---
license: apache-2.0
tags:
- rwkv
---

# RWKV-Reka-3.1-Flash



<div align="center">
  <img src="./hxa079.png" style="border-radius: 15px; width: 60%; height: 60%; object-fit: cover;  box-shadow: 10px 10px 20px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5); border: 2px solid white;" alt="PRWKV" />
</div>

> I'm simply exploring the possibility of linearizing existing Transformer models.
> It's still far from perfect,
> but I hope you'll bear with me as I continue this journey. :)

### Model Description

RWKV-Reka-3.1 Flash is an RNN hybrid architecture model that combines RWKV v7's linear attention mechanism with Group Query Attention (GQA) layers. Built upon the Reka-flash3.1 21B foundation, this model replaces most Transformer attention blocks with RWKV blocks while strategically maintaining some GQA layers to enhance performance on specific tasks.

-   **Developed by:** OpenMOSE
-   **Model type:** Hybrid Linear-Attention Language Model
-   **Language(s):** Multilingual (inherited from Reka-flash3.1 21B)
-   **License:** Apache-2.0
-   **Base Model:** Reka-flash3 21B(https://huggingface.co/RekaAI/reka-flash-3.1)
-   **Year:** 2025

### Architecture Specifications

-   **Architecture:** RWKV v7 based "hxa079" Architecture + Group Query Attention Hybrid
-   **Total Layers:** 44 layers (L44D6114)
    -   38 RWKV layers (with Rope)
    -   6 GQA layers (No Rope, No Position Embeddings)
-   **Hidden Dimension:** 6144
-   **Training Context Window:** 8192 tokens
-   **Inference Context Window** 40000+
-   **Training Strategy** Following RADLADS method based knowledge distillation

## Technical Innovation

### RWKV "hxa079" Architecture

The model implements several key improvements over original RWKV architectures:

1.  **Token Shift Removal**: In order to effectively inherit the teacher model weights, we removed the residual connection one token ago.
2.  **GroupNorm Removal**: Helps improve training stability issues
3.  **k_first Introduction**: Experimentally adopted the approach of residually connecting k layers in layer 0.

### Hybrid Design Benefits

-   **Linear Attention Inference**: RWKV blocks enable O(1) memory complexity during inference, and the hybrid approach reduces the KVCache to 1/7 of full GQA.
-   **Enhanced Needle Tasks**: Strategic placement of GQA layers significantly improves performance on needle-in-haystack retrieval tasks, addressing a known limitation of pure linear attention models
-   **Implicit Position Encoding**: Interestingly, the model achieves better performance when RoPE (Rotary Position Embedding) is not applied to GQA layers, suggesting that RWKV blocks provide implicit positional encoding capabilities

## Intended Use

This is an **experimental research model** designed to explore hybrid architectures combining linear and quadratic attention mechanisms. It is intended for:

-   Research into efficient attention mechanisms
-   Benchmarking hybrid architecture performance
-   Exploring linear attention limitations and solutions
-   Academic and industrial R&D purposes

## Limitations

-   **Experimental Status**: This model is in experimental stages and may exhibit unexpected behaviors
-   **Context Window**: Limited to 8192 tokens during training, though RWKV architecture theoretically supports longer sequences
-   **Performance Variability**: As a hybrid model, performance may vary significantly across different task types

## Training Details

-   **Training Context Window:** 8192 tokens
-   **Training GPU** AMD Instinct MI300X (takes 290hrs) AMD Developer Cloud.(Thank you for credit support)
-   **Training Strategy** 8bit MLP Quant, frozen emb,mlp,head, Deepspeed Stage1, Stage1 100M, Stage2(ctx4096) 360M Stage3(ctx8192) 300M 
-   **Training Stage** Stage3 - Reduced temperature stepped knowledge distillation.(stage3 final temp=0.7)
-   **Base Model Initialization:** Weights initialized from Reka-3.1-flash 21B
-   **Architecture Conversion:** Transformer attention blocks systematically replaced with RWKV blocks, except for 6 strategically placed GQA layers

## Evaluation

Performance evaluation is ongoing. The model shows promising results in:
-   Maintaining base model capabilities while achieving linear attention efficiency
-   Significantly improved needle-in-haystack task performance compared to pure RWKV architectures
-   Competitive performance on standard language modeling benchmarks

## Usage with RWKV-Infer
-   **RWKV-Infer** Triton based Hybrid RWKV Inference engine, can be check at: [https://github.com/OpenMOSE/RWKV-Infer/wiki/How-to-Running-RWKV-hxa079-models%3F](https://github.com/OpenMOSE/RWKV-Infer/wiki/How-to-Running-RWKV-hxa079-models%3F)


## Usage with Hugging Face Transformers

Currently in development. stay tuned :)



## Code Repositories

-   **RADLADS Project Code:** The main codebase for the RADLADS paper, including conversion scripts and model code, can be found at: [https://github.com/recursal/RADLADS](https://github.com/recursal/RADLADS)
-   **ARWKV Project Code** The ARWKV original training code, can be found at: [https://github.com/yynil/RWKVInside](https://github.com/yynil/RWKVInside)
-   **Specific Training Code (OpenMOSE):** The training code for this particular `RWKV-Reka-3.1-Flash` model is available at: [https://github.com/OpenMOSE/RWKVInside](https://github.com/OpenMOSE/RWKVInside) (Note: this repository is still under development and may contain bugs.)

## Model Card Contact

OpenMOSE - 2025