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

learnedkey_states

Reconstruct 64 key heads of 256 features: per-head content from the latent and one rotated key shared by all heads.

Why

The authors of latent attention explain that a key has two parts because rotation by position does not go together with the compression. If the rebuilt keys were rotated, the rotation would stand between the query matrix and the key’s up-projection, and the keys of all earlier tokens would have to be recomputed for every new token. So position is carried by a separate rotary part, one per position and shared by all heads, joined to each head’s content part. DeepSeek-V2 §2.1.3

ktR=RoPE⁡(ktpe,Rt){\htmlClass{vl-stream-k}{k^{R}_{t}}}=\operatorname{RoPE}({\htmlClass{vl-stream-k}{k^{\mathrm{pe}}_{t}}},{\htmlClass{vl-stream-context}{R_t}})
Ki=[KiC; kR]{\htmlClass{vl-stream-k}{K_i}}=[{\htmlClass{vl-stream-k}{K^{C}_i}};\,{\htmlClass{vl-stream-k}{k^{R}}}]
All 5 steps
kC=c^KVWUK{\htmlClass{vl-stream-k}{k^{C}}}=\hat c^{KV}W_{UK}
KC=reshape⁡(kC){\htmlClass{vl-stream-k}{K^{C}}}=\operatorname{reshape}({\htmlClass{vl-stream-k}{k^{C}}})
kpe=xWKR{\htmlClass{vl-stream-k}{k^{\mathrm{pe}}}}=xW_{KR}
ktR=RoPE⁡(ktpe,Rt){\htmlClass{vl-stream-k}{k^{R}_{t}}}=\operatorname{RoPE}({\htmlClass{vl-stream-k}{k^{\mathrm{pe}}_{t}}},{\htmlClass{vl-stream-context}{R_t}})
Ki=[KiC; kR]{\htmlClass{vl-stream-k}{K_i}}=[{\htmlClass{vl-stream-k}{K^{C}_i}};\,{\htmlClass{vl-stream-k}{k^{R}}}]
in
xx [B batch, T positions, 6144 d]RR [T positions, 32 pairs]
out
KK [B batch, 64 heads, T positions, 256 content + rotary]
parameters
6,684,672 · × 75 MoE blocks = 501,350,400
Parameters

6,684,672 parameters per instance, across its learned components

Exact per-instance accounting
ComponentCalculationParameters
Key content up-projection512×12,288512 \times 12{,}2886,291,456
Rotary key projection6,144×646{,}144 \times 64393,216
Per-instance total6,684,672

Across 75 independent MoE blocks: 6,684,672×75=501,350,4006{,}684{,}672 \times 75 = 501{,}350{,}400 parameters.

Derived from the pinned configuration and transformers implementation, and equal to the count of the checkpoint’s tensors read from its safetensors headers, less the multi-token-prediction layer the implementation does not load. The total includes the routers’ 19,200 correction-bias values, which the implementation holds as buffers.

Explanation

One matrix, kv_b_proj, produces the content keys and the values together; the implementation splits them after the product (modeling_glm_moe_dsa.py 371–372).

When decoding, the implementation rebuilds every head’s keys from the cached latent at each step (modeling_glm_moe_dsa.py 407–413).

Codemodeling_glm_moe_dsa.py 268–458
modeling_glm_moe_dsa.py 293–306
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
modeling_glm_moe_dsa.py 326–360
        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)
modeling_glm_moe_dsa.py 362–379
    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
modeling_glm_moe_dsa.py 398–403
        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)
modeling_glm_moe_dsa.py 268–290
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
modeling_glm_moe_dsa.py 404–458
        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,
        )
Sources3

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; 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)

Direct evidence

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)

Direct evidence

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,
        )