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Releases: linkedin/Liger-Kernel

v0.8.1

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@vaibhavjindal vaibhavjindal released this 23 Jul 00:01
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Liger-Kernel v0.8.1

Highlights

This is an incremental release on top of v0.8.0, bundling a new Megatron-Core integration, additional model coverage, early scaffolding for alternative kernel backends, and a large batch of Ascend NPU work — all opt-in, with the default CUDA path unchanged.

🧩 Megatron-Core integration (new)

Initial, opt-in support for plugging Liger kernels directly into Megatron-Core through native integration points — no monkey-patching of Megatron internals required. Exposed under the new liger_kernel.megatron namespace:

  • RMSNorm via a spec provider (#1254)
  • Vocab-parallel cross-entropy, including TP > 1 (#1207, #1260)
  • RMSNorm benchmark with reference H100 measurements (#1257)

This is an initial surface covering two kernels; it's designed to grow.

🤖 New model support

  • Gemma-4 multimodal — apply_liger_kernel_to_gemma4 (#1203)
  • DeepSeek-v4 — apply_liger_kernel_to_deepseek_v4 (#1245)
  • Fix for Gemma-3 multimodal forward (#1242)

🧪 Alternative kernel backends (experimental, opt-in)

Early groundwork for selecting alternative kernel implementations via LIGER_KERNEL_IMPL=<backend>. These are off by default and do not change existing behavior:

  • cuTile kernels for geglu, layer_norm, fused_linear_jsd, cross_entropy, RoPE, and more (#1250, #1269, #1228)
  • CuTe DSL cross-entropy scaffolding for Blackwell / B200 (#1279)
  • CUTLASS CuTe DSL RMSNorm (#1299)
  • infer_device_arch() for coarse GPU-architecture detection (#1273)

➕ New operators & kernel tuning

  • Fused modulated RMSNorm (#1225)
  • Hardware-gated cross-entropy and SwiGLU tuning for newer architectures (#1266, #1267, #1271, #1239)

🧠 Post-training / alignment

  • DPO: added hinge, bco_pair, robust, exo_pair, and discopop loss types (#1204)
  • Expose alpha through the LigerFusedLinearDPO public API (#1194)
  • GRPO/TRL-Liger fix and a SAPO torch.compile graph-break fix (#1202, #1274)

🖥️ Ascend NPU

A substantial batch of NPU work landed this cycle — optimized cross_entropy, fused_linear_cross_entropy, SwiGLU, layer_norm, embedding, fused_moe, and attention kernels, plus A3-machine support and dependency bumps (torch/torch_npu 2.7.1, triton-ascend 3.2.1).

🔧 Compatibility & fixes

  • transformers v5.8.0 support (#1221, #1236)
  • Triton compatibility: LOG2_E as tl.constexpr (#1275)
  • int32 pointer-overflow fix in fused MoE, with an autotune escape hatch (#1248)
  • ROCm source-install extras (#1243)
  • Convergence and test-suite stabilization (#1306, #1309, #1310, #1313)

👀 On the horizon

The alternative-backend scaffolding (cuTile / CuTe DSL / CUTLASS) and the new Megatron-Core surface are early foundations — both are areas we expect to keep building on in upcoming releases.


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v0.8.0

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@Mecoli1219 Mecoli1219 released this 30 Apr 23:01
c4b16d4

Liger-Kernel v0.8.0

Highlights ✨

🚀 MoE Training Acceleration via LigerExperts

A new fused MoE expert kernel (LigerExperts, backed by LigerFusedMoEFunction) inspired by SonicMoE (arXiv:2512.14080). It replaces the eager per-expert loop in HuggingFace MoE blocks with a Triton grouped-GEMM + fused SwiGLU + token aggregation path, with a memory-efficient backward.

Qwen3-30B-A3B fine-tuning on 2 × H100 (max seq len 32768, BS=1, GA=8): 8.24× tokens/sec, 8.19× training step, 4.10× eval, ~1% memory savings.

Auto-patched into Mixtral, Qwen3-MoE, Qwen3-Next, Qwen3.5-MoE, Qwen3-VL-MoE, GLM4V-MoE, and HunYuan-MoE-V1. (#1179, #1192)

🤖 Claude Code Skills for Kernel Authoring (.claude/skills/)

Three first-party Claude Code skills now ship with the repo to make extending Liger-Kernel dramatically easier:

  • liger-kernel-dev (#1170) — builds a production-ready Triton kernel end-to-end from a PyTorch op (file, URL, snippet, or NL): ops, module wrapper, functional API, tests, benchmark, exports.
  • liger-autopatch (#1167, #1177) — adds Liger support for a new HuggingFace model: reads modeling_*.py, generates lce_forward, monkey-patch entry, and convergence tests.
  • liger-kernel-perf (#1185) — profiles an existing kernel, generates and benchmarks optimization variants (Ampere / Hopper / Blackwell-aware), applies the winner.

Several PRs in this release were authored using these skills (e.g. #1165, #1166, #1171, #1187).

🧩 New Model Support

  • Qwen3.5 MoE (#1109) and Qwen3.5 dense (#1123)
  • Qwen3.5 multimodalQwen3_5ForConditionalGeneration (#1150)
  • Nemotron (#1165), with Liger ReLU² wired in (#1176)
  • Ministral (#1166)
  • Gemma 4 dense text, 31B-targeted (#1196)
  • Falcon H1 SwiGLU multipliers (#1201)

Ascend NPU Backend Support

Liger-Kernel now supports the Ascend NPU backend. Huge thanks to the Ascend team for the sustained effort across this release. See #969 for the full tracking issue and roadmap.


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v0.7.0

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@vaibhavjindal vaibhavjindal released this 12 Feb 22:00
7644a0f

🚀 Liger-Kernel Now Fully Supports Transformers v5

We’ve added full support for Transformers v5!
🔗 #994

Liger now supports all 🤗 Transformers versions ≥ 4.52.0, including the latest v5 release.

Broader compatibility. Seamless upgrades. No version headaches.

Thanks to all the contributors!

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Full Changelog: v0.6.5...v0.7.0

v0.6.5

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@vaibhavjindal vaibhavjindal released this 04 Feb 02:01
81f932a

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Full Changelog: v0.6.4...v0.6.5

v0.6.4 release

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@momochen momochen released this 21 Nov 22:48
0a62700

Highlights

New model architecture:
Qwen3-VL, hunyuanv1, Olmo3

New algorithm:
DAPO loss

Optimizations:
Layernorm backward, Tiled MLP

What's Changed

New Contributors

Full Changelog: v0.6.3...v0.6.4

v0.6.3 release

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@momochen momochen released this 27 Oct 18:30
d5648bf

Highlights in this release:

New model architecture supports:
SmolVLM2, GLM4.5V, InternVL3, Falcon-H1, Qwen-Next

New algorithm:
GSPO

What's Changed

New Contributors

Full Changelog: v0.6.2...v0.6.3

v0.6.2

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@vaibhavjindal vaibhavjindal released this 22 Aug 00:15
77a4c1a

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Full Changelog: v0.6.1...v0.6.2

v0.6.1

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@shimizust shimizust released this 28 Jul 18:36
7705dcc

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Full Changelog: v0.6.0...v0.6.1

v0.6.0: New Attention Operators, Cosine Similarity Loss, Llama 4, and VLM Patching Updates

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@shimizust shimizust released this 09 Jul 05:05
66570b1

Highlights

This release introduces significant improvements to Liger-Kernel, including new operators, support for Llama 4 models, more robust benchmarking automation, and key fixes for patching of vision-language models (VLMs) due to recent transformers refactoring.

Key Changes

New Features & Improvements

Bug Fixes

Documentation & CI Fixes

Benchmarking & Automation

New Contributors

Full Changelog: v0.5.10...v0.6.0

v0.5.10: Qwen3 MOE support, Sparsemax kernel, bug fixes

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@shimizust shimizust released this 22 May 17:52
44a8f2f

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Full Changelog: v0.5.9...v0.5.10