Differential Transformer V2 (DIFF V2)

Read the blog post here

The implementation is provided in multihead_flashdiffv2.py.

TL;DR

We introduce Differential Transformer V2 (DIFF V2), an improved version of Differential Transformer (DIFF V1). This revision focuses on inference efficiency, training stability for production-level LLMs, and architectural elegance.

Key Improvements

1. Faster Inference & No Need of Custom Attention Kernels
   Instead of forcing the attention parameter count to match the baseline Transformer (as in DIFF V1), we introduce additional parameters for $Q_2$. This design allows DIFF V2 to match the baseline Transformer’s decoding speed and directly use FlashAttention without custom kernels.

2. Improved Training Stability
   We remove the per-head RMSNorm after differential attention. We find the per-head RMSNorm can lead to instability in later stages of large-scale pretraining of LLM.

3. Simpler Parameterization & Initialization
   We replace the globally shared $\lambda$ with a token-specific, head-wise projected $\lambda$. This eliminates the exponential re-parameterization and initialization complexity of $\lambda$ in V1.

Implementation Details

Pseudocode

In the script, h represents number of query heads, h_kv represents number of key-value heads, and d means head dimension. The $\lambda$ in DIFF V2 is projected from $X$ for each token each head.

(For simplicity, we omit the batch dimension and assume that both the input and output of the following flash_attn_func are three-dimensional tensors (tokens, heads, head dimension). Heads belonging to the same GQA group are arranged contiguously in the output)

def DiffAttnV2(
	q, k, v, lam
):
   """
   q:   (N, 2h, d)
   k:   (N, h_kv, d)
   v:   (N, h_kv, d)
   lam: (N, h, 1)
   """

   attn = flash_attn_func(q, k, v)
   attn1, attn2 = (attn[:, 0::2], 
                     attn[:, 1::2])

   lam_val = sigmoid(lam)
   attn = attn1 - lam_val * attn2
   return attn

Note

DIFF V2 subtracts two heads that are in the same GQA group, which means they share the same key and value.

# Subtraction of two heads that are **not** in the same GQA group
# ❌ Wrong Implementation of DIFF V2!
...
attn = flash_attn_func(q, k, v)
nh = attn.size(1)
attn1, attn2 = (attn[:, :nh//2], 
		          attn[:, nh//2:])
# similarly, also wrong implementation:
# attn1, attn2 = attn.chunk(2, dim=1)
...

# DIFF V2: Subtraction of two heads that are **in** the same GQA group
# ✅ Correct Implementation of DIFF V2
...
attn = flash_attn_func(q, k, v)

attn1, attn2 = (attn[:, 0::2], 
		          attn[:, 1::2])
...