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ONNX Runtime's WebGPU plugin reached 0.5.0 with native GatedDeltaNet and sparse-attention kernels, block-scaled FP8 MoE, and concurrent independent sessions

AspireAI community · GitHub (microsoft/onnxruntime)
ONNX Runtime WebGPU Plugin EP 0.5.0, published 29 October 2026, expands operator and model support for running models on WebGPU. It adds native GatedDeltaNet and VarlenCausalConvWithState kernels, SparseAttentionIndexer, DynamicSparseAttention and SparsePagedAttention with a packed sparse indexer for continuous batching, plus unquantized MoE, block-scaled FP8 QMoE, INT2 expert weights and mixed-width integer QMoE execution. Performance work includes subgroup-matrix kernels on AMD GPUs, an FP16 GEMV specialization for single-row decode projections, local-window flash attention for GroupQueryAttention and optimized sparse attention softmax. Runtime integration adds concurrent independent-Session execution on eligible hosts, requiring ORT 1.28.3 or later in the 1.28 series, 1.30.1 or later in the 1.30 series, or 1.31 or later, with older hosts keeping serialized compatibility. One caveat is called out in the release itself: ORT 1.26.0 was reported to reject the plugin during kernel creation, and forcing serialized execution does not work around it. The release notes state they were prepared with AI assistance from commit history and pull request metadata.
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One distance function matched sparse-autoencoder features across layers and compressed feature circuits into supernodes
Two sparse-autoencoder analyses have resisted scaling: matching semantically similar features across layers, and compressing large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes. This paper argues both are the same underlying problem, estimating semantic distances between SAE features that sit on different activation manifolds. Its representation treats each feature not as a single decoder vector but as an activation-weighted distribution over the hidden states expressing it, projects those distributions into a shared reference space, and compares them with Wasserstein distance. The representation is proved invariant to activation rescaling and stable under perturbation, and recovers true matches under finite-sample margin conditions. Empirically it outperformed decoder-vector and LLM-based baselines and captured subtle functional distinctions between related features, and it compressed large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes automatically. The limitation is that this is interpretability tooling: the paper demonstrates better feature matching and circuit compression, not that downstream interpretability claims become more accurate.
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