DeepSeek V4.1 · MoE RMSNorm

40 layers › 2 groups of 6 layers › Source layer, pairs pooled

MoE RMSNorm

learnedself.ffn_norm(x) · 991

Rescale each position’s features using their root mean square, then apply learned gain.

\begin{aligned}m_2(x)&=\frac{1}{d}\sum_{j=1}^d x_j^2\\y&=\gamma_{\mathrm{ffn}}\odot\frac{x}{\sqrt{m_2(x)+\varepsilon}}\\\varepsilon&=10^{-20}\end{aligned}

in: $h_{\mathrm{ffn}}$ [B batch, T positions, 5120 d]
out: $x_{\mathrm{ffn}}$ [B batch, T positions, 5120 d]
parameters: 5,120 · × 2 groups = 10,240

Parameters

5,120 parameters per instance.

Exact per-instance accounting
Component	Calculation	Parameters
Learned gain	$5{,}120$	5,120
Per-instance total		5,120

Each normalization instance owns its learned gain vector.

Across 2 independent groups: $5{,}120 \times 2 = 10{,}240$ parameters.

Derived from the configured feature width; the model total matches the checkpoint’s tensors.

Codemodel.py 281–293, 968–994

model.py 281–293

class RMSNorm(nn.Module):
    def __init__(self, dim: int, eps: float = 1e-6):
        super().__init__()
        self.dim = dim
        self.eps = eps
        self.weight = nn.Parameter(torch.ones(dim))

    def forward(self, x: torch.Tensor):
        dtype = x.dtype
        x = x.float()
        var = x.square().mean(-1, keepdim=True)
        x = x * torch.rsqrt(var + self.eps)
        return (self.weight * x).to(dtype)

model.py 968–994

    def forward(
        self,
        x: torch.Tensor,
        start_pos: int,
        pre_mix: torch.Tensor,
        image_mask: torch.Tensor | None,
        *attn_args,
    ) -> tuple[torch.Tensor, torch.Tensor]:
        """`pre_mix` collapses the hc_mult copies down to one input for this block's attention. Each
        sub-block's own `hc_mixes` produces the mix for the *next* one, so attention uses what the
        previous layer's FFN produced and the FFN uses what this attention produced.

        image_mask: [b, s] bool, True inside image spans (selects the VL routing bias)."""
        residual = x
        attn_pre, attn_post, attn_comb = self.hc_mixes(x, self.hc_attn_fn, self.hc_attn_scale, self.hc_attn_base)
        x = self.hc_pre(x, pre_mix)
        x = self.attn_norm(x)
        x = self.attn(x, start_pos, *attn_args)
        x = self.hc_post(x, residual, attn_post, attn_comb)

        residual = x
        ffn_pre, ffn_post, ffn_comb = self.hc_mixes(x, self.hc_ffn_fn, self.hc_ffn_scale, self.hc_ffn_base)
        x = self.hc_pre(x, attn_pre)
        x = self.ffn_norm(x)
        x = self.ffn(x, image_mask)
        x = self.hc_post(x, residual, ffn_post, ffn_comb)
        return x, ffn_pre

Sources2

Direct evidence

RMSNorm divides by the root mean square over the features, computed in float32, and multiplies by a learned gain.

rmsnorm · deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash / inference/model.py
Pinned revision 2cba9e42aa02 ↗ · lines 281–293

Read code excerpt

class RMSNorm(nn.Module):
    def __init__(self, dim: int, eps: float = 1e-6):
        super().__init__()
        self.dim = dim
        self.eps = eps
        self.weight = nn.Parameter(torch.ones(dim))

    def forward(self, x: torch.Tensor):
        dtype = x.dtype
        x = x.float()
        var = x.square().mean(-1, keepdim=True)
        x = x * torch.rsqrt(var + self.eps)
        return (self.weight * x).to(dtype)

Direct evidence

Attention reads the streams with the mix the previous sublayer computed and writes with its own; the mixture reads with the mix attention computed and writes with its own, and hands its reading mix to the next layer.

block-forward · deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash / inference/model.py
Pinned revision 2cba9e42aa02 ↗ · lines 968–994

Read code excerpt

    def forward(
        self,
        x: torch.Tensor,
        start_pos: int,
        pre_mix: torch.Tensor,
        image_mask: torch.Tensor | None,
        *attn_args,
    ) -> tuple[torch.Tensor, torch.Tensor]:
        """`pre_mix` collapses the hc_mult copies down to one input for this block's attention. Each
        sub-block's own `hc_mixes` produces the mix for the *next* one, so attention uses what the
        previous layer's FFN produced and the FFN uses what this attention produced.

        image_mask: [b, s] bool, True inside image spans (selects the VL routing bias)."""
        residual = x
        attn_pre, attn_post, attn_comb = self.hc_mixes(x, self.hc_attn_fn, self.hc_attn_scale, self.hc_attn_base)
        x = self.hc_pre(x, pre_mix)
        x = self.attn_norm(x)
        x = self.attn(x, start_pos, *attn_args)
        x = self.hc_post(x, residual, attn_post, attn_comb)

        residual = x
        ffn_pre, ffn_post, ffn_comb = self.hc_mixes(x, self.hc_ffn_fn, self.hc_ffn_scale, self.hc_ffn_base)
        x = self.hc_pre(x, attn_pre)
        x = self.ffn_norm(x)
        x = self.ffn(x, image_mask)
        x = self.hc_post(x, residual, ffn_post, ffn_comb)
        return x, ffn_pre