MLA

DeepSeek AI successively released DeepSeek-V2 (DeepSeek-AI, 2024) and DeepSeek-V3 (DeepSeek-AI, 2024), two powerful Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models that significantly optimize training costs and inference efficiency while maintaining state-of-the-art performance. DeepSeek-V2 has a total of 236B parameters, activating 21B per token, while DeepSeek-V3 further expands to 671B total parameters, activating 37B per token. Both support a 128K context length. The core innovations of these two models lie in the adoption of Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) and the DeepSeekMoE architecture (Dai et al., 2024). MLA drastically reduces GPU memory usage during inference by compressing the Key-Value (KV) cache into low-dimensional latent vectors, improving efficiency. DeepSeekMoE achieves stronger expert specialization capabilities and more economical training costs through fine-grained expert segmentation and shared expert isolation. Building upon V2, DeepSeek-V3 further introduces an Auxiliary-Loss-Free Load Balancing strategy (Wang et al., 2024) and the Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) (Gloeckle et al., 2024) training objective, further enhancing model performance and training efficiency. ...