{"id":1162282,"date":"2026-02-17T08:41:48","date_gmt":"2026-02-17T16:41:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&p=1162282"},"modified":"2026-02-17T08:43:56","modified_gmt":"2026-02-17T16:43:56","slug":"seerattention-r-sparse-attention-adaptation-for-long-reasoning","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/seerattention-r-sparse-attention-adaptation-for-long-reasoning\/","title":{"rendered":"SeerAttention-R: Sparse Attention Adaptation for Long Reasoning"},"content":{"rendered":"
We introduce SeerAttention-R, a sparse attention framework specifically tailored for the long decoding of reasoning models. Extended from SeerAttention, SeerAttention-R retains the design of learning attention sparsity through a self-distilled gating mechanism, while removing query pooling to accommodate auto-regressive decoding. With a lightweight plug-in gating, SeerAttention-R is flexible and can be easily integrated into existing pretrained model without modifying the original parameters. We demonstrate that SeerAttention-R, trained on just 0.4B tokens, maintains near-lossless reasoning accuracy with 4K token budget in AIME benchmark under large sparse attention block sizes (64\/128). Using TileLang, we develop a highly optimized sparse decoding kernel that achieves near-theoretical speedups of up to 9x over FlashAttention-3 on H100 GPU at 90% sparsity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We introduce SeerAttention-R, a sparse attention framework specifically tailored for the long decoding of reasoning models. Extended from SeerAttention, SeerAttention-R retains the design of learning attention sparsity through a self-distilled gating mechanism, while removing query pooling to accommodate auto-regressive decoding. With a lightweight plug-in gating, SeerAttention-R is flexible and can be easily integrated into existing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":null,"msr_publishername":"","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"","msr_editors":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_issue":"","msr_journal":"","msr_number":"","msr_organization":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_page_range_start":"","msr_page_range_end":"","msr_series":"","msr_volume":"","msr_copyright":"","msr_conference_name":"ICLR 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