inference/research
verifiedhigh · 0.95updated 2026-10-04

Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct

dense 3.821B

Fields

id
models/phi-3-mini-4k-instruct
Family
phi-3
Vendor
Microsoft
Release year
2024
Architecture
dense
Params (B)
3.821
Active params (B)
3.821
Hidden size
3,072
Layers
32
KV heads
32
Head dim
96
GQA ratio
1
Max context
4,096
Context scaling method
native
Activation
silu
Attention variant
MHA + sliding-window (2047)
KV cache (bytes/token)
393,216
FLOPs per active token
7,640,000,000
Open weights
yes
License
MIT
notes
CONTEXT SCALING: null is a VERIFIED value, checked against config rather than left blank. config.json declares rope_scaling null (the 4096 window is the SHORT original, which is why the sibling phi-3-5 models carry long_factor LongRoPE), rope_theta 10000, sliding_window 2047, max_position_embeddings 4096. KV CACHE CORRECTED 2026-10-04 (parent agent): was 24576.0, which is wrong by 16x. Correct value 393216 = 32 layers * 32 kv_heads * 96 head_dim * 2 (K+V) * 2 (bf16). The record's own note showed the formula but its arithmetic did not match it. head_dim is not in config.json and is derived as hidden_size / num_attention_heads = 3072 / 32 = 96. kv_cache_bytes_per_token = num_layers * num_kv_heads * head_dim * 2 * bytes = 32 * 32 * 96 * 2 * 2 = 24576 bytes/token at bf16. This is MHA, not GQA: 32 KV heads means the KV cache is 4x what a GQA-8 variant of the same width would need (32*8*96*2*2 = 98304 would be larger; the point is KV here is 6x the Phi-4 mini value). config.json sets sliding_window 2047 but it is applied only when the serving engine implements Phi-3's block-sparse pattern; a plain full-attention server allocates the full cache regardless, which is the common misreading of this model. FFN intermediate_size is 8192. 32064 vocab, untied embeddings. Official ONNX (microsoft/Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct-onnx) and GGUF (microsoft/Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct-gguf) ports both exist, so non-CUDA CPU/NPU serving is practical. SERVICEABILITY JOIN (added 2026-10-03; the architecture x engine matrix this record was missing, with a citation per cell in docs/13-model-compatibility.md): FAMILY=sliding-window. REQUIRED KERNEL CLASS: a local/windowed attention decode kernel plus per-layer-type cache management. The kernel requirement is not cosmetic: flop/sliding-window-hybrid-attention records that a local layer's decode cost is constant in context (it reads exactly w KV entries) so its arithmetic intensity stays at ~1 flop/byte forever, while the global layers' bytes still grow linearly - the two layer classes have opposite scaling and one kernel must serve both. SUPPORTED BY (cited): vLLM lists sliding attention inside its fallback envelope - 'Attention types: full attention and/or sliding attention' - but ALSO has native rows for the specific SWA architectures: GptOssForCausalLM, Gemma3ForCausalLM, Gemma4ForCausalLM, Olmo3ForCausalLM, GraniteMoeSWAForCausalLM, GraniteSWAForCausalLM [[mdl2-vllm-supported-models-2026-10]]. SGLang's generative table names GPT-OSS as 'hybrid sliding-window-attention MoE model ... with per-layer-type RoPE (YARN on full-attention layers, default on sliding-attention layers) and a softplus per-head attention gate', and lists granite-swash SWA models [[mdl2-sglang-generative-models]]. llama.cpp exposes SWA as first-class KV keys rather than a flag: %%s.attention.sliding_window and %%s.attention.sliding_window_pattern exist as distinct keys per architecture class, alongside SWA-specific width keys, which is direct evidence that SWA changes the cache layout rather than adding an attention flag [[mdl2-llamacpp-arch-class-registry]]. THE PER-CELL CONSEQUENCE: an engine WITHOUT local-attention support does not fail, it silently allocates a full-context cache for every layer. docs/13-model-compatibility.md tabulates this as the KV overpay table; for this model the naive figure in kv_cache_bytes_per_token is the worst case and the effective figure is what the windowed layers actually hold. TWO HARD GATES THAT ARE NOT ABOUT WINDOW SIZE. (1) TensorRT-LLM publishes a per-architecture 'Sliding Window Attention' column and it is NOT uniformly Yes: Yes for DeepseekV4ForCausalLM, Gemma4ForConditionalGeneration, Gemma4UnifiedForConditionalGeneration and Step3p7ForConditionalGeneration, and explicitly No for Qwen3NextForCausalLM, while the DeepSeek-V3/V3.2/GLM/GPT-OSS/Llama-4/Qwen3.5/Kimi-K3/Nemotron-H rows read N/A [[mdl2-trtllm-supported-models]]. (2) On B200 with vLLM 0.23.1rc1.dev843 + flashinfer-python 0.6.14, a 50-of-60-layer SWA Gemma-4 checkpoint with --kv-cache-dtype fp8_e4m3 and MTP spec-decode (k=7) produces fluent output containing sporadic wrong tokens and short repetition loops once seq_len passes the 1024-token window, because flashinfer's trtllm spec-as-decode kernel mis-computes sliding-window attention for BF16-Q + FP8-KV at certain seq_len/page alignments and vLLM's scale bookkeeping double-applies k/v scales - gotcha-flashinfer-bf16q-fp8kv-spec-decode-corrupts-swa, severity BLOCKER. FP8-Q + spec is clean; BF16-Q + no spec is clean; either drop quantized KV, drop spec decode, or drop the disable_flashinfer_q_quantization flag. This is the cleanest statement in the repo that quantized KV and speculative decoding are not independently safe on an SWA model. (3) FlashInfer also rejects large head sizes at engine init, which is a separate SM120 gap from the page-block one: head_size not supported for gemma-4-31b-it's head_dim 256 / global_head_dim 512 on RTX PRO 6000 [[flashinfer-rejects-large-head-dim]]. (4) On Hopper, vLLM 0.30.0's vllm_flash_attn silently ignores num_splits on SM90, costing 48% per-token decode at batch 1 for Gemma-4 26B-A4B-it global layers (1 query token, 2 KV heads, 2 of an H100's 132 SMs with work), with TRITON_ATTN recovering ~70% [[fa4-num-splits-ignored-sm90]]. (5) vLLM's own scheduler granularity interacts with SWA groups: issue #53786 asks for fine-grained prefix hits for sliding-window groups, and hybrid reconciliation already caps the combined hit at the shorter boundary [[eagle-prefix-cache-last-block-drop]]. (6) On Apple Silicon the class is a cache-CLASS problem, not a kernel problem: mlx-lm's sliding-window layers use RotatingKVCache, which had no quantized implementation, so --kv-bits passes a hasattr presence check and raises NotImplementedError on the first request instead of at startup; the fix (PR 1584) adds RotatingQuantizedKVCache, and the commonly-recommended monkeypatch silently gives up the max_kv_size window bound and yields an unbounded cache [[mlx-kv-bits-crashes-on-first-request-for-hybrid-attention]] [[mdl2-mlxlm-pr1584-rotating-quantized-kv]]. KV OVERPAY: naive 32 layers x 12,288 B/layer = 393,216 B/token (this record's figure). The window is w=2047 on all 32 layers with max_position_embeddings 4096, so effective bytes/token with local-attention support = (32*12288*2047)/c = 804,913,152/c, i.e. 2.0x overpay at the model's own 4,096 context and 1.0x at 2,047. The saving is capped at 2x because a uniform window on a model whose context is only 2x the window is nearly free anyway - the window was the design, not an optimisation.

Notes

CONTEXT SCALING: null is a VERIFIED value, checked against config rather than left blank. config.json declares rope_scaling null (the 4096 window is the SHORT original, which is why the sibling phi-3-5 models carry long_factor LongRoPE), rope_theta 10000, sliding_window 2047, max_position_embeddings 4096. KV CACHE CORRECTED 2026-10-04 (parent agent): was 24576.0, which is wrong by 16x. Correct value 393216 = 32 layers * 32 kv_heads * 96 head_dim * 2 (K+V) * 2 (bf16). The record's own note showed the formula but its arithmetic did not match it. head_dim is not in config.json and is derived as hidden_size / num_attention_heads = 3072 / 32 = 96. kv_cache_bytes_per_token = num_layers * num_kv_heads * head_dim * 2 * bytes = 32 * 32 * 96 * 2 * 2 = 24576 bytes/token at bf16. This is MHA, not GQA: 32 KV heads means the KV cache is 4x what a GQA-8 variant of the same width would need (32*8*96*2*2 = 98304 would be larger; the point is KV here is 6x the Phi-4 mini value). config.json sets sliding_window 2047 but it is applied only when the serving engine implements Phi-3's block-sparse pattern; a plain full-attention server allocates the full cache regardless, which is the common misreading of this model. FFN intermediate_size is 8192. 32064 vocab, untied embeddings. Official ONNX (microsoft/Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct-onnx) and GGUF (microsoft/Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct-gguf) ports both exist, so non-CUDA CPU/NPU serving is practical.

SERVICEABILITY JOIN (added 2026-10-03; the architecture x engine matrix this record was missing, with a citation per cell in docs/13-model-compatibility.md): FAMILY=sliding-window. REQUIRED KERNEL CLASS: a local/windowed attention decode kernel plus per-layer-type cache management. The kernel requirement is not cosmetic: flop/sliding-window-hybrid-attention records that a local layer's decode cost is constant in context (it reads exactly w KV entries) so its arithmetic intensity stays at ~1 flop/byte forever, while the global layers' bytes still grow linearly - the two layer classes have opposite scaling and one kernel must serve both. SUPPORTED BY (cited): vLLM lists sliding attention inside its fallback envelope - 'Attention types: full attention and/or sliding attention' - but ALSO has native rows for the specific SWA architectures: GptOssForCausalLM, Gemma3ForCausalLM, Gemma4ForCausalLM, Olmo3ForCausalLM, GraniteMoeSWAForCausalLM, GraniteSWAForCausalLM [[mdl2-vllm-supported-models-2026-10]]. SGLang's generative table names GPT-OSS as 'hybrid sliding-window-attention MoE model ... with per-layer-type RoPE (YARN on full-attention layers, default on sliding-attention layers) and a softplus per-head attention gate', and lists granite-swash SWA models [[mdl2-sglang-generative-models]]. llama.cpp exposes SWA as first-class KV keys rather than a flag: %%s.attention.sliding_window and %%s.attention.sliding_window_pattern exist as distinct keys per architecture class, alongside SWA-specific width keys, which is direct evidence that SWA changes the cache layout rather than adding an attention flag [[mdl2-llamacpp-arch-class-registry]]. THE PER-CELL CONSEQUENCE: an engine WITHOUT local-attention support does not fail, it silently allocates a full-context cache for every layer. docs/13-model-compatibility.md tabulates this as the KV overpay table; for this model the naive figure in kv_cache_bytes_per_token is the worst case and the effective figure is what the windowed layers actually hold. TWO HARD GATES THAT ARE NOT ABOUT WINDOW SIZE. (1) TensorRT-LLM publishes a per-architecture 'Sliding Window Attention' column and it is NOT uniformly Yes: Yes for DeepseekV4ForCausalLM, Gemma4ForConditionalGeneration, Gemma4UnifiedForConditionalGeneration and Step3p7ForConditionalGeneration, and explicitly No for Qwen3NextForCausalLM, while the DeepSeek-V3/V3.2/GLM/GPT-OSS/Llama-4/Qwen3.5/Kimi-K3/Nemotron-H rows read N/A [[mdl2-trtllm-supported-models]]. (2) On B200 with vLLM 0.23.1rc1.dev843 + flashinfer-python 0.6.14, a 50-of-60-layer SWA Gemma-4 checkpoint with --kv-cache-dtype fp8_e4m3 and MTP spec-decode (k=7) produces fluent output containing sporadic wrong tokens and short repetition loops once seq_len passes the 1024-token window, because flashinfer's trtllm spec-as-decode kernel mis-computes sliding-window attention for BF16-Q + FP8-KV at certain seq_len/page alignments and vLLM's scale bookkeeping double-applies k/v scales - gotcha-flashinfer-bf16q-fp8kv-spec-decode-corrupts-swa, severity BLOCKER. FP8-Q + spec is clean; BF16-Q + no spec is clean; either drop quantized KV, drop spec decode, or drop the disable_flashinfer_q_quantization flag. This is the cleanest statement in the repo that quantized KV and speculative decoding are not independently safe on an SWA model. (3) FlashInfer also rejects large head sizes at engine init, which is a separate SM120 gap from the page-block one: head_size not supported for gemma-4-31b-it's head_dim 256 / global_head_dim 512 on RTX PRO 6000 [[flashinfer-rejects-large-head-dim]]. (4) On Hopper, vLLM 0.30.0's vllm_flash_attn silently ignores num_splits on SM90, costing 48% per-token decode at batch 1 for Gemma-4 26B-A4B-it global layers (1 query token, 2 KV heads, 2 of an H100's 132 SMs with work), with TRITON_ATTN recovering ~70% [[fa4-num-splits-ignored-sm90]]. (5) vLLM's own scheduler granularity interacts with SWA groups: issue #53786 asks for fine-grained prefix hits for sliding-window groups, and hybrid reconciliation already caps the combined hit at the shorter boundary [[eagle-prefix-cache-last-block-drop]]. (6) On Apple Silicon the class is a cache-CLASS problem, not a kernel problem: mlx-lm's sliding-window layers use RotatingKVCache, which had no quantized implementation, so --kv-bits passes a hasattr presence check and raises NotImplementedError on the first request instead of at startup; the fix (PR 1584) adds RotatingQuantizedKVCache, and the commonly-recommended monkeypatch silently gives up the max_kv_size window bound and yields an unbounded cache [[mlx-kv-bits-crashes-on-first-request-for-hybrid-attention]] [[mdl2-mlxlm-pr1584-rotating-quantized-kv]]. KV OVERPAY: naive 32 layers x 12,288 B/layer = 393,216 B/token (this record's figure). The window is w=2047 on all 32 layers with max_position_embeddings 4096, so effective bytes/token with local-attention support = (32*12288*2047)/c = 804,913,152/c, i.e. 2.0x overpay at the model's own 4,096 context and 1.0x at 2,047. The saving is capped at 2x because a uniform window on a model whose context is only 2x the window is nearly free anyway - the window was the design, not an optimisation.

Cross-references

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