deepspeedai / deepspeedai/DeepSpeed

How to get average loss across all ranks using custom loss function

Open
#4,472 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

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

Description

Below is a simple training code

for i, (inputs, labels) in enumerate(trainloader):  
        inputs = inputs.to(device)  
        labels = labels.to(device)  
        pred = model(inputs)  
        loss = criterion(pred, labels)  
        optimizer.zero_grad()  
        model.backward(loss)  
        optimizer.step()  

In this code, although the gradient descent of the model can be performed automatically.
But the loss is different in each rank. So how do I get the average loss under all ranks?
Thank you.

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 with the provided training loop, especially criterion, model.backward(loss), and the per-rank loss behavior. Read the project's distributed-training guidance and identify how a custom loss can be aggregated across ranks. Done means the documentation explains how to obtain the average loss and clarifies whether the reported value is per-rank or global.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
distributed-systems, machine-learning
Issue type
Documentation
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
30/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.