Parameterized Stripe Attention for Efficient Video Generation

arXiv:2609.37001v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) enable high-quality video generation but suffer from substantial inference latency, primarily attributable to the computationally expensive full spatio-temporal attention. While sparse attention methods offer potential solutions, existing approaches face an inherent flexibility--efficiency dilemma: predefined masks lack the flexibility to capture diverse attention patterns, while runtime-determined masks introduce overheads and sacrifice hardware efficiency. We identify the lack of a unified structural characterization of DiT attention as a key limitation of existing methods, and establish that video DiT attention exhibits extbf{periodic diagonal stripe structures} along both temporal and spatial dimensions. To formally encode these structured patterns within a single efficient kernel, we present {f PSA}, a parameterized stripe attention that formalizes the observed stripe regularity, unifying diverse attention patterns for efficient mask generation. This unified representation enables a single hardware-efficient CUDA kernel to process all sparse patterns, achieving FlashAttention-3-level Model FLOPs Utilization. To determine optimal sparsity configurations, we propose a training-free offline search algorithm that automatically maximizes sparsity under a specified error tolerance for each attention head. Experiments on HunyuanVideo and Wan~2.1 demonstrate that PSA achieves 1.57imes and 1.37imes end-to-end speedups over FlashAttention-3 baselines, with acceptable visual quality degradation.

Source: arXiv cs.AI | 2026-09-30