Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Improve consistency of zero_grad #6554

Draft
wants to merge 9 commits into
base: master
Choose a base branch
from
Draft

Conversation

tohtana
Copy link
Contributor

@tohtana tohtana commented Sep 18, 2024

DeepSpeed has several ways to call zero_grad() but they have the following inconsistency.

  • ZeRO 1/2 optimizer's zero_grad: Clear .grad and .grad_acc
  • ZeRO 3 optimizer's zero_grad: Clear .grad and reset micro_step_id. This affects whether it overwrites or accumulates gradients after reduce. It also causes a mismatch with engine's micro_steps.
  • Engine's zero_grad: Clear .grad (doesn't call optimizer's zero_grad in its zero_grad). But it calls the optimizer's zero_grad after step().

Another confusion is that it doesn't consider the gradient accumulation boundary while backward and step do. Users naturally expect the code below works, but these inconsistent behaviors can potentially cause unexpected behavior as shown in comments.

for batch in data_loader:
    # We need *if condition* to run zero_grad only at a gradient accumulation boundary
    target_engine.zero_grad() # optimizer.zero_grad() is safer but it shows different behavior with Z1/2 and 3

    outputs = target_engine(batch)
    target_engine.backward(loss)
    target_engine.step() # this is another confusion ... user can call optimizer.step() but it doesn't work in some cases

This PR aims to improve the behavior of the optimizers.

  • zero_grad clears gradients only at a gradient accumulation boundary.
    • Shows a warning once when it is called at steps that are not a gradient accumulation boundary
    • Accepts kwarg force to clear gradients
  • ZeRO 1/2/3 optimizers and engine's zero_grad have the same effect
    • Users can call either of optimizer.zero_grad and engine.zero_grad with any zero stages
    • Stop resetting micro_step_id for Z3 optimizer to make it consistent with engine's micro_steps

(This PR depends on #6550)

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.

2 participants