[sabaimran]

> Despite being sparse, NSA surpasses Full Attention baseline on average across general benchmarks, long-context tasks, and reasoning evaluation.

Isn't it very notable that the latency improvement didn't have a performance loss? I'm not super familiar with all the technical aspects, but that seems like it should be one of the main focuses of the paper.

[ethan_smith]

The performance maintenance (or even improvement) isn't surprising - sparse attention can reduce noise by focusing only on relevant tokens. Traditional full attention dilutes focus by attending to everything equally, while NSA's pruning approach mimics how humans selectively process information.

[laughingcurve]

Yes that’s what makes it so interesting and novel you nailed it