# LongCat-Flash-Lite (68.5B-A3B)

> Meituan's LongCat-Next text backbone is a lightweight MoE that shifts a large share of parameters into N-gram embeddings while keeping sparse inference around 3B active parameters.

| Property | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Lab | Meituan (China) |
| Released | 2026-01-28 |
| Decoder type | Sparse MoE |
| Family | Sparse MoE |
| Scale | 68.5B total, ~3B active avg (4.4% active) |
| Context window | 256,000 tokens |
| Attention | MLA with RoPE + NoPE |
| Layer mix | 14 logical layers / 28 MLA sublayers |
| KV cache / token (bf16) | 31.5 KiB (Low) |
| License | MIT License |

**Key detail:** Uses N-gram embedding expansion, Shortcut MoE routing over 256 routed plus 128 zero/identity experts, and top-k 12 expert choices per token.

## Architecture concepts

- [Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA)](https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/concepts/mla.md): Keys and values are compressed into a small latent vector that is cached instead of full K/V.
- [Mixture of Experts (MoE)](https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/concepts/moe.md): Many feed-forward experts, but a router sends each token to only a few of them.

## Benchmark (Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index)

- AA Intelligence Index v4.3.2: total 11.5 (Scientific 2.9)

## Links

- Architecture diagram: https://sebastianraschka.com/llm-architecture-gallery/images/architectures/longcat-flash-lite-68-5b-a3b.webp
- config.json: https://huggingface.co/meituan-longcat/LongCat-Flash-Lite/blob/main/config.json
- Tech report: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.21204
- Source card (source of truth): https://sebastianraschka.com/llm-architecture-gallery/#card-longcat-flash-lite-68-5b-a3b
- Web page: https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/models/longcat-flash-lite-68-5b-a3b/
- JSON: https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/api/models/longcat-flash-lite-68-5b-a3b.json

_Data from Sebastian Raschka's LLM Architecture Gallery (https://sebastianraschka.com/llm-architecture-gallery/). Synced 2026-11-04._