Attention in Constant Time: Vashista Sparse Attention for Long-Context Decoding with Exponential Guarantees

arXiv:2602.13804v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large language models spend most of their inference cost on attention over long contexts, yet empirical behavior suggests that only a small subset of tokens meaningfully contributes to each query. We formalize this phenomenon by modeling attention as a projection onto the convex hull of key vectors and analyzing its entropic (softmax-like) relaxation. Our main theoretical contribution is a face-stability theorem showing that, under a strict complementarity margin (a support gap (Delta) certified by KKT multipliers), entropic attention concentrates on a constant-size active face: the total mass assigned to inactive tokens decays exponentially as (exp(-Omega(Delta/varepsilon))), while the error on the active face scales linearly in the temperature/regularization parameter (varepsilon). This yields a practical criterion for when sparse long-context decoding is safe and provides a principled knob to trade accuracy for compute.
Building on these guarantees, we introduce Vashista Sparse Attention, a drop-in mechanism that maintains a small candidate set per query through a paging-style context selection strategy compatible with modern inference stacks. Across long-context evaluations, we observe stable constant-size effective support, strong wall-clock speedups, and minimal quality degradation in the regimes predicted by the support-gap diagnostics. Finally, we discuss deployment implications for privacy-sensitive and air-gapped settings, where interchangeable attention modules enable predictable latency and cost without external retrieval dependencies.