High cache-hit NSA sparse attention only gathers rows selected by topk_indices, but the FP8 RAGGED path dequantized the whole materialized K buffer first. Wire the syh in-place topk-only dequant path behind an explicit env gate so the sparse path can dequant referenced rows at their original row ids while keeping topk_indices unchanged. The old full-dequant path remains the default and the verification gate stays available for small correctness checks only.
Constraint: Production runs should enable only SGLANG_NSA_DEQUANT_ONLY_TOPK=1; VERIFY also runs the full-dequant reference and is too expensive for perf tests.
Rejected: Compact/remap topk buffer | data-dependent shape and remap add synchronization/aliasing risk; syh final in-place contract avoids both.
Confidence: medium
Scope-risk: moderate
Directive: Do not enable SGLANG_NSA_DEQUANT_ONLY_TOPK_VERIFY in throughput runs; use it only for small correctness probes.
Tested: python -m py_compile python/sglang/srt/environ.py python/sglang/srt/layers/attention/nsa_backend.py test/registered/unit/layers/test_nsa_dequant_only_topk.py
Tested: git diff --check
Tested: remote g0034 container PYTHONPATH=python python -m pytest -q test/registered/unit/layers/test_nsa_dequant_only_topk.py -> 2 passed
Tested: remote g0034 CUDA smoke for tai_kernel.nsa_prefill.nsa_dequant_topk_inplace topk rows matched torch reference
Not-tested: Full GSM8K or replay ETE with SGLANG_NSA_DEQUANT_ONLY_TOPK=1
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