NVIDIA-NeMo / NVIDIA-NeMo/Automodel

More numerically stable plans

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enhancement
Dominant language
Python
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3d 20h
Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

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Related
https://github.com/NVIDIA-NeMo/RL/issues/1227
https://github.com/NVIDIA-NeMo/RL/pull/1235

We've noticed in nemo-rl that some parallel plans are more numerically stable than other. In particular, when the o_proj/mlp.down_proj are RowwiseParallel you can get different evals depending on TP. @joyang-nv did a lot of heavy lifting to demonstrate this.

I would like to request that this be added as an option if someone wants to make the TP plan selected more numerically stable. I'm not sure it makes sense to always use this one b/c other frameworks like vllm will still use rowwiseparallel, so from the RL perspective of matching the implementation against the training and inference FW, it is more on-policy to leave it like this.

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First steps

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Research direction

Start by reading related issue #1227 and PR #1235, then inspect how tensor-parallel plans use RowwiseParallel for o_proj and mlp.down_proj. Done means providing an optional more numerically stable plan and demonstrating whether evaluations remain consistent across TP configurations.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python, pytorch
Domain
distributed-systems, machine-learning, performance
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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