Show HN: Jax-JS, array library in JavaScript targeting WebGPU

sestep 131 days ago |

Hey Eric, great to see you've now published this! I know we chatted about this briefly last year, but it would be awesome to see how the performance of jax-js compares against that of other autodiff tools on a broader and more standard set of benchmarks: https://github.com/gradbench/gradbench

ekzhang 131 days ago | |

For sure! It looks like this is benchmarking the autodiff cpu time, not the actual kernels though, which (correct me if I’m wrong) isn’t really relevant for an ML library — it’s more for if you have a really complex scientific expression

sestep 131 days ago | | |

Nope, both are measured! In fact, the time to do the autodiff transformation isn't even reflected in the charts shown on the README and the website; those charts only show the time to actually run the computations.

ekzhang 131 days ago | | |

Hm okay, seems like an interesting set of benchmarks — let me know if there’s anything I can do to help make jax-js more compatible with your docker setup

sestep 131 days ago | | |

It should be fairly straightforward; feel free to open a PR following the instructions in CONTRIBUTING.md :)

ekzhang 131 days ago | | |

I don’t think this is straightforward but it may be a skill issue on my part. It would require dockerizing headless Chrome with WebGPU support and dynamically injecting custom bundled JavaScript into the page, then extracting the results with Chrome IPC

fouronnes3 131 days ago |

Congrats on the launch! This is a very exciting project because the only decent autodiff implementation in typescript was tensorflowjs, which has been completely abandonned by Google. Everyone uses onnx runtime web for inference but actually computing gradients in typescript was surprisingly absent from the ecosystem since tfjs died.

I will be following this project closely! Best of luck Eric! Do you have plans to keep working on it for sometime? Is it a side project or will you abe ble to commit to jax-js longer term?

ekzhang 131 days ago | |

Yes, we are actively working on it! The goal is to be a full ML research library, not just a model inference runtime. You can join the Discord to follow along

bobajeff 131 days ago |

This is really great. I don't do ML stuff. But I some mathy things that would benefit from running in the GPU so it's great to see the Web getting this.

I hope this will help grow the js science community.

yuppiemephisto 131 days ago |

This project is an inspiration, I've been working on porting tinygrad to [Lean](github.com/alok/tinygrad)

mlajtos 131 days ago |

I have a project using tfjs and jax-js is very exciting alternative. However during porting I struggle a lot with `.ref` and `.dispose()` API. Coming from tfjs where you garbage collect with `tf.tidy(() => { ... })`, API in jax-js seems very low-level and error-prone. Is that something that can be improved or is it inherent to how jax-js works?

Would `using`[0] help here?

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

ekzhang 131 days ago | |

I don’t think tf.tidy() is a sound API under jvp/grad transformations, also it prevents you from using async which makes it incompatible with GPU backends (or blocks the page), a pretty big issue. https://github.com/tensorflow/tfjs/issues/5468

Thanks for the feedback though, just explaining how we arrived at this API. I hope you’d at least try it out — hopefully you will see when developing that the refs are more flexible than alternatives.

mlajtos 131 days ago | | |

I'll grind jax-js more and see if refs become invisible then. Thanks for a great project!

esafak 132 days ago |

What is the state of web ML? Anybody doing cool things already? How about https://www.w3.org/TR/webnn/ ?

sroussey 131 days ago | |

onnx on the web has the most models available and can use webgpu which is available everywhere.

Huggingface’s transformers.js uses it. And I use that for https://workglow.dev (also tensorflow mediapipe though that is using wasm).

I don’t think webnn has gone anywhere and is too restrictive.

ekzhang 131 days ago | | |

Since ONNX is just a model data format, you can actually parse and run ONNX files in jax-js as well. Here’s an example of running DETR ResNet-50 from Xenova’s transformers.js checkpoint in jax-js

https://jax-js.com/detr-resnet-50

I don’t think I intend to support everything in ONNX right now, especially quant/dequant, but eventually it would be interesting to see if we can help accelerate transformers.js with a jax-js backend + goodies like kernel fusion

jax-js is more trying to explore being an ML research library, rather than ONNX which is a runtime for exported models

sbondaryev 130 days ago |

The examples are great. It would be really nice to have a sandbox with the full training code (e.g. MNIST) to play with.

maelito 131 days ago |

Could not run the demos on Firefox. On Chromium, the Great Expectations loads but then nothing happens.

ekzhang 131 days ago | |

Firefox doesn’t support WebGPU yet, you can run programs in the REPL through other backends like Wasm/WebGL: https://jax-js.com/repl

See: https://caniuse.com/webgpu

forgotpwd16 131 days ago | | |

According to page WebGPU supported (`dom.webgpu.enabled` flag) but is only enabled by default on Windows & macOS (i.e. not Linux).

forgotpwd16 131 days ago |

Very nice work. Like how it supports webgpu but also cpu/wasm/webgl. Would love to read more on the internals & design choices made like e.g. ref counting in README.

P.S. And thanks for taking your time working on this and releasing something polished rather a Claude slop made within few days as seems to be the norm now.