DeepSeek has introduced the DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash model, which is a multimodal Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with 552 billion parameters. This model is built on the Causal Encoder–Decoder architecture and supports a context window of one million tokens. The company positions it as the smallest member of a new architectural line aimed at enhancing capabilities, accelerating decoding, and increasing throughput during deployment, making it available via the API named deepseek-flash.
The Causal Encoder–Decoder stack utilizes a 40-layer transformer, divided into a 20-layer causal encoder and a 20-layer decoder. Upon prefix activation, approximately 8 billion parameters are activated per token, and about 16 billion during decoding, allowing input-intensive workloads to consume fewer resources compared to similarly sized symmetric MoE designs.
To optimize performance, methods such as Compressed Sparse Attention 2 (CSA2) are used, which distributes Full, Reindex, or Reuse modes across layers, alongside FP4 main KV cache, which reduces the total KV volume to approximately 890 bytes per token—about a quarter of the volume of DeepSeek-V4-Flash. Furthermore, SWA Bounded Replay reduces the constant KV demand on SSDs by about one eighth.
Training was conducted on approximately 45 trillion multimodal tokens, including sparse attention on 64K sequences, with the context extension to 1 million occurring later in the pre-training process. This was followed by supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and policy distillation, accompanied by intensive automated agent task synthesis.
In agent instruction benchmarks, under maximum reasoning effort, DeepSeek reports the following results: Terminal-Bench 2.1 achieves 90.6, DeepSWE v1.1 reaches 74.2, and AutomationBench scores 54.8. The model also features native vision support thanks to the custom-built DeepSeek-ViT encoder.
The weights and inference recipes have been published on Hugging Face under the MIT license, and DeepSeek states support for open-source inference adapters for large-scale deployments. Older V4 Flash aliases are temporarily redirected to V4.1-Flash; DeepSeek also plans to phase out V4 Pro routing in favor of the new Flash SKU. The main focus is on the architecture and cost-efficient long-context inference based on KV compression and asymmetric activation, making the servicing of agent sessions with one million tokens cheaper.

