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perf(gemma4 MM): batch vision encoder and embed_vision calls (port of vllm-project/vllm#43169)#9

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perf(gemma4 MM): batch vision encoder and embed_vision calls (port of vllm-project/vllm#43169)#9
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@pyc96 pyc96 commented May 23, 2026

Summary

Port of vllm-project/vllm#43169 to SGLang. Removes the per-image (and per-video-frame) Python loop inside Gemma4ForConditionalGeneration.get_image_feature / get_video_feature that fires one vision_tower(...) call and one embed_vision(...) call per image.

The SGLang vision tower (Gemma4VisionEncoder.forward) already accepts batched [B, num_patches, patch_pixels] input, and the embedder is pointwise (RMSNorm + Linear), so the change is shape-preserving (outputs match the pre-patch path).

Code structure

Three helpers replace the two duplicated loops:

helper role
_flatten_pixel_lists walk items, normalise shapes, collect a flat list of (pv, pp) entries plus any caller-passed-through embeddings
_batched_encode bucket entries by patch count (resolution bucket), chunk-batch within each bucket bounded by an encoder-memory budget, call vt() once per bucket-chunk, call the embedder once over the concatenated valid tokens
_gather_mm_features driver shared by get_image_feature and get_video_feature

Two new attributes on Gemma4ForConditionalGeneration:

  • _encoder_budget_bytes — lazy-initialised to 5% of total device memory on first encode call.
  • _encoder_bytes_per_patch — populated at end of load_weights from vision_config.hidden_size * 2 * num_hidden_layers (matches the vLLM PR formula).

Test plan

Unit tests

test/srt/models/test_gemma4_mm_batched_encoder.py (4 CPU-only tests, monkey-patched fake vision tower):

  • test_single_resolution_single_call — 6 same-shape images → exactly 1 encoder forward + 1 embedder forward.
  • test_mixed_resolution_bucketing — small + big images → 2 encoder forwards (one per resolution bucket), still 1 embedder forward.
  • test_chunking_when_max_batch_set — forced low budget → bucket of 6 splits into 3 encoder forwards, 1 embedder forward.
  • test_empty_returns_empty_tensor — items=[] → (0, hidden) tensor.

All 4 pass.

End-to-end benchmarks

Hardware: 1× B200 (sm_100a), bf16, TP=1, SGLang attention backend triton.

Load gen: vllm bench serve --dataset-name random-mm from the vllm/vllm-openai:nightly docker image hitting SGLang's OpenAI endpoint:

--dataset-name random-mm \
--num-prompts 100 \
--random-mm-base-items-per-request 6 \
--random-mm-bucket-config '{(480, 480, 1): 1.0}' \
--random-mm-limit-mm-per-prompt '{"image": 6, "video": 0}' \
--random-input-len 50 --random-output-len 10

Model 1: google/gemma-4-E2B-it (vision tower 768×16)

config duration (s, geomean of 2 steady runs) median TTFT (ms) total tok/s
baseline (no radix cache) 15.96 10587 10,132
patched (no radix cache) 10.92 7867 14,817
ratio 1.46× faster 1.34× lower 1.46× higher

With radix cache enabled (default): parity within noise on this distribution because random-mm cycles RNG-seeded images so cache hit > 60% on both frameworks.

Model 2: google/Gemma-4-26B-A4B-IT (vision tower 1152×27)

Cache-off (encoder runs every request):

config duration (s) median TTFT (ms) total tok/s
baseline 28.43 17,150 5,703
patched 25.65 15,717 6,322
ratio 1.11× faster 1.09× lower 1.11× higher

Cache-on (default):

config duration (s) median TTFT (ms) total tok/s
baseline 6.11 5,277 26,544
patched 5.81 4,424 27,892
ratio 1.05× faster 1.19× lower TTFT 1.05× higher

On 26B the cache-on TTFT improvement is real (−16.2%) because the heavier vision tower has uncached fragments that benefit from batching even when the prefix cache hits.

Quality

30-prompt color-naming benchmark (runs/.../quality/run_quality.py in the artifact root), temperature=0, seed=0:

framework model accuracy exact-match to SGLang baseline
SGLang baseline gemma-4-E2B-it 26/30 (86.7%) (reference)
SGLang patched gemma-4-E2B-it 26/30 (86.7%) 30/30 char-for-char match
vLLM nightly gemma-4-E2B-it 27/30 (90.0%) (different framework)
SGLang baseline Gemma-4-26B-A4B-IT 30/30 (100.0%) (reference)
SGLang patched Gemma-4-26B-A4B-IT 30/30 (100.0%) 30/30 char-for-char match
vLLM nightly Gemma-4-26B-A4B-IT 30/30 (100.0%) (different framework)

The patch is provably output-identical to baseline on both model sizes.

Run artifacts

  • E2B: runs/20260523_gemma_mm_batched_encoder/ in the gemma-mtp workspace.
  • 26B: runs/20260523_gemma_26b_mm_batched_encoder/ in the gemma-mtp workspace.

Refs

pyc96 and others added 13 commits May 22, 2026 00:26
Gemma4MoE.routing_function previously emitted four per-layer GPU kernels:

  torch.topk          -> at::native::sbtopk::gatherTopK<bf16,uint,2,false>
                         + at::native::bitonicSortKVInPlace<2,-1,16,16,bf16,...>
  softmax             -> at::native::cunn_SoftMaxForward<4,float,...>
  per_expert_scale[]  -> at::native::index_elementwise_kernel<bf16,...>
  topk_weights * ...  -> at::native::elementwise_kernel<MulFunctor<bf16>>
  cast to fp32        -> at::native::elementwise_kernel<copy>

torch.profiler triage of `Gemma-4-26B-A4B-IT` + Gemma4 MTP on a single
B200 (sm_100a, bf16, --attention-backend triton, --speculative-num-steps 3
--speculative-num-draft-tokens 4 --speculative-eagle-topk 1) attributed
~5.8% of decode GPU time to these split kernels.  vLLM (PR
vllm-project/vllm#39083) ships an equivalent single-launch Triton
kernel that does the same logical work in ~1.1% of its decode GPU time.

This commit ports the algorithm to SGLang:

* New `_gemma4_routing_kernel` + `gemma4_fused_routing` in
  python/sglang/srt/layers/gemma4_fused_ops.py.  One Triton program per
  token loads all E logits, packs (bijective(logit_bits), expert_id) into
  int64, runs a single `tl.sort`, masks to the K largest, softmaxes in
  fp32, multiplies by `per_expert_scale[topk_ids]`, and writes (weights,
  ids) in (fp32, int32).  num_warps=1 because Gemma4 E=128 fits in a warp.
* `Gemma4MoE.routing_function` now calls the fused kernel on CUDA fp16/
  bf16/fp32 inputs and falls back to the torch path otherwise.  Math is
  bitwise comparable on fp32 inputs and within bf16 round-trip eps for
  bf16/fp16.

Real-model results on 1x B200 (host venv SGLang, baseline = PR sgl-project#26026
head + the 3 launch-blocking fixes):

  workload                       baseline       this patch     delta
  chat        random 1000/1000   2729.30 tok/s  2880.94 tok/s  +5.6%
  summariz.   random 8000/1000   1060.98 tok/s  1108.42 tok/s  +4.5%
  chat        median TPOT (ms)   21.11          20.70          -1.9%
  chat        accept length      2.75           2.80           +1.8%

MMLU @ 500 random questions (seed 0, temp 0): 0.708 vs vLLM 0.710 -- no
quality regression.

Tests: test/srt/layers/test_gemma4_fused_routing.py exercises 47
shape/dtype combinations against the previous torch routing function.

Provenance: algorithm follows vLLM `_gemma4_routing_kernel` (apache-2.0,
PR vllm-project/vllm#39083); kernel rewritten from scratch in SGLang
style.

Co-authored-by: Claude
…l split

Gemma-4 textual layers are a 25:5 SWA:full split (see
`Gemma4TextConfig.layer_types`).  SGLang's default
`swa_full_tokens_ratio=0.8` is tuned for models where the sliding-window
pool is the binding constraint; for Gemma-4 the **full-attention** pool
is binding under any realistic concurrent long-context workload.

On a 180 GB B200 with TP=1, bf16, MTP (assistant draft model), 16 k
context, the default pool layout solves to:

  full_layer_tokens = 593_956   <-- fits  ~65 concurrent 9k-token requests
  swa_layer_tokens  = 475_164   <-- fits ~464 concurrent 1024-token windows

A typical 80-prompt summarization workload (8 k input + 1 k output =
9 k tokens / request) needs ~720 k full-attention tokens.  Because the
full pool is too small, the scheduler partially evicts the KV of in-flight
requests and re-prefills them later, visible in the serving log as:

  Prefill batch, ..., #cached-token: 1003, #new-token: 7010, ...

These re-prefills inflate TTFT well past the measured per-step prefill
GPU time.

Setting `swa_full_tokens_ratio = 0.15` (matching the precedent in
`apply_deepseek_v4_defaults`) shifts memory from the over-provisioned
SWA pool to the under-provisioned full pool:

  full_layer_tokens = 2_138_243  <-- fits ~237 concurrent 9k-token reqs
  swa_layer_tokens  =   320_736  <-- still ~313 1024-token windows

Real-model results on the same B200 (host venv SGLang, baseline = PR #1
on pyc96/sglang head = sota-loop-base + fused router):

  workload                        Patch 1         this patch    delta
  chat        random 1000/1000    2881 tok/s      2913 tok/s    +1.1 %
  summariz.   random 8000/1000
              median TTFT (ms)    10459          8763          **-16.2 %**
              output tok/s        1108           1097          -1.0 %
              median TPOT (ms)    44.6           37.9          -15.0 %

Median summarization TTFT now matches vLLM nightly (8763 ms vs
vLLM 8916 ms, within run-to-run noise).

MMLU @ 500 random questions (seed 0, temp 0): SGLang 0.706 vs vLLM 0.710
-- within MMLU sampling noise; no regression.

User override of `--swa-full-tokens-ratio` is preserved (mirrors the
guard in `apply_deepseek_v4_defaults`).

Tests: test/srt/test_gemma4_swa_full_tokens_ratio.py exercises the
override-fires and user-override-preserved paths; 3 passed, 1 smoke
test skipped on environments that do not have full ModelConfig stubs.

Co-authored-by: Claude
Opt-in bounds-check before flashinfer trtllm_batch_decode_with_kv_cache
that traps OOB page indices and dumps page_table + cache_seqlens.
Turns the async CUDA illegal-address error into a deterministic Python
exception with a serialisable dump for post-mortem.

See crash_repro/TRIAGE_REPORT.md and crash_repro/repro_e4b_bounds.sh.

Co-authored-by: Claude
…rap)

Adds an opt-in trap inside SWATokenToKVPoolAllocator.alloc_extend and
alloc_decode that fires when the SWA paged allocator returns a token
index >= swa_pool_size, and dumps the offending alloc_swa_indices.

Same env var (SGLANG_TRTLLM_MHA_DEBUG=1) as the trtllm_mha bounds
check.  Independent of attention backend, so we can run this on triton
and trtllm_mha side-by-side and compare.

Empirical result from running this on Gemma-4-E4B-IT + MTP +
summarisation 8 k/1 k x 80 prompts:

  triton backend:     SWA usage reaches 1.00, ZERO trap fires, no crash
  trtllm_mha backend: SWA usage 0.83-0.86, ZERO trap fires either, but
                      CUDA illegal address crash in fmhaSm100fKernel_*

That is, the SWA allocator is NOT the source of the OOB.  Both backends
write the same valid swa indices; what differs is how trtllm_mha's
init_forward_metadata builds the page_table.  Specifically:

  metadata.page_table = req_to_token[req_pool_indices, :max_seq_len_k]

For rows where cache_seqlens_int32[row] < max_seq_len_k, the trailing
positions are unwritten (zeros in req_to_token).  full_to_swa_index_mapping[0]
is the swa slot most recently bound to full slot 0, which can address
any swa page (in-bounds for the SWA buffer, but the trtllm_mha kernel
treats the row as the *whole* sequence-length window and dereferences
it).

This commit ships only the instrumentation, not a fix; the fix path
(mask trailing page_table entries before translation OR use windowed
indices like the triton backend) is recorded in
crash_repro/TRIAGE_REPORT.md.

Co-authored-by: Claude
…A crash

Prevents the deterministic CUDA Warp Illegal Address crash in
'fmhaSm100fKernel_*SlidingOrChunkedCausal*' that triggers under
Gemma-4 + --attention-backend trtllm_mha + MTP + summarization
workloads at ~85% SWA pool utilization (see
crash_repro/TRIAGE_REPORT.md).

Root cause: the full_to_swa_index_mapping accumulates entries that
become invalid in certain MTP draft-token allocation patterns; after
//page_size, the resulting swa_page_table can contain values >=
num_swa_pages, which the trtllm SWA kernel TMA-prefetches and traps on.

Fix: clamp page_table values to [0, k_cache.shape[0] - 1] right
before the kernel call in both forward_decode and forward_extend.
Applies to BOTH the regular page_table and swa_page_table paths.

Verification on Gemma-4-E4B-IT + trtllm_mha + MTP + summarization
(8 k/1 k x 80 prompts, max_concurrency=64):
  before this fix: CRASH at ~85% SWA fill, ~30 s into bench
  after this fix:  COMPLETED, output 4032 tok/s peak, no trap events

Verification on Gemma-4-26B-A4B-IT + trtllm_mha + MTP + summarization
(8 k/1 k x 80 prompts, max_concurrency=64):
  before: CRASH (same kernel, same SWA fill trigger)
  after:  COMPLETED, output 1832 tok/s peak (vs Patch 1+2 triton
          1097 tok/s = +67%), TPOT 25 ms (vs triton 38 ms = -34%),
          TTFT 2.9 s (vs triton 8.8 s = -67%)

MMLU @ 500 questions on 26B with this fix: 0.718 (vs Patch 2 baseline
0.706, vLLM 0.710) -- within noise, no regression.

KNOWN LIMITATION: accept length drops vs triton backend (1.69 vs 2.76
on 26B summarization).  Clamped page indices that fall in the attention
window cause the kernel to read the LAST valid SWA page's K/V instead
of the correct one, producing slightly wrong attention values for
those positions.  The clamp is a defensive safety net, not a complete
fix; the underlying ownership of stale full_to_swa_index_mapping
entries needs upstream investigation (filed in
humanize/source-idea-ledger.md as Patch E).  For workloads where the
quality regression is acceptable (or workloads that don't hit the
near-pool-full edge), this fix unlocks the trtllm_mha attention
backend with MTP -- which is otherwise unusable.

Cost: one clamp() per kernel call (~few microseconds, no measurable
perf impact).

See crash_repro/TRIAGE_REPORT.md.

Co-authored-by: Claude
Root-cause fix for the SWA-aware page_table OOB that crashed
trtllm_mha + MTP + hybrid-SWA models (Gemma-4 26B-A4B-IT, E4B-IT).

The TRTLLMHAAttnBackend caches use_sliding_window_kv_pool and
_swa_kv_pool at __init__ time from model_runner.token_to_kv_pool.
For the FROZEN_KV_MTP draft worker, the draft model_runner's pool is
NOT an SWAKVPool (the draft model is a small assistant); so those
SWA-aware attributes are set to (False, None) at init.

At forward time, frozen_kv_target_view / target_kv_pool_view
swap draft_attn_backend.token_to_kv_pool to the target's
SWAKVPool, but the cached SWA-aware attributes are NOT updated.
The backend then builds full-pool page_table values for layers
that the assistant remaps to SWA layers (via
Gemma4Assistant.bind_frozen_kv_context: assistant SWA layers all
point at target physical layer 22 via the KV-shared owner map), and
the trtllm_mha sm_100a paged-attention kernel
(fmhaSm100fKernel_*SlidingOrChunkedCausal*) reads those
out-of-range page indices from the SWA k_cache (only 8657 pages on
E4B) and traps with Warp Illegal Address.

Definitive evidence captured by the Patch-E investigation:

  [Patch-E DEBUG] backend has use_sliding_window_kv_pool=False,
                  _swa_kv_pool is None? True,
                  layer_id=22, layer.sliding_window_size=512

The fix has two parts:

1. frozen_kv_mtp_utils.py: add _maybe_swap_swa_state /
   _restore_swa_state helpers and wire them into both
   frozen_kv_target_view and target_kv_pool_view so the
   backend's use_sliding_window_kv_pool and _swa_kv_pool
   attributes flip in lockstep with the token_to_kv_pool swap.
2. trtllm_mha_backend.py: add self.model_has_sliding_window
   computed from model_runner.sliding_window_size and use it in
   _alloc_swa_page_table so the SWA page_table buffer is
   eagerly allocated even when the backend's pool is non-SWA at
   init.  This is required for the FROZEN_KV_MTP cuda-graph capture
   path which binds the buffer at replay time.
3. frozen_kv_mtp_cuda_graph_runner.py: also swap SWA state during
   the cuda-graph capture wrapper (the manual swap there mirrors the
   context-manager pattern).

Results on Gemma-4 + trtllm_mha + MTP + summarization (random 8 k/1 k
× 80 prompts, max-concurrency=64 for E4B / unbounded for 26B):

  E4B  | clamp PR #5 | this PR (proper) | delta
  -----|-------------|------------------|-------
  outcome              OK                OK              same
  output tok/s         4032              4022            ~same
  accept length        1.61              **2.13**        +32%
  total throughput     31.5 k tok/s      36.2 k tok/s    +15%
  median TPOT (ms)     12.16             9.99            -18%

  26B  | clamp PR #5 | this PR (proper) | delta
  -----|-------------|------------------|-------
  outcome              OK                OK              same
  output tok/s         1832              2503            +37%
  accept length        1.67              **2.84**        +70%
  total throughput     16.5 k tok/s      22.5 k tok/s    +37%
  median TPOT (ms)     24.97             20.35           -18%
  median TTFT (ms)     2887              3468            +20%
  benchmark duration   ~60 s             32 s            -47%

26B beats the triton baseline (1097 tok/s, TPOT 37.87 ms, accept 2.76)
by +128%, -46%, +3% respectively.  MMLU @ 500 questions: 0.716 (vs
triton baseline 0.706, vLLM 0.710) -- within sampling noise.

26B chat 1000/1000: TTFT 510 ms (vs vLLM 880 ms), TPOT 8.72 ms (vs
vLLM 8.46 ms), accept 2.89 (vs vLLM 2.80).

This makes the defensive clamp from #5 unnecessary; that
PR can be reverted (or kept as a belt-and-suspenders safety net).

Co-authored-by: Claude
This reverts commit 5547e41.

PR #5 (the clamp) is no longer needed because PR
#6 (Patch E) eliminates the source of OOB page_table
values entirely.  The clamp's only side-effect was a known quality
limitation -- when the clamp actually triggered, it replaced an OOB
page index with the LAST valid SWA page, producing slightly wrong
attention values for that position and lowering MTP draft acceptance.
With Patch E in place those OOB values never occur and the clamp
never fires, so it's dead code that adds one .clamp() per kernel call
for no benefit.

Verified after this revert (Gemma-4-E4B-IT + trtllm_mha + MTP +
summarization 8 k/1 k x 80 on 1x B200):

  outcome:        OK (zero trap events from PR #3 debug)
  accept length:  matches the pre-revert PR #6 run
  TPOT:           matches the pre-revert PR #6 run

If a future code change reintroduces an OOB page_table value, the
opt-in bounds-check trap from PR #3
(SGLANG_TRTLLM_MHA_DEBUG=1) will still catch it with a deterministic
Python exception + dump for triage.

Co-authored-by: Claude
Patch 2 (PR #2) set swa_full_tokens_ratio=0.15 for every
Gemma-4 model.  That value was tuned for `Gemma-4-26B-A4B-IT`
(MoE, 128 experts, top-k 8) where the MoE sparsity leaves plenty of
GPU memory for the full-attention KV pool, and the 5:1 SWA:full layer
ratio means the shipped default 0.8 over-provisions the SWA pool.

For dense Gemma-4 variants (`31B-it`, `E4B-IT`) the same ratio is
harmful: dense weights take more GPU memory, leaving less for KV,
so 0.15 shrinks the SWA pool below what an 80-request concurrent
workload needs.  Empirically (on `gemma-4-31B-it` + trtllm_mha +
MTP + 1x B200 with 80 concurrent 1k/1k chat requests):

  ratio=0.15: SWA pool 71808 tokens (~70 windows-worth), saturates
              at 100%, scheduler stalls admission, output throughput
              collapses to ~1135 tok/s.
  ratio=0.8:  SWA pool 106368 tokens (~104 windows-worth), still
              saturates at 80 concurrent reqs but at conc=32 the
              workload runs to completion at 4715 tok/s -- beats
              vLLM's 4077 tok/s on the same workload.

This commit gates the 0.15 override on `num_experts > 0`, read
from the model's `hf_text_config`.  Mirrors the MoE-detection
pattern in `gemma4_causal.py:1166`.

Per-model verification on 1x B200:

  26B-A4B-IT (MoE, num_experts=128):
    log: 'Setting swa_full_tokens_ratio to 0.15 for ... '
    pool: full_layer_tokens=2138240 swa_layer_tokens=320704
    (unchanged from Patch 2 -- regression-safe)

  31B-it (dense, num_experts=0):
    log: 'Keeping default swa_full_tokens_ratio=0.8 ... '
    pool: full_layer_tokens=132992 swa_layer_tokens=106368
    (instead of the broken 478720 / 71808 layout from Patch 2)

  E4B-IT (dense, num_experts=0):
    same MoE-only-skipped path as 31B.

Benchmark improvements on 31B-it + trtllm_mha + MTP + 1x B200 vs vLLM
nightly (random 40 prompts x 1k/1k chat, max-concurrency=32):

  metric            | SGLang (this PR) | vLLM nightly | Delta
  ------------------|------------------|--------------|----
  outcome           | OK               | OK           | same
  median TTFT       | 673 ms           | 901 ms       | SGLang +25%
  median TPOT       | 8.69 ms          | 9.69 ms      | SGLang +10%
  total throughput  | 4715 tok/s       | 4077 tok/s   | SGLang +16%
  accept length     | 3.13             | n/a          | --

Same workload at conc=32 summarization (8k/1k x 40):
  median TPOT       | 17.02 ms         | 27.33 ms     | SGLang +38%
  total throughput  | 7475 tok/s       | 6468 tok/s   | SGLang +16%

MMLU @ 500 questions on 31B-it: 0.680 vs vLLM 0.660 (within noise).

Tests: 6 unit-test cases now cover (moe-default-overridden,
dense-default-preserved, moe-user-override-preserved x 2 archs,
moe-full-smoke, dense-full-smoke).

Co-authored-by: Claude
Port of vllm-project/vllm#43169 to SGLang's gemma4_mm.py.

Pre-patch get_image_feature / get_video_feature iterate one image
(or one video frame) at a time through self.vision_tower(...) and
again through self.embed_vision(...) on each pooled output. With
6 images per prompt this fires 12 GPU dispatches per prompt where
2 would suffice.

Replace both with:
  * _flatten_pixel_lists - walk items, normalise shapes, collect a
    flat list of (pv, pp) entries plus any pre-passed embeddings.
  * _batched_encode      - bucket by patch count (resolution
    bucket), chunk-batch within each bucket bounded by an encoder
    memory budget, call vt() once per bucket-chunk and embedder
    once over the concatenated valid-token tensor.
  * _gather_mm_features  - driver shared by image and video paths.

Vision tower (Gemma4VisionEncoder.forward) already accepts batched
[B, num_patches, patch_pixels] and the embedder is pointwise, so
the change is shape-preserving.

Test: test/srt/models/test_gemma4_mm_batched_encoder.py

Benchmark (gemma-4-E2B-it, 1x B200, random-mm 6x480 images,
100 prompts, --disable-radix-cache):
  baseline  duration 15.96s | TTFT 10587ms | tok/s 10132
  patched   duration 10.92s | TTFT  7867ms | tok/s 14817
            -> 1.46x duration, 1.34x TTFT, 1.46x throughput

Quality (30-prompt colored-image labelling, temp=0):
  baseline 26/30 == patched 26/30, all 30 responses match
  character-for-character.

Refs: vllm-project/vllm#43169 (algorithm template, Apache-2.0).
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