Optimizing Attention for Efficient LLM Inference: A Review

The rapid advancement of deep learning has led to significant progress in large language models (LLMs), with the Attention mechanism serving as a core component of their success. However, the computational and memory demands of Attention mechanisms pose bottlenecks for efficient inference, especially in long-sequence and real-time tasks. This paper systematically reviews optimization strategies for Attention mechanisms, including sparse attention, low-rank decomposition, quantization techniques, block-based parallel computation, and memory management. These approaches have demonstrated notable improvements in reducing computational complexity, optimizing memory usage, and enhancing inference performance. This review highlights the key challenges of computational efficiency, long-sequence modeling, and cross-task generalization through an in-depth analysis of existing methods, their advantages, and limitations. Future research directions, including dynamic precision, hardware-aware optimization, and lightweight architectures offer insights for advancing LLM inference theory and practice.