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vllm/docs/design
Yongye ZhuandClaude Opus 4.8 a3028cebbf [MiniMax M3] Add sparse-attention backend + merged attention layer
Scaffold the lightning-indexer sparse-attention path:

- MiniMaxM3SparseBackend (registered as MINIMAX_M3_SPARSE): block-sparse GQA
  backend; get_kv_cache_shape serves both the main K/V cache and the
  single-vector index-key side cache.
- MiniMaxM3IndexerCache: side KV cache for per-token index keys, key-only so it
  uses a single-vector MLAAttentionSpec rather than a K+V FullAttentionSpec.
- MiniMaxM3SparseMetadata (+ prefill/decode sub-metadata) and its builder,
  splitting the batch via split_decodes_and_prefills.
- MiniMaxM3SparseImpl: subclasses AttentionImplBase so it can take a custom
  forward(query, index_query, kv_cache, index_kv_cache); no alibi / sliding
  window / logits soft cap. forward is a stub pending the kernel port.

MiniMaxM3SparseAttention is merged into a single AttentionLayerBase: it owns the
projections, per-head QK norm and RoPE, binds the backend + impl, registers the
main K/V cache, and holds the index cache. Its forward computes q/k/v and the
index q/k, pre-inserts K/V and index-K into their caches, then calls the sparse
impl with only the queries.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Signed-off-by: Yongye Zhu <yongye@inferact.ai>

Signed-off-by: Yongye Zhu <zyy1102000@gmail.com>
2026-05-31 16:02:56 +00:00
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