Two closed-loop checks, both clean, which finally retires the two standing suspects.
P4.3 KV cache. The repo's own store/load tests pass for the fp32-scale index layout SM90 uses
(6 each). Running every layout gives 48 passed / 12 failed, and every failure is a ue8m0 index
layout -- `FP4_INDEX_KV_FORMAT` or `MXFP8_INDEX_KV_FORMAT`, neither of which SM90 selects. Those
failures are in the test's reference, not the kernel: it reinterprets ue8m0 bytes as
`PLATFORM.fp8_sf_type`, which is float32 here, so `index_copy_` hits a dtype mismatch.
`scripts/h20_kv_roundtrip.py` then closes the loop without any reference at all -- write known
BF16 through the paged cache, read it back, compare. Both SM90 layouts, block 32 and 64, 1/233/
1029 tokens:
V41_FORMAT (main/swa KV) rel 0.0266-0.0295 cos 0.9996
FP8_FLOAT32_SF_INDEX_KV_FORMAT (132B) rel 0.0266-0.0327 cos 0.9996
That is the fp8 floor, the same order as the 2.7e-2 on weights, so the cache is not where the
decode error comes from and the 132-byte layout question from P3.9 is closed.
One trap: the first version of the script compared raw fp8 values against BF16 and reported
rel=126. Index layouts are deliberately *not* dequantized by `load_paged_kv_cache` -- the
consumer is a kernel that wants bytes plus scales. Multiplying by the scale gives 0.027. The
127x was the test, not the implementation.
P4.4 the decode indexer. `_decode_p_sum_sm90` reimplements DeepGEMM's paged MQA logits in torch
because Hopper's kernel requires 64-token pages; nothing else exercised it. Compared against a
float64 reference that shares no code -- explicit per-token offsets instead of strided views --
it agrees to rel~1e-7 / cos 1.0 across page sizes 32 and 64, boundary-crossing lengths,
multi-page contexts and 32 heads. The `q_sf[..., :1]` dequantization is also sound: head_dim is
128, equal to the granularity, so one scale per (row, head) is correct.
What this changes. `logits_prompt` from the max_tokens=1 run puts the prefill error at cos
0.9846 with an absolute error of 3.30 on the winning token, against a reference margin of 3.112:
the margin is thin because the error is the same size as the margin, not by coincidence. The
reference's own prefill-to-decode transition also costs about 2x margin (3.112 -> 1.638) purely
from the quantized KV round trip. Our 0.256 halved would still be positive, yet it flips, so
roughly 0.5-1.0 of logit-level error in decode remains unexplained -- now narrowed to attention
over the cached main KV and the SWA-window / compressed-position mapping.
Also corrects an earlier overstatement: "the difference is introduced by decode" does not mean
decode has a discrete bug, and P4.3/P4.4 show its two main suspects do not.
One more dump trap worth recording: with max_tokens > 1, `logits_prompt` is contaminated too.
mysteps6 (max_tokens=7) gives cos 0.68 and a 16.5 top-1 error for the same input where mylogits3
(max_tokens=1) gives 0.9846 and 3.30. Prefill logits are only trustworthy from a
max_tokens=1 run.
|
||
|---|---|---|
| csrc | ||
| deep_cluster | ||
| deepinfer | ||
| doc | ||
| eval | ||
| examples | ||
| scripts | ||
| tests | ||
| vendor | ||
| .clang-format | ||
| .gitignore | ||
| .gitmodules | ||
| build.sh | ||
| CONTRIBUTING.md | ||
| H20-DEBUG-PLAN.md | ||
| H20-DRIFT-ANALYSIS.md | ||
| H20-PORTING-JOURNAL.md | ||
| H20-SM90-FINDINGS.md | ||
| LICENSE | ||
| Makefile | ||
| pyproject.toml | ||
| README.md | ||
| requirements-ascend.txt | ||
| requirements-dev.txt | ||
| requirements-nvidia.txt | ||
| requirements.txt | ||
| setup.py | ||
DeepInfer
DeepInfer is the high-performance inference framework that powers DeepSeek's large-scale production services. This open-source release provides offline inference with the core features needed for serving at scale.
Supported models:
- DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash
Supported features:
- Optimized kernels, model and sampler runtime
- Parallelism: Attention DP / balanced CP, MoE EP + EPLB
- DSpark and confidence-scheduled verification
- SWA bounded replay
- Asynchronous scheduling (zero-overhead batch scheduler)
- Batch-invariant inference
- Deterministic sampling
- Structured outputs
Feature details and configuration
- Optimized kernels: FlashMLA, DeepGEMM, DeepEP, TileKernels, DeepSelect, and custom TileLang kernels.
- DSpark and confidence-scheduled verification: accelerate decoding with draft tokens and use confidence estimates to schedule verification. Set
DEEPINFER_ENABLE_MTP_VARLEN=1;DEEPINFER_USE_NEXTN_DECODEcontrols the maximum draft length (default: 5). - Decoder SWA bounded replay: reduce decoder prefill work by replaying only a bounded suffix. Set
DEEPINFER_YOCO_PREFILL_TRUNCATION_MODE=compactandDEEPINFER_YOCO_PREFILL_KEEP_TOKENS=140for the default V4.1 settings; the retained suffix must cover the SWA window plus the maximum backtracking length. - Asynchronous scheduling: overlap CPU batch scheduling with device execution. Enabled by default.
- Batch-invariant inference: keep model results identical across different batch compositions. Enable with
DEEPINFER_BATCH_INVARIANT=1(NVIDIA only). - Deterministic sampling: produce identical outputs for identical input tokens and sampling parameters. Set
DEEPINFER_BATCH_INVARIANT=1 DEEPINFER_ENABLE_MTP_VARLEN=0and pass a fixedseq_seedtoSamplingParams(NVIDIA only). - Structured outputs: constrain generation to a regex, JSON schema, or EBNF grammar. Pass
so_args={"schema_type": ..., "schema": ...}toSamplingParams; see examples.
Supported hardware:
- NVIDIA SM100 GPUs
- Huawei Ascend 950 NPUs
Required for a complete inference service (not included in this release):
- A KV cache system
- VE/Prefill/Decode disaggregation (most required engine functionality is already implemented)
- Load balancing across data-parallel replicas for both prefill and decode
Getting started
Prerequisites
- Linux
- GCC >= 13.0
- Python 3.12
- CUDA 13 (NVIDIA only)
- CANN 9.2 (Ascend only)
Build from source
Before building DeepInfer, please create and activate an empty Python 3.12 environment.
# Use `ascend` instead for the Ascend platform
# Keep it exported in the environment where you run DeepInfer
export DEEPINFER_ACCELERATOR=nvidia
./build.sh
Offline inference
The default checkpoint, deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017, is
downloaded into the Hugging Face cache on the first run; set DEEPINFER_HF_MODEL_DIR=/path/to/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 to
run from a local copy instead.
python examples/offline_inference.py
See examples for details.
Performance benchmarks
| Prefill | Decode |
|---|---|
![]() |
![]() |
Measured on 4 SM100 GPUs for prefill and 64 for decode — each within one scale-up domain. To reproduce the benchmarks, see run_sweep.sh.
Evaluation benchmarks
See eval/README.md.
License
DeepInfer is released under the Apache License 2.0. See LICENSE for details.
Acknowledgments
DeepInfer was originally built primarily on vLLM, with additional inspiration from SGLang and TensorRT-LLM. We thank their developers.
Citation
@misc{deepinfer2026,
title = {DeepInfer: High-performance, large-scale inference framework for DeepSeek models},
author = {DeepSeek-AI},
year = {2026},
publisher = {GitHub},
howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepInfer}},
}

