SnapMLA: Efficient Long-Context MLA Decoding via Hardware-Aware FP8 Quantized Pipelining

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Zhang, Yifan, Su, Zunhai, Hu, Shuhao, Yang, Rui, Wu, Wei, Qian, Yulei, Xie, Yuchen, Cai, Xunliang
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Zhang, Yifan
Su, Zunhai
Hu, Shuhao
Yang, Rui
Wu, Wei
Qian, Yulei
Xie, Yuchen
Cai, Xunliang
author_facet Zhang, Yifan
Su, Zunhai
Hu, Shuhao
Yang, Rui
Wu, Wei
Qian, Yulei
Xie, Yuchen
Cai, Xunliang
contents While FP8 attention has shown substantial promise in innovations like FlashAttention-3, its integration into the decoding phase of the DeepSeek Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) architecture presents notable challenges. These challenges include numerical heterogeneity arising from the decoupling of positional embeddings, misalignment of quantization scales in FP8 PV GEMM, and the need for optimized system-level support. In this paper, we introduce SnapMLA, an FP8 MLA decoding framework optimized to improve long-context efficiency through the following hardware-aware algorithm-kernel co-optimization techniques: (i) RoPE-Aware Per-Token KV Quantization: Motivated by our analysis of the heterogeneous quantization sensitivity inherent to the MLA KV cache, this approach preserves the RoPE part in high precision. Furthermore, per-token granularity is employed to align with the autoregressive decoding process and maintain quantization accuracy. (ii) Quantized PV Computation Pipeline Reconstruction: Addresses the misalignment of quantization scales in FP8 PV computation caused by the shared KV structure of the MLA. (iii) End-to-End Dataflow Optimization: Establishes an efficient data read-and-write workflow using specialized kernels, ensuring streamlined data flow and improved performance. Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art MLA LLMs show that SnapMLA achieves up to a 1.91x improvement in throughput on long-output decoding workloads while maintaining near-parity benchmark quality compared with the BF16 baseline on the evaluated reasoning and code-generation benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/meituan-longcat/SGLang-FluentLLM.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_10718
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SnapMLA: Efficient Long-Context MLA Decoding via Hardware-Aware FP8 Quantized Pipelining
Zhang, Yifan
Su, Zunhai
Hu, Shuhao
Yang, Rui
Wu, Wei
Qian, Yulei
Xie, Yuchen
Cai, Xunliang
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
While FP8 attention has shown substantial promise in innovations like FlashAttention-3, its integration into the decoding phase of the DeepSeek Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) architecture presents notable challenges. These challenges include numerical heterogeneity arising from the decoupling of positional embeddings, misalignment of quantization scales in FP8 PV GEMM, and the need for optimized system-level support. In this paper, we introduce SnapMLA, an FP8 MLA decoding framework optimized to improve long-context efficiency through the following hardware-aware algorithm-kernel co-optimization techniques: (i) RoPE-Aware Per-Token KV Quantization: Motivated by our analysis of the heterogeneous quantization sensitivity inherent to the MLA KV cache, this approach preserves the RoPE part in high precision. Furthermore, per-token granularity is employed to align with the autoregressive decoding process and maintain quantization accuracy. (ii) Quantized PV Computation Pipeline Reconstruction: Addresses the misalignment of quantization scales in FP8 PV computation caused by the shared KV structure of the MLA. (iii) End-to-End Dataflow Optimization: Establishes an efficient data read-and-write workflow using specialized kernels, ensuring streamlined data flow and improved performance. Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art MLA LLMs show that SnapMLA achieves up to a 1.91x improvement in throughput on long-output decoding workloads while maintaining near-parity benchmark quality compared with the BF16 baseline on the evaluated reasoning and code-generation benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/meituan-longcat/SGLang-FluentLLM.
title SnapMLA: Efficient Long-Context MLA Decoding via Hardware-Aware FP8 Quantized Pipelining
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.10718