Original paper: DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligence

Authors: DeepSeek-AI

Model checkpoints: https://huggingface.co/collections/deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4

Summary

DeepSeek-V4 presents a preview of two strong MoE language models — DeepSeek-V4-Pro (1.6T total / 49B activated) and DeepSeek-V4-Flash (284B total / 13B activated) — both supporting a context length of one million tokens.

Key architectural innovations:

  • Hybrid Compressed Attention: Combines Compressed Sparse Attention (CSA, compression rate m=4 with top-k sparse selection) and Heavily Compressed Attention (HCA, compression rate m’=128 with dense attention) in an interleaved configuration. At 1M-token context, this reduces single-token inference FLOPs to 27% and KV cache to 10% compared to DeepSeek-V3.2.
  • Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections (mHC): Constrains the residual mapping matrix to the manifold of doubly stochastic matrices (Birkhoff polytope), ensuring spectral norm ≤ 1 for stable deep-layer signal propagation. Uses Sinkhorn-Knopp iterations (t=20) for projection.
  • Muon Optimizer: Adopted for most modules with hybrid Newton-Schulz iterations for orthogonalization. Paired with Anticipatory Routing (decoupling backbone and routing network updates) and SwiGLU clamping for training stability.

Post-training paradigm shift: Replaces mixed RL with domain-specific expert training (SFT → GRPO RL) followed by multi-teacher On-Policy Distillation (OPD) with full-vocabulary KL divergence. Over 10 teacher models are distilled into a single unified model.

Infrastructure highlights: Fine-grained EP communication-computation overlap (MegaMoE, open-sourced); TileLang-based kernel development; batch-invariant and deterministic kernels; FP4 QAT with lossless FP4-to-FP8 dequantization; DSec sandbox platform managing hundreds of thousands of concurrent sandbox instances.

Results: DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Max outperforms all prior open-source models on knowledge benchmarks, matches GPT-5.2 on reasoning, ranks 23rd on Codeforces, achieves proof-perfect 120/120 on Putnam-2025, and surpasses Gemini-3.1-Pro on long-context benchmarks.

The Chinese version of this page contains a full annotated translation of the paper. Please refer to the original PDF for the complete English text.