[2510.26692] Kimi Linear: An Expressive, Efficient Attention Architecture

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arXiv:2510.26692 (cs)

[Submitted on 30 Oct 2025 (v1), last revised 1 Nov 2025 (this version, v2)]

Title:Kimi Linear: An Expressive, Efficient Attention Architecture

Authors:Kimi Team: Yu Zhang, Zongyu Lin, Xingcheng Yao, Jiaxi Hu, Fanqing Meng, Chengyin Liu, Xin Men, Songlin Yang, Zhiyuan Li, Wentao Li, Enzhe Lu, Weizhou Liu, Yanru Chen, Weixin Xu, Longhui Yu, Yejie Wang, Yu Fan, Longguang Zhong, Enming Yuan, Dehao Zhang, Yizhi Zhang, T.Y. Liu, Haiming Wang, Shengjun Fang, Weiran He, Shaowei Liu, Yiwei Li, Jianlin Su, Jiezhong Qiu, Bo Pang, Junjie Yan, Zhejun Jiang, Weixiao Huang, Bohong Yin, Jiacheng You, Chu Wei, Zhengtao Wang, Chao Hong, Yutian Chen, Guanduo Chen, Yucheng Wang, Huabin Zheng, Feng Wang, Yibo Liu, Mengnan Dong, Zheng Zhang, Siyuan Pan, Wenhao Wu, Yuhao Wu, Longyu Guan, Jiawen Tao, Guohong Fu, Xinran Xu, Yuzhi Wang, Guokun Lai, Yuxin Wu, Xinyu Zhou, Zhilin Yang, Yulun Du<br>View a PDF of the paper titled Kimi Linear: An Expressive, Efficient Attention Architecture, by Kimi Team: Yu Zhang and 58 other authors

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Abstract:We introduce Kimi Linear, a hybrid linear attention architecture that, for the first time, outperforms full attention under fair comparisons across various scenarios -- including short-context, long-context, and reinforcement learning (RL) scaling regimes. At its core lies Kimi Delta Attention (KDA), an expressive linear attention module that extends Gated DeltaNet with a finer-grained gating mechanism, enabling more effective use of limited finite-state RNN memory. Our bespoke chunkwise algorithm achieves high hardware efficiency through a specialized variant of the Diagonal-Plus-Low-Rank (DPLR) transition matrices, which substantially reduces computation compared to the general DPLR formulation while remaining more consistent with the classical delta rule.

We pretrain a Kimi Linear model with 3B activated parameters and 48B total parameters, based on a layerwise hybrid of KDA and Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA). Our experiments show that with an identical training recipe, Kimi Linear outperforms full MLA with a sizeable margin across all evaluated tasks, while reducing KV cache usage by up to 75% and achieving up to 6 times decoding throughput for a 1M context. These results demonstrate that Kimi Linear can be a drop-in replacement for full attention architectures with superior performance and efficiency, including tasks with longer input and output lengths.

To support further research, we open-source the KDA kernel and vLLM implementations, and release the pre-trained and instruction-tuned model checkpoints.

Comments:<br>Kimi Linear tech report

Subjects:

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

Cite as:<br>arXiv:2510.26692 [cs.CL]

(or<br>arXiv:2510.26692v2 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2510.26692

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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history<br>From: Yulun Du [view email]<br>[v1]<br>Thu, 30 Oct 2025 16:59:43 UTC (645 KB)

[v2]<br>Sat, 1 Nov 2025 12:05:18 UTC (691 KB)

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View a PDF of the paper titled Kimi Linear: An Expressive, Efficient Attention Architecture, by Kimi Team: Yu Zhang and 58 other authors<br>View PDF<br>TeX Source

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