Fix repeated gradient scaling across pipeline stages#8154
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Signed-off-by: Yuchen Fan <functionhx@gmail.com>
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July 18, 2026 04:43
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Summary
Fix repeated gradient accumulation scaling when pipeline parallelism is combined with gradient accumulation.
Every pipeline stage registers an output backward hook that scales gradients by
gradient_accumulation_steps. The last stage therefore scales the gradient correctly before sending it upstream, but each preceding stage scales the already-scaled gradient again.Fixes #8152
Changes
gradient_accumulation_steps=1.Testing
DS_ACCELERATOR=cpu LOCAL_SIZE=2 OMP_NUM_THREADS=1 pytest -q tests/unit/runtime/pipe/test_pipe.py::TestPipeGradientAccumulationScaling::test_gradients_are_scaled_oncepre-commit run --files deepspeed/runtime/pipe/engine.py tests/unit/runtime/pipe/test_pipe.pygradient_accumulation_steps=1,2,8