DecoupAttn: Decoupled Sparse Attention for Training-Free Acceleration of Video Diffusion

Sparse attention accelerates few-step video diffusion transformers by computing a few key blocks exactly and compensating for the rest. However, existing sparse attention still faces key challenges, including identification overhead from finding critical blocks at every denoising step, suboptimal budget allocation that sets sparsity budgets uniformly or by local metrics, and cross-step error accumulation as reused masks or clusters go stale. Observing that the errors left on skipped blocks cancel each other once every key is compensated, we propose DecoupAttn, a new paradigm of decoupled sparse attention: semantic clusters compensate every key, and exact attention corrects their error on a few blocks fixed once offline by position. To support this paradigm, we introduce Distortion Budget, a rate-distortion objective for budget allocation that places exact computation across timesteps, layers, and heads where it removes the most distortion that compensation leaves in the final latent. Built on this budget, we further propose Reassign Cache, in which each step reassigns the drifting keys to cached centroids and refreshes compensation while the budgeted blocks stay fixed. Moreover, DecoupAttn is training-free: a few calibration clips compile one plan offline, and inference runs standard block-sparse kernels with one fused compensation kernel. Our code will be released after submission.