AI-Hypercomputer / AI-Hypercomputer/maxtext

DEFAULT_MASK_VALUE causes gradient explosion and nan loss on deep models

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#614 2 comments 2 reactions 1 assignee Claimed by @anfals View on GitHub
bug
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Description

I was training a llama model on GPU, with a custom embedding. It worked fine with 12 layers, dim 1024, seq length 256, but loss would become nan after the first step if setting num_layers to more than 17. I debugged the gradients, and found after each layer their magnitude would increase by around 100x, until they hit float32_max at around the 18th layer and became inf, leading to nan loss.

The gradient explosion seemed to be coming from
`local_exps = jnp.exp(attn_weights - local_max)`
in attentions.py.

Changing

`DEFAULT_MASK_VALUE = -0.7 * float(jnp.finfo(jnp.dtype("float32")).max)`
to
`DEFAULT_MASK_VALUE = -jnp.inf`
fixed the issue, and the gradients' magnitude stopped increasing after each level.

Presumably the issue wasn't noticed during TPU training as that uses a separate codepath.

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