Lightning-AI / Lightning-AI/lightning-thunder

TE: Redundant backward computation in PEFT setting.

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#2,076 7 comments 0 reactions 1 assignee View on GitHub

@kshitij12345 is already working on this.

Since May 19, 2025.

TransformerEngine
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Python
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Description

Problem - Currently, TE executor just assumes that we will be computing gradients for both input and weight. This is true for full finetuning, but in PEFT scenario the weights are frozen i.e. requires_grad=False. This leads to poor performance as the TE executor ends up doing unnecessary work of computing gradients for weights.

NOTE: We tried fixing in #1838 but it had to be reverted due to #1966

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