Hacker News AI · 10/17/2026, 16:21:25
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash Minor Update Boosts Reasoning and Coding
DeepSeek released a minor update to V4.1-Flash (version 1017), delivering substantial improvements in reasoning, coding, and agentic benchmarks. The update reduces task execution time and output length, advancing the performance-cost Pareto frontier while continuing to optimize KV cache compression.
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Contents6 sections
Introduction
DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 is a minor update to DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, delivering substantial improvements across reasoning, coding, agentic tasks, and visual benchmarks. Alongside these gains, the model reduces task execution time and output length, enabling users to complete tasks faster and at lower cost and advancing the performance–cost Pareto frontier across multiple agent harnesses.
| Benchmark | DS-V4.1-Flash-1017 | DS-V4.1-Flash | K3 | GLM-5.3 | GPT-5.6 Sol | Opus 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HLE w/o tools | 42.6 (44.0†) | 36.8 (39.1†) | 43.5 | 42.0† | 44.5 | 56.3 |
| Terminal-Bench 4.0 | 42.3 | 31.2 | 12.6 | 37.9 | 39.9 | 51.8 |
| DeepSWE v1.1 | 77.0 | 74.2 | 67.5 | 66.9 | 73.0 | 74.0 |
| ProgramBench | 29.1 | 20.3 | 17.5 | 19.0 | 23.0 | 37.0 |
| NL2Repo-Bench | 68.2 | 65.4 | 58.0 | 58.0 | 56.8 | 75.3 |
| Automation-Bench v1.0.6 | 60.5 | 54.8 | 46.7 | 48.8 | 45.8 | 50.3 |
| Agents’ Last Exam | 35.4 | 31.8 | 27.6 | 28.5 | 26.7 | 28.6 |
| Apex Bench v1.1 | 72.1 | 64.6 | 47.8 | 56.6 | 54.3 | 65.8 |
| Chartography (w/tools) | 83.0 | 78.9 | 68.1 | — | 79.9 | 84.0 |
| BabyVision (w/tools) | 92.5 | 89.6 | 85.7 | — | 88.9 | 94.1 |
| ZeroBench-main (w/tools) | 51.0 | 49.0 | 41.0 | — | 53.0 | 52.0 |
† denotes the text-only subset of HLE. We use the Claude Code harness for Terminal-Bench 4.0 and the Mini-SWE-V2 harness for DeepSWE v1.1.
Prompt Encoding
This release does not include a Jinja-format chat template. The encoding folder contains a self-contained Python reference implementation (encoding.py) with test cases for multi-turn conversations, tool calling, thinking mode, numeric reasoning effort, mid-conversation system messages, and interleaved image content.
For production use, we additionally release deepseek-recipe, a set of Rust libraries with Python bindings that provides the same prompt format as a maintained, protocol-aware toolkit. It converts Messages, Chat Completions, and Responses API requests into the Conversation format, encodes them into DeepSeek V4 and V4.1 prompts or token IDs, and parses model output back into complete or streamed responses — covering thinking, tool calls, images, and generation settings. Model inference, tool execution, and HTTP transport are left to the caller.
Minimal Inference
Please refer to the inference folder for instructions on weight conversion and running inference locally.
Recommended sampling parameters:
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
temperature | 1.0 |
top_p | 1.0 |
context_window | 1M tokens |
max_tokens | ≥ 256K |
License
This repository and the model weights are licensed under the MIT License.
Citation
@misc{deepseekai2026deepseekv41flash,
title={DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash: Pushing the Limits of KV Cache Compression},
author={DeepSeek-AI},
year={2026},
}Contact
If you have any questions, please raise an issue or contact us at [email protected].