# MiniMax M3.1-Flash (428B)

> MiniMax M3 successor with sparse attention in all 60 decoder layers, quantization-aware training, and a DSpark draft head for speculative decoding.

| Property | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Lab | MiniMax (China) |
| Released | 2026-10-19 |
| Decoder type | Sparse MoE |
| Family | Sparse MoE |
| Scale | 428B total, 23B active (5.4% active) |
| Context window | 1,048,576 tokens |
| Attention | GQA with QK-Norm and MiniMax Sparse Attention |
| Layer mix | 60 MiniMax Sparse Attention; 3 dense FFN + 57 MoE |
| KV cache / token (bf16) | 120 KiB (Moderate) |
| License | MiniMax Community License |

**Key detail:** All 60 layers use sparse attention; the first 3 retain dense FFNs, while the remaining 57 route to 4 of 128 experts plus 1 shared expert per token.

## Architecture concepts

- [Grouped-Query Attention (GQA)](https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/concepts/gqa.md): Several query heads share one key/value head, shrinking the KV cache with little quality loss.
- [QK-Norm (QK-Norm)](https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/concepts/qk-norm.md): RMSNorm applied to queries and keys before attention to keep logits well-behaved.
- [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 v5.0: total 28.9 (Knowledge Work 47.9, Coding 22.8, Science 14.4, General 30.5)
- AA Intelligence Index v4.3.2: total 42.7 (General 40.1, Scientific 35.1, Coding 39.6, Agents 52.4)

## Links

- Architecture diagram: https://sebastianraschka.com/llm-architecture-gallery/images/architectures/minimax-m3.1-flash.webp
- config.json: https://huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M3.1-Flash/blob/main/config.json
- License: https://huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M3.1-Flash/blob/main/LICENSE
- Tech report: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.13392
- Source card (source of truth): https://sebastianraschka.com/llm-architecture-gallery/#card-minimax-m3-1-flash-428b
- Web page: https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/models/minimax-m3-1-flash-428b/
- JSON: https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/api/models/minimax-m3-1-flash-428b.json

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