AppliedAIPrep logoAppliedAI/Prep
🧠 Foundations of LLMs & GenAI
Core

Attention Variants: MHA, MQA, and GQA

Multi-head attention gives every query head its own key and value heads, which is expressive but makes the KV cache large and memory-bandwidth hungry at decode time. Multi-query attention shares one key-value head across all query heads to shrink the cache hard, and grouped-query attention sits in between by sharing key-value heads across small groups. Applied-AI interviews probe this because it is the cleanest example of trading model quality against serving memory and throughput, and it explains why frontier models standardized on GQA.

a free account unlocks the core curriculum tier · no card
RELATED CONCEPTS
PRACTICE THIS IN REAL QUESTIONS
COMPANIES THAT ASSUME THIS
NEXT IN FOUNDATIONS OF LLMS & GENAIPositional Encodings (RoPE and ALiBi)