Tech Comparison: Sparse Attention Implementation in Qwen vs. Minimax
stochasticchasm · x · 2026-08-28
Discussing Qwen's sparse attention, the author notes it appears to be a refined version of Minimax's approach, both utilizing block sparsity. The key technical difference lies in the placement of pooling: Qwen performs pooling before Scaled Dot-Product Attention (SDPA), whereas Minimax does it after. The author suggests that pre-SDPA pooling makes sense as it drastically reduces the computational cost of long-context attention.
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