FlashMemory DeepSeek-V4 Retriever (GitHub Repo)

TLDR AI Models

Summary

Introduces FlashMemory DeepSeek-V4 Retriever, a lightweight model that sparsifies DeepSeek-V4's CSA KV-cache by predicting which chunks will be attended to next, keeping only ~10-15% on-device while matching full-attention performance.

FlashMemory predicts which DeepSeek-V4 CSA KV-cache chunks future tokens will attend to, keeping only the most relevant chunks on GPU. The retriever reportedly preserves or improves downstream performance while retaining about 10–15% of the KV cache on-device.
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libertywing/FlashMemory-Deepseek-V4

Source: https://github.com/libertywing/FlashMemory-Deepseek-V4

FlashMemory DS-V4 Retriever

A lightweight retriever that sparsifies DeepSeek-V4 Compressed-Sparse-Attention (CSA) KV-cache.

Given the hidden state of a decode token, the retriever predicts which CSA KV-cache chunks the next ~64 tokens will attend to. Only the top-scoring chunks stay resident on the GPU; the rest can be offloaded to CPU/disk. In downstream evaluation it matches or beats the full-attention baseline while keeping ~10–15% of the KV cache on-device.

Model weights on Hugging Face


Quick start

pip install torch safetensors

# Demo with mock inputs
python demo.py --ckpt weights/flashmemory_ds_v4.safetensors

# Toy sparse-decode loop
python toy_flashmemory_inference.py --ckpt weights/flashmemory_ds_v4.safetensors

Usage

from retriever import FlashMemoryRetriever

model = FlashMemoryRetriever.from_checkpoint(
    "weights/flashmemory_ds_v4.safetensors", device="cuda"
)

# hidden:     [B, 4096] decode-token hidden state
# comp_k:     [B, N, 132] uint8 compressed CSA keys
# positions:  [B] int64 token positions

# Per-layer sigmoid scores: {"l10": [B,N], "l12": [B,N], "l20": [B,N]}
per_layer = model(hidden, comp_k, positions)

# Cross-layer ensemble (mode="max" or "mean")
scores = model.ensemble(hidden, comp_k, positions, mode="max")       # [B, N]

# Boolean keep mask
keep = model.select_topk(hidden, comp_k, positions, top_k=512)       # top-K
keep = model.select_topk(hidden, comp_k, positions, threshold=0.5)   # threshold

compressed_k format

Each chunk = HEAD_DIM + 4 = 132 uint8 bytes:

BytesTypeMeaning
[:128]float8_e4m3Quantized key values
[128:132]float32Per-chunk dequant scale

Dequant: fp8_values.view(float8_e4m3).float() * scale.
See make_mock_compressed_k() in demo.py.


Architecture

Per CSA layer, scores are computed as:

hidden [B, 4096]
    → wq_a        (4096 → Q_LORA_RANK)
    → RMSNorm     (q_norm_weight, eps=1e-6)
    → wq_b        (Q_LORA_RANK → N_HEADS * HEAD_DIM)
    → reshape     [B, N_HEADS, HEAD_DIM]
    → RoPE        (YaRN, last ROPE_DIM=64 dims, base=160000)
    → Hadamard    (normalized Walsh-Hadamard)
    → q           [B, N_HEADS, HEAD_DIM]

hidden [B, 4096]
    → weights_proj (4096 → N_HEADS)
    → × weight_scale  (= HEAD_DIM^-0.5 * N_HEADS^-0.5)
    → fused_w     [B, N_HEADS]

compressed_k [B, N, HEAD_DIM + 4] (uint8)
    → bytes[:HEAD_DIM]  viewed as float8_e4m3 → dequant
    → × bytes[HEAD_DIM:]  viewed as float32   → k [B, N, HEAD_DIM]

score = sigmoid( sum_heads( relu(k @ q^T) * fused_w ) )   in [0, 1]

Joint checkpoint + ensemble

The checkpoint holds three independent CSA layers (l10, l12, l20), each with its own weights. At inference time per-layer sigmoid scores are ensembled per chunkmax (union, default) or mean — to produce a single keep/drop decision.

Hyperparameters

ParamValue
N_HEADS128
HEAD_DIM128
Q_LORA_RANK2048
ROPE_DIM64 (last 64 dims)
ROPE_BASE160000 (YaRN)
ROPE_FACTOR16
ROPE_ORIGINAL_SEQ_LEN65536
ROPE_BETA_FAST32
ROPE_BETA_SLOW1
RMS_NORM_EPS1e-6

Toy inference reference (toy_flashmemory_inference.py)

A self-contained illustration of how the retriever drives memory recall during decode — the actual control flow used inside DeepSeek-V4-FlashMemory.

Inference flow

 ┌──────────┐  compress & store    ┌────────────────────────────┐
 │ PREFILL  │  historical K/V      │  CSA KV-cache (the memory) │
 │ (dense   │ ───────────────────► │  N compressed chunks,      │
 │  attn)   │                      │  each = [132] uint8 fp8-K  │
 └────┬─────┘                      └──────────────┬─────────────┘
      │ last hidden state                         │ scored every 64 steps
      ▼                                           │
 ┌──────────────────────── DECODE LOOP ──────────┼──────────────────────────┐
 │ for each decode step t:                       │                          │
 │   hidden = toy_decoder.step(token, keep_mask)  │  (sparse memory attn)   │
 │                                               │                          │
 │   every RETRIEVAL_INTERVAL (= 64) steps:      ▼                          │
 │     scores[N]   = retriever.ensemble(hidden, compressed_k, pos)          │
 │     keep_mask[N] = top-K (or sigmoid>thresh) of scores                   │
 │     -> unselected chunks masked to -inf in next 64 steps                 │
 └──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
  1. Prefill (dense). Short prompt runs through dense memory attention. Its last hidden state seeds the first retrieval cycle.
  2. Decode loop. Toy decoder produces a [B, 4096] hidden state each step.
  3. Retrieval cycle (every 64 steps). The real FlashMemoryRetriever scores all N compressed-K chunks, ensembles per-layer scores, selects keep chunks.
  4. Sparse attention. Unselected chunks’ attention logits are set to -inf.

What this simulates

  • This toy does NOT perform real CPU↔GPU KV-cache transfer. The swap engine is internal FlashMemory infrastructure and is not included.
  • We simulate memory recall by masking attention logits to -inf. A masked chunk contributes nothing to attention — the same effect as not loading its KV.
  • The purpose is to make the decode-time control flow concrete.

What it is / is NOT

ISIS NOT
Minimal torch-only illustration of memory recallA runnable DeepSeek-V4
Uses the real retriever weights & scoring mathProduction KV swap engine
Pedagogical: shows the control flowMeaningful text generation

The production version depends on the internal sglang + DeepSeek-V4 CSA framework (native FP8 indexer, real compressed KV-cache, attention-sink, threshold fallback, per-request routing, actual KV swap) and cannot be released.


Downstream evaluation

FlashMemory DS-V4 beats or ties the full-attention baseline on reasoning-heavy long-context tasks while keeping only ~10–15% of CSA KV cache on-device:

TaskContextvs. Full-AttnKV Saved
RULER (64k–512k)64K–512K−1 ~ +2 pp~80–90%
LongMemEval-s125K±1 pp~86%
LongMemEval-m500K±1 pp~91%
LongBench V246K–493K+1 ~ +2 pp~73–90%
MRCR (needle)274Kneeds fallback~86%

Precise needle-retrieval tasks (MRCR) require an additional threshold-fallback in the serving layer — this is not part of the standalone release.


Files

FilePurpose
retriever.pyFlashMemoryRetriever model + RoPE/Hadamard + FP8 dequant
demo.pyMinimal demo with mock inputs
toy_flashmemory_inference.pyToy sparse-decode loop
weights/flashmemory_ds_v4.safetensorsTrained weights (~510 MB, on Hugging Face)
requirements.txtDependencies

License

MIT


Citation

If you use FlashMemory in your research, please cite:

@article{wang2026flashmemory,
  title   = {FlashMemory-DeepSeek-V4: Lightning Index Ultra-Long Context via Lookahead Sparse Attention},
  author  = {Yan Wang and Qifan Zhang and Jiachen Yu and Tian Liang and Dongyang Ma and
             Xiang Hu and Zibo Lin and Chunyang Li and Zhichao Wang and Jia Li and
             Yujiu Yang and Haitao Mi and Dong Yu},
  year    = {2026},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.09079},
  url     = {https://huggingface.co/papers/2606.09079},
}

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