More than half of the first-named authors on accepted papers originated from China, up from less than 30 per cent last year

The paper, titled “Native Sparse Attention: Hardware-Aligned and Natively Trainable Sparse Attention,” was published on February 27, with Liang listed as one of 15 authors. The “native sparse attention” mechanism is a core improvement that underpins the high efficiency and low-cost performance of DeepSeek’s AI models.

The paper’s win comes as Chinese scientists and researchers are outperforming US peers in basic research in the field of computational linguistics and natural language processing.

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