Multi-head latent attention

Checkpoint configuration and implementation zai-org/GLM-5 @ c183ef8, huggingface/transformers @ 5e4d630 · parameter count checked against the checkpoint’s tensor headers · How to read

78 transformer blocks › 75 MoE blocks › Sparse latent attention

RoPE coefficients

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supplied · no parametersposition_embeddings

Position-dependent rotations supplied by the block.

shape
RR [1 positions, 32 pairs]
Sources

Contextual evidence from Generate RoPE coefficients

Rotary coefficients: default RoPE, inverse frequencies θ^(−2j/d) over the rotary slice, cosine and sine computed in float32 for the current positions and cast to the activations’ type, with no rescaling (the attention factor is 1).

rope · huggingface/transformers / modeling_glm_moe_dsa.py
Pinned revision 5e4d6304de55 ↗ · lines 68–122

Read code excerpt
class GlmMoeDsaRotaryEmbedding(nn.Module):
    @deprecate_kwarg("device", version="5.18")
    def __init__(self, config: GlmMoeDsaConfig, device=None):
        super().__init__()
        self.max_seq_len_cached = config.max_position_embeddings
        self.original_max_seq_len = config.max_position_embeddings

        self.config = config

        self.rope_type = self.config.rope_parameters["rope_type"]
        rope_init_fn: Callable = self.compute_default_rope_parameters
        if self.rope_type != "default":
            rope_init_fn = ROPE_INIT_FUNCTIONS[self.rope_type]
        inv_freq, self.attention_scaling = rope_init_fn(self.config, device)

        self.inv_freq = nn.Buffer(inv_freq, persistent=False)
        self.original_inv_freq = nn.Buffer(inv_freq.clone(), persistent=False)

    @staticmethod
    @deprecate_kwarg("device", version="5.18")
    def compute_default_rope_parameters(config: GlmMoeDsaConfig, device=None, **kwargs) -> tuple[torch.Tensor, float]:
        """
        Computes the inverse frequencies according to the original RoPE implementation
        Args:
            config ([`~transformers.PreTrainedConfig`]):
                The model configuration.
        Returns:
            Tuple of (`torch.Tensor`, `float`), containing the inverse frequencies for the RoPE embeddings and the
            post-processing scaling factor applied to the computed cos/sin (unused in this type of RoPE).
        """
        base = config.rope_parameters["rope_theta"]
        dim = getattr(config, "head_dim", None) or config.hidden_size // config.num_attention_heads

        attention_factor = 1.0  # Unused in this type of RoPE
        # Compute the inverse frequencies
        inv_freq = 1.0 / (base ** (torch.arange(0, dim, 2, dtype=torch.float) / dim))
        return inv_freq.to(device), attention_factor

    @torch.no_grad()
    @dynamic_rope_update  # power user: used with advanced RoPE types (e.g. dynamic rope)
    def forward(self, x, position_ids):
        inv_freq_expanded = (
            self.inv_freq[None, :, None].expand(position_ids.shape[0], -1, 1).to(dtype=torch.float, device=x.device)
        )
        position_ids_expanded = position_ids[:, None, :].float()

        device_type = x.device.type if isinstance(x.device.type, str) else "cpu"
        # Disable any outside autocast context if any, to really force fp32
        with maybe_autocast(device_type=device_type, enabled=False):
            freqs = (inv_freq_expanded @ position_ids_expanded).transpose(1, 2)
            emb = torch.cat((freqs, freqs), dim=-1)
            cos = emb.cos() * self.attention_scaling
            sin = emb.sin() * self.attention_scaling

        return cos.to(dtype=x.dtype), sin.to(dtype=x.dtype)

Contextual evidence from Generate RoPE coefficients

The implementation’s configuration: RoPE covers only the 64-feature rotary slice (head_dim is pointed at qk_rope_head_dim), every layer runs its own indexer (with no index_topk_freq set, indexer_types is "full" for every layer), and the first first_k_dense_replace layers use the dense MLP.

model-args · huggingface/transformers / configuration_glm_moe_dsa.py
Pinned revision 5e4d6304de55 ↗ · lines 135–156

Read code excerpt
    def __post_init__(self, **kwargs):
        # Per-layer indexer mode: a pattern (e.g. `"FSSF..."`) overrides the freq/offset schedule.
        if self.indexer_types is None:
            pattern = kwargs.get("index_topk_pattern")
            if pattern is not None:
                self.indexer_types = (
                    [{"F": "full", "S": "shared"}[c] for c in pattern] if isinstance(pattern, str) else list(pattern)
                )
            else:
                freq = max(kwargs.get("index_topk_freq", 1), 1)
                offset = kwargs.get("index_skip_topk_offset", 2)
                self.indexer_types = [
                    "full" if (max(i - offset + 1, 0) % freq) == 0 else "shared" for i in range(self.num_hidden_layers)
                ]
        self.qk_head_dim = self.qk_nope_head_dim + self.qk_rope_head_dim
        # RoPE applies only to the rope slice, so point `head_dim` at it: the inherited (Llama) rotary
        # embedding reads `config.head_dim` and then computes the right frequencies with no override needed.
        self.head_dim = self.qk_rope_head_dim
        # MLP layer types: the first `first_k_dense_replace` layers are dense, the rest are MoE.
        if self.mlp_layer_types is None:
            n_dense = min(self.first_k_dense_replace, self.num_hidden_layers)
            self.mlp_layer_types = ["dense"] * n_dense + ["sparse"] * (self.num_hidden_layers - n_dense)

Contextual evidence from Query heads

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; the latent RMSNorms are built without ε and take the default 10⁻⁶; the softmax scale is 1/√256, with no YaRN correction under default RoPE; every layer builds its own indexer.

mla-init · huggingface/transformers / modeling_glm_moe_dsa.py
Pinned revision 5e4d6304de55 ↗ · lines 293–360

Read code excerpt
def yarn_get_mscale(scale=1, mscale=1):
    if scale <= 1:
        return 1.0
    return 0.1 * mscale * math.log(scale) + 1.0


def yarn_apply_mscale(rope_parameters, scaling):
    if rope_parameters.get("rope_type", "default") != "default":
        mscale_all_dim = rope_parameters.get("mscale_all_dim", 0)
        scaling_factor = rope_parameters["factor"]
        if mscale_all_dim:
            mscale = yarn_get_mscale(scaling_factor, mscale_all_dim)
            scaling = scaling * mscale * mscale
    return scaling

… lines 307–325 omitted …

        self.q_lora_rank = config.q_lora_rank
        self.qk_rope_head_dim = config.qk_rope_head_dim
        self.kv_lora_rank = config.kv_lora_rank
        self.v_head_dim = config.v_head_dim
        self.qk_nope_head_dim = config.qk_nope_head_dim
        self.qk_head_dim = config.qk_nope_head_dim + config.qk_rope_head_dim
        self.num_key_value_groups = config.num_attention_heads // config.num_key_value_heads

        self.is_causal = True
        self.q_a_proj = nn.Linear(self.hidden_size, self.q_lora_rank, bias=config.attention_bias)
        self.q_a_layernorm = GlmMoeDsaRMSNorm(self.q_lora_rank)
        self.q_b_proj = nn.Linear(self.q_lora_rank, self.num_heads * self.qk_head_dim, bias=False)

        self.kv_a_proj_with_mqa = nn.Linear(
            self.hidden_size,
            config.kv_lora_rank + config.qk_rope_head_dim,
            bias=config.attention_bias,
        )
        self.kv_a_layernorm = GlmMoeDsaRMSNorm(config.kv_lora_rank)
        self.kv_b_proj = nn.Linear(
            config.kv_lora_rank,
            self.num_heads * (self.qk_nope_head_dim + self.v_head_dim),
            bias=False,
        )

        self.o_proj = nn.Linear(
            self.num_heads * self.v_head_dim,
            self.hidden_size,
            bias=config.attention_bias,
        )

        self.scaling = yarn_apply_mscale(config.rope_parameters, self.qk_head_dim ** (-0.5))
        # Refer: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12201 for more details.
        self.skip_topk = config.indexer_types[layer_idx] == "shared"
        self.indexer = None if self.skip_topk else GlmMoeDsaIndexer(config, layer_idx)

Contextual evidence from Query heads

Queries are produced from the normalized query latent and split into a non-rotated and a rotated part.

mla-queries · huggingface/transformers / modeling_glm_moe_dsa.py
Pinned revision 5e4d6304de55 ↗ · lines 394–396

Read code excerpt
        q_resid = self.q_a_layernorm(self.q_a_proj(hidden_states))
        q_states = self.q_b_proj(q_resid).view(query_shape).transpose(1, 2)
        q_pass, q_rot = torch.split(q_states, [self.qk_nope_head_dim, self.qk_rope_head_dim], dim=-1)

Contextual evidence from Key heads

The joint down-projection yields the key–value latent and one rotary key shared by all heads; the latent is normalized, and kv_b_proj reconstructs per-head content keys and values from it.

mla-kv · huggingface/transformers / modeling_glm_moe_dsa.py
Pinned revision 5e4d6304de55 ↗ · lines 362–403

Read code excerpt
    def expand_kv(self, kv_nope: torch.Tensor, k_rot: torch.Tensor) -> tuple[torch.Tensor, torch.Tensor]:
        """Expands the compressed latents into key and value states. Args:
            - kv_nope: key + value without positional encoding, shape [batch_size, 1, seqlen, self.kv_lora_rank]
            - k_rot: shared key with positional encoding, shape [batch_size, 1, seqlen, self.qk_rope_head_dim]
        Returns the key and value states, two tensors of shape [batch, num_heads, seq, (k or v)_head_dim].
        """
        batch_size, _, seq_length, _ = kv_nope.shape
        key_shape = (batch_size, seq_length, -1, self.qk_nope_head_dim + self.v_head_dim)

        kv_nope = self.kv_b_proj(kv_nope).view(key_shape).transpose(1, 2)
        k_nope, value_states = torch.split(kv_nope, [self.qk_nope_head_dim, self.v_head_dim], dim=-1)
        k_rot = k_rot.expand(-1, k_nope.shape[1], -1, -1)  # does not affect the underlying storage

        # Concatenate k_nope and k_rot in a new tensor
        key_states = kv_nope.new_empty(*kv_nope.shape[:-1], self.qk_nope_head_dim + self.qk_rope_head_dim)
        key_states[..., : self.qk_nope_head_dim].copy_(k_nope)
        key_states[..., self.qk_nope_head_dim :].copy_(k_rot)
        return key_states, value_states

… lines 380–397 omitted …

        compressed_kv = self.kv_a_proj_with_mqa(hidden_states)
        kv_pass, k_rot = torch.split(compressed_kv, [self.kv_lora_rank, self.qk_rope_head_dim], dim=-1)
        # Both latents are viewed as single-head, 4D tensors, as expected by `expand_kv`
        k_pass = self.kv_a_layernorm(kv_pass).view(batch_size, 1, seq_length, self.kv_lora_rank)

        k_rot = k_rot.view(batch_size, 1, seq_length, self.qk_rope_head_dim)

Contextual evidence from Key heads

The rotary parts are rotated; the normalized latent and the rotated key are what the cache stores; each head joins its content and rotary parts; the indexer’s selection becomes a mask that sets unselected positions to the dtype’s most negative value on top of the causal mask; attention is scaled dot-product attention with a float32 softmax.

mla-prefill · huggingface/transformers / modeling_glm_moe_dsa.py
Pinned revision 5e4d6304de55 ↗ · lines 268–458

Read code excerpt
def eager_attention_forward(
    module: nn.Module,
    query: torch.Tensor,
    key: torch.Tensor,
    value: torch.Tensor,
    attention_mask: torch.Tensor | None,
    scaling: float,
    dropout: float = 0.0,
    **kwargs: Unpack[TransformersKwargs],
):
    key_states = repeat_kv(key, module.num_key_value_groups)
    value_states = repeat_kv(value, module.num_key_value_groups)

    attn_weights = torch.matmul(query, key_states.transpose(2, 3)) * scaling
    if attention_mask is not None:
        attn_weights = attn_weights + attention_mask

    attn_weights = nn.functional.softmax(attn_weights, dim=-1, dtype=torch.float32).to(query.dtype)
    attn_weights = nn.functional.dropout(attn_weights, p=dropout, training=module.training)
    attn_output = torch.matmul(attn_weights, value_states)
    attn_output = attn_output.transpose(1, 2).contiguous()

    return attn_output, attn_weights

… lines 291–403 omitted …

        cos, sin = position_embeddings
        q_rot, k_rot = apply_rotary_pos_emb_interleave(q_rot, k_rot, cos, sin)

        # Cache read / write is performed while latent KV is still compressed
        if past_key_values is not None:
            k_pass, k_rot = past_key_values.update(k_pass, k_rot, self.layer_idx)

        query_states = torch.cat((q_pass, q_rot), dim=-1)

        key_states, value_states = self.expand_kv(k_pass, k_rot)

        # DSA: select this layer's top-k tokens, or reuse the previous full layer's on `"shared"` layers.
        if self.indexer is not None:
            topk_indices = self.indexer(
                hidden_states,
                q_resid,
                position_embeddings,
                attention_mask[:, 0, :, :],
                position_ids,  # Kept for BC
                past_key_values=past_key_values,
            )  # [B, S, topk]
        else:
            if prev_topk_indices is None:
                raise ValueError("Shared DSA layers require top-k indices from a previous full indexer layer.")
            topk_indices = prev_topk_indices

        sparse_indices = None
        if self.config._attn_implementation in ("eager", "sdpa"):
            index_mask = (
                topk_indices.new_ones((batch_size, seq_length, key_states.shape[2]), dtype=torch.bool)
                .scatter(-1, topk_indices.long(), False)
                .unsqueeze(1)
            )

            if attention_mask.dtype == torch.bool:
                attention_mask = attention_mask & ~index_mask
            else:
                attention_mask = attention_mask.masked_fill(index_mask, torch.finfo(hidden_states.dtype).min)
        else:
            sparse_indices = topk_indices

        attention_interface: Callable = ALL_ATTENTION_FUNCTIONS.get_interface(
            self.config._attn_implementation, eager_attention_forward
        )
        attn_output, attn_weights = attention_interface(
            self,
            query_states,
            key_states,
            value_states,
            attention_mask,
            dropout=0.0 if not self.training else self.attention_dropout,
            scaling=self.scaling,
            indices=sparse_indices,  # consumed by flash_mla_with_kvcache; ignored by eager / SDPA
            **kwargs,
        )

Contextual evidence from Lightning indexer

The indexer owns a query projection from the query latent (32 heads × 128 features), one key projection from the block input followed by LayerNorm, and a head-weight projection; its score scale is 1/√128; the head-weight projection is kept in float32 when loading.

indexer-init · huggingface/transformers / modeling_glm_moe_dsa.py
Pinned revision 5e4d6304de55 ↗ · lines 177–649

Read code excerpt
    def __init__(self, config: "GlmMoeDsaConfig", layer_idx: int):
        super().__init__()
        self.config = config
        self.layer_idx = layer_idx

        self.hidden_size: int = config.hidden_size
        self.n_heads: int = config.index_n_heads
        self.head_dim: int = config.index_head_dim
        self.qk_rope_head_dim: int = config.qk_rope_head_dim
        self.index_topk: int = config.index_topk
        self.q_lora_rank: int = config.q_lora_rank

        self.wq_b = nn.Linear(self.q_lora_rank, self.n_heads * self.head_dim, bias=False)
        self.wk = nn.Linear(self.hidden_size, self.head_dim, bias=False)
        self.k_norm = nn.LayerNorm(self.head_dim, eps=1e-6)
        self.weights_proj = nn.Linear(self.hidden_size, self.n_heads, bias=False)
        self.softmax_scale = self.head_dim**-0.5

… lines 194–648 omitted …

    _keep_in_fp32_modules = ["indexer.weights_proj"]

Contextual evidence from Lightning indexer

Indexer queries and the shared key rotate their first 64 features with interleaved RoPE; scores are the ReLU of scaled query–key products in float32, weighted per head by the head weights divided by √32 and summed; the causal mask is added and the top 2,048 positions are kept. There is no Hadamard transform, and it runs without gradients.

indexer-forward · huggingface/transformers / modeling_glm_moe_dsa.py
Pinned revision 5e4d6304de55 ↗ · lines 195–253

Read code excerpt
    @torch.no_grad()
    def forward(
        self,
        hidden_states: torch.Tensor,
        q_resid: torch.Tensor,
        position_embeddings: tuple[torch.Tensor, torch.Tensor],
        attention_mask: torch.Tensor,
        position_ids: torch.Tensor,  # Kept for BC
        past_key_values: Cache | None = None,
    ) -> torch.Tensor:
        """
        Selects the top-k tokens per query for DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA).

        Same as [`DeepseekV32Indexer.forward`], but the indexer applies **interleaved** RoPE
        rather than the non-interleaved half-split RoPE used by DeepSeek-V3.2.

        Args:
            hidden_states: Input hidden states `[B, S, hidden_size]`.
            q_resid: Query residual from `q_a_layernorm(q_a_proj(x))`, shape `[B, S, q_lora_rank]`.
            position_embeddings: `(cos, sin)` from RotaryEmbedding.
            attention_mask: Causal mask, broadcastable to `[B, S, T]`.
            past_key_values: Cache object containing the indexer key cache for this layer.

        Returns:
            `torch.Tensor`: the `int32` top-k token indices of shape `[B, S, topk]`. The eager / SDPA paths
                turn these into an additive sparse mask; the `flash-mla` kernel consumes them directly.
        """
        batch_size, seq_len, _ = hidden_states.shape
        cos, sin = position_embeddings
        q = self.wq_b(q_resid)  # [B, S, H*D]
        q = q.view(batch_size, seq_len, self.n_heads, self.head_dim)  # [B, S, H, D]
        q_rot, q_pass = torch.split(q, [self.qk_rope_head_dim, self.head_dim - self.qk_rope_head_dim], dim=-1)

        k = self.k_norm(self.wk(hidden_states)).unsqueeze(2)  # [B, S, 1, D]
        k_rot, k_pass = torch.split(k, [self.qk_rope_head_dim, self.head_dim - self.qk_rope_head_dim], dim=-1)

        # GLM-MoE-DSA uses interleaved RoPE in the indexer
        q_rot, k_rot = apply_rotary_pos_emb_interleave(q_rot, k_rot, cos, sin, unsqueeze_dim=2)
        q = torch.cat([q_rot, q_pass], dim=-1)  # [B, S, H, D]
        k = torch.cat([k_rot, k_pass], dim=-1).squeeze(2)  # [B, S, D]

        if past_key_values is not None:
            k = past_key_values.update_indexer(k, self.layer_idx)

        scores = torch.matmul(q.float(), k.transpose(-1, -2).float().unsqueeze(1)) * self.softmax_scale
        scores = F.relu(scores)

        # Weight per head and sum across heads: [B, S, 1, H] @ [B, S, H, T] → [B, S, T]
        weights = self.weights_proj(hidden_states.to(self.weights_proj.weight.dtype)).float() * (self.n_heads**-0.5)
        index_scores = torch.matmul(weights.unsqueeze(-2), scores).squeeze(-2)

        # Causality needs to be taken into account when computing scores so padding tokens don't affect computation
        if attention_mask.dtype == torch.bool:
            index_scores = index_scores.masked_fill(~attention_mask, float("-inf"))
        else:
            index_scores = index_scores + attention_mask

        topk = min(self.index_topk, index_scores.shape[-1])
        return index_scores.topk(topk, dim=-1).indices.to(torch.int32)  # [B, S, topk]

Contextual evidence from Lightning indexer

The index score is computed in float32, as the head-weighted sum of ReLU(q·k/√128) with the head weights divided by √32; no FP8 kernel is involved.

index-kernel · huggingface/transformers / modeling_glm_moe_dsa.py
Pinned revision 5e4d6304de55 ↗ · lines 239–244

Read code excerpt
        scores = torch.matmul(q.float(), k.transpose(-1, -2).float().unsqueeze(1)) * self.softmax_scale
        scores = F.relu(scores)

        # Weight per head and sum across heads: [B, S, 1, H] @ [B, S, H, T] → [B, S, T]
        weights = self.weights_proj(hidden_states.to(self.weights_proj.weight.dtype)).float() * (self.n_heads**-0.5)
        index_scores = torch.matmul(weights.unsqueeze(-2), scores).squeeze(-2)