From Multi-Head to Multi-Head Latent Attention: An Engineering Analysis of Attention Mechanisms for Large Language Model Inference
Trisham Patil <trishampatil@gmail.com>
Published: July 2026 | Technical Report
Modern large language models have become increasingly constrained by memory bandwidth rather than compute during autoregressive inference. This technical report presents a systems-level engineering analysis of the evolution of attention mechanisms—from Multi-Head Attention (MHA) through Multi-Query Attention (MQA), Grouped Query Attention (GQA), and Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA)—covering their mathematical foundations, KV cache optimization, GPU memory behavior, and inference trade-offs in modern LLM serving systems.
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