Analysis compares Qwen and MiniMax sparse attention implementations
stochasticchasm · x · 2026-08-28
A technical observer noted that Qwen's sparse attention appears to be a refined version of MiniMax's sparse attention. Both are block sparse, with the key difference being that Qwen performs pooling before SDPA (Scaled Dot-Product Attention), whereas MiniMax does so after. This pre-SDPA pooling design significantly reduces computation costs for long contexts. The post includes a link to the arXiv paper on MiniMax Sparse Attention.
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