MiniMax Sparse Attention (MSA): a Two-Branch Block-Sparse Attention Trained on a 109B-Parameter MoE With a 3T-Token Budget

MiniMax released MSA (MiniMax Sparse Attention), a sparse attention method built directly on Grouped Query Attention (GQA). It targets one bottleneck: the quadratic cost of softmax attention at long context. The MiniMax research team tested it inside a 109B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model trained with native multimodal data. They also open-sourced an inference kernel and shipped a production model, MiniMax-M3. What is MSA (MiniMax Sparse Attention) MSA (MiniMax Sparse Attention) factor