Key heads

61 transformer blocks › 58 MoE blocks › Sparse latent attention › Key heads

Rotary key projection

×

learnedself.wkv_a(x)

Map 7,168 input features to one 64-feature key shared by all heads.

kpe=xWKR{\htmlData{light=unrotated rope-down}{{\htmlClass{vl-stream-k}{k^{\mathrm{pe}}}}}}={\htmlData{light=input}{x}}W_{KR}
in
xx [B batch, 1 position, 7168 d]
out
kpek^{\mathrm{pe}} [B batch, 1 position, 64 rotary]
parameters
458,752 · × 58 MoE blocks = 26,607,616
Parameters

458,752 parameters per instance.

Exact per-instance accounting
ComponentCalculationParameters
Weight matrix7,168×647{,}168 \times 64458,752
Per-instance total458,752

This projection has no bias parameter.

The reference module holds the weight output by input, [out, in].

Across 58 independent MoE blocks: 458,752×58=26,607,616458{,}752 \times 58 = 26{,}607{,}616 parameters.

Derived from the configured matrix dimensions; checkpoint tensors have not been independently counted.

Explanation

WKRW_{KR} is the last 64 output features of wkv_a.

Codemodel.py 523–539, 565–568
model.py 523–539
        self.qk_head_dim = args.qk_nope_head_dim + args.qk_rope_head_dim
        self.v_head_dim = args.v_head_dim

        self.wq_a = Linear(self.dim, self.q_lora_rank)
        self.q_norm = RMSNorm(self.q_lora_rank)
        self.wq_b = ColumnParallelLinear(self.q_lora_rank, self.n_heads * self.qk_head_dim)
        self.wkv_a = Linear(self.dim, self.kv_lora_rank + self.qk_rope_head_dim)
        self.kv_norm = RMSNorm(self.kv_lora_rank)
        self.wkv_b = ColumnParallelLinear(self.kv_lora_rank, self.n_heads * (self.qk_nope_head_dim + self.v_head_dim))
        self.wo = RowParallelLinear(self.n_heads * self.v_head_dim, self.dim)
        self.softmax_scale = self.qk_head_dim ** -0.5
        self.scale_fmt = args.scale_fmt
        if args.max_seq_len > args.original_seq_len:
            mscale = 0.1 * args.mscale * math.log(args.rope_factor) + 1.0
            self.softmax_scale = self.softmax_scale * mscale * mscale

        self.indexer = Indexer(args)
model.py 565–568
        kv = self.wkv_a(x)
        kv, k_pe = torch.split(kv, [self.kv_lora_rank, self.qk_rope_head_dim], dim=-1)
        kv = self.kv_norm(kv)
        k_pe = apply_rotary_emb(k_pe.unsqueeze(2), freqs_cis)
Sources2

Direct evidence

MLA owns a query down-projection, query RMSNorm and up-projection, a joint key–value down-projection that also emits the shared rotary key, a latent RMSNorm, a key–value up-projection and an output projection.

mla-init · deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp / inference/model.py
Pinned revision 87e509a2e5a1 ↗ · lines 523–539

Read code excerpt
        self.qk_head_dim = args.qk_nope_head_dim + args.qk_rope_head_dim
        self.v_head_dim = args.v_head_dim

        self.wq_a = Linear(self.dim, self.q_lora_rank)
        self.q_norm = RMSNorm(self.q_lora_rank)
        self.wq_b = ColumnParallelLinear(self.q_lora_rank, self.n_heads * self.qk_head_dim)
        self.wkv_a = Linear(self.dim, self.kv_lora_rank + self.qk_rope_head_dim)
        self.kv_norm = RMSNorm(self.kv_lora_rank)
        self.wkv_b = ColumnParallelLinear(self.kv_lora_rank, self.n_heads * (self.qk_nope_head_dim + self.v_head_dim))
        self.wo = RowParallelLinear(self.n_heads * self.v_head_dim, self.dim)
        self.softmax_scale = self.qk_head_dim ** -0.5
        self.scale_fmt = args.scale_fmt
        if args.max_seq_len > args.original_seq_len:
            mscale = 0.1 * args.mscale * math.log(args.rope_factor) + 1.0
            self.softmax_scale = self.softmax_scale * mscale * mscale

        self.indexer = Indexer(args)

Direct evidence

The joint down-projection yields the key–value latent and one rotary key shared by all heads; the latent is normalized and the key rotated.

mla-kv · deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp / inference/model.py
Pinned revision 87e509a2e5a1 ↗ · lines 565–568

Read code excerpt
        kv = self.wkv_a(x)
        kv, k_pe = torch.split(kv, [self.kv_lora_rank, self.qk_rope_head_dim], dim=-1)
        kv = self.kv_norm(kv)
        k_pe = apply_rotary_emb(k_pe.unsqueeze(2), freqs_cis)