deepspeedai / deepspeedai/DeepSpeed

[REQUEST] Add optional "subsequence overlap" to UlyssesSPDataLoaderAdapter

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enhancement
Dominant language
Python
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Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

For sequence parallel pipelines that have conv + downsampling layers prior to attention layers, it would be beneficial to allow for some overlap between subsequences sharded across GPUs, so as to not introduce convolution artifacts from zero-padded tensors.

I would like to see an argument I can provide to a DeepSpeed config file, like sequence_parallel_subsequence_overlap (or something less verbose), which is piped to UlyssesSPDataLoaderAdapter if present and used to adjust the sequence length for each micro-batch.

It could look something along the lines of:

class UlyssesSPDataLoaderAdapter:

    def __init__(
        self,
        dl: DataLoader,
        sp_rank: int,
        sp_group,
        sp_world_size,
        device,
        subsequence_overlap: int = 0    # <-- NEW ARG
    ):
        ...
        def refill(self):
            ...
            # update length of sharded tensor with user-defined subsequence_overlap
            # specified in DS config file
            chunk_len = seq_length // self.sp_world_size + subsequence_overlap

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First steps

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  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Locate UlyssesSPDataLoaderAdapter and the DeepSpeed config path that supplies its arguments. Trace how each micro-batch's sequence length is calculated and determine where the optional overlap should be propagated; done means the configured value adjusts the sharded subsequence length while the default preserves current behavior.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
distributed-systems, machine-learning
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Active
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
55/100

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