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FlashKDA: Flash Kimi Delta Attention — high-performance KDA kernels built on CUTLASS

News

• 2026-04-22 — Deep-Dive Blog: the design decisions behind FlashKDA v1, read it here.

Requirements

• SM90 and above
• CUDA 12.9 and above
• PyTorch 2.4 and above

Installation

git clone https://github.com/MoonshotAI/FlashKDA.git flash-kda
cd flash-kda
git submodule update --init --recursive
pip install -v --no-build-isolation .

By default, the build detects the current CUDA device and compiles for that architecture. For wheel or CI builds, compile all supported architectures explicitly:

FLASH_KDA_CUDA_ARCHS=all pip install -v --no-build-isolation .

Supported values are auto (default), all, or a comma-separated arch list such as 90a,100a.

Using FlashKDA as an FLA backend

Once installed, FlashKDA is auto-dispatched from flash-linear-attention's chunk_kda. See fla-org/flash-linear-attention#852 for integration details.

Requirements

1. Install flash-linear-attention >= 0.5.0: pip install -U flash-linear-attention
2. Call chunk_kda under torch.inference_mode() import torch from fla.ops.kda import chunk_kda with torch.inference_mode(): out, final_state = chunk_kda( q=q, k=k, v=v, g=g, beta=beta, scale=scale, initial_state=h0, output_final_state=True, use_gate_in_kernel=True, use_qk_l2norm_in_kernel=True, use_beta_sigmoid_in_kernel=True, safe_gate=True, A_log=A_log, dt_bias=dt_bias, lower_bound=lower_bound, transpose_state_layout=True, cu_seqlens=cu_seqlens, )

Opt out: set FLA_FLASH_KDA=0 to fall back to the Triton path.

Debug dispatch: add logging.basicConfig(level=logging.INFO) to see [FLA Backend] kda.chunk_kda -> flashkda on hit, or ... rejected: <reason> on miss.

Performance

See BENCHMARK_H20.md.

Tests

bash tests/test.sh

• tests/test_fwd.py — correctness tests (exact match against the torch reference; compared with flash-linear-attention)

Kernel API

flash_kda.fwd

flash_kda.fwd(q, k, v, g, beta, scale, out, A_log, dt_bias, lower_bound,
              initial_state=None, final_state=None, cu_seqlens=None)

Parameters:

• Currently requires K = V = 128.
• initial_state / final_state accept None (stateless), bf16, or fp32 tensors. When both are provided, their dtypes must match.
• When cu_seqlens is provided, B must be 1, T is the total length across all sequences, and initial_state / final_state have shape [N, H, V, K].
• When cu_seqlens is None, each batch element is treated as an independent sequence, and the state shape is [B, H, V, K].

Development

To set up IntelliSense (clangd) for the CUDA/C++ sources, run:

bash setup_clangd.sh

This generates a .clangd file with the correct repository paths and installs the global clangd config.yaml to ~/.config/clangd/.

Citation

@misc{flashkda2026,
      title={FlashKDA: Flash Kimi Delta Attention},
      author={Yutian Chen, Zhiyuan Li, Yucheng Wang, Ming Wei},
      year={2026},
      publisher = {GitHub},
      howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/MoonshotAI/FlashKDA}},
}