jointly adapts selection resolution along these two dimensions. Along the feature dimension, the singular spectrum of each head's query–key operator determines an effective rank, yielding a compact, head-specific response space. Along the sequence dimension, neighboring regions are progressively merged according to the directional coherence of their token responses in this same space, while heterogeneous regions remain separate. Exact attention is then computed using the original full-dimensional KV states of the selected regions. HASA captures 88.1% of dense-attention mass and, compared with UNIQUE, a strong recent sparse-attention baseline, improves accuracy by up to 3.47 and 2.57 points on RULER and LongBench-Pro, respectively, and accelerates self-attention by up to 1.32 times, while achieving up to 14.07 times speedup over dense attention.