deepspeedai / deepspeedai/DeepSpeed

[REQUEST] Ability to switch out weights when using deepspeed inference

Open
#2,619 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

enhancement
Dominant language
Python
Stars
43.1k
Forks
5k
Avg merge
4d 15h
Merged PRs (30d)
112

Description

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
If I have multiple fine-tuned versions of the same base model where only a small number of weights are different, I'd like to be able to change out the weights quickly without relaunching deepspeed. Not sure if this is already possible, so marking this issue as a feature request.

Describe the solution you'd like
Have a straightforward and fast way to reload weights to specific modules within a pytorch model, that has already been prepared by deepspeed for multi-gpu single-node inference, across multiple processes.

Describe alternatives you've considered
If not using deepspeed for inference, it is quite simple to reload weights for a small portion of the model.

Additional context
I'm wondering if this is possible for models for which deepspeed inference does not support custom kernels (T5), and models that deepspeed inference does support custom kernels for (GPT)

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reviewing DeepSpeed inference and the PyTorch model preparation path for multi-GPU, single-node, multi-process execution. Determine how weights for specific modules could be reloaded without relaunching, including models with and without DeepSpeed custom kernels. Done means a defined, fast reload mechanism works across processes for both cases.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

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

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.