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[scale] Implement activation checkpointing for transformers. #3864
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Patch description
Leverage Fairscale to add in activation checkpointing. Activation checkpointing works by throwing away the activations during the forward pass, and recomputing them just-in-time during the backward pass, thereby trading away compute for memory savings.
It is particularly powerful when combined with FSDP. Utilized with
--checkpoint-activations true
Testing steps
New CI test to just ensure that the path doesn't crash. Due to the simplicity of the call, I rely on fairscale's tests for correctness.
Manual testing:
parlai train -m bart -t taskmaster2 -bs 4 -dynb full -tstep 100 --checkpoint-activations true
. Took some very non-scientific measurements but were exactly as expected: