Key–value compression

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

in
xx [B batch, T positions, 6144 d]
out
c^KV\hat c^{KV} [B batch, T positions, 512 kv latent]
parameters
3,146,240 · × 3 dense blocks = 9,438,720
mode
prefill, empty cache
Parameters

3,146,240 parameters per instance, across its learned components

Exact per-instance accounting
ComponentCalculationParameters
Key–value down-projection6,144×5126{,}144 \times 5123,145,728
Key–value latent RMSNorm512512512
Per-instance total3,146,240

Across 3 independent dense blocks: 3,146,240×3=9,438,7203{,}146{,}240 \times 3 = 9{,}438{,}720 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

The implementation caches this latent and the rotary key (modeling_glm_moe_dsa.py 407–409): 576 values per position. Full per-head keys (256 features) and values (256) would take 32,768. The lightning indexer caches one more key per position, of 128 features.

One matrix, kv_a_proj_with_mqa, produces this latent and the 64-feature rotary key together, 576 output features in all; the implementation splits them after the product (modeling_glm_moe_dsa.py 398–399).

Codemodeling_glm_moe_dsa.py 293–403
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)
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; 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)