StreamBP: Memory-Efficient Exact Backpropagation for Long Sequence
  Training of LLMs
Authors: name: Qijun Luo; name: Mengqi Li; name: Lei Zhao; name: Xiao Li
Published: 2025-06-03 16:54:15

Abstract: Training language models on long sequence data is a demanding requirement for
enhancing the model's capability on complex tasks, e.g., long-chain reasoning.
However, as the sequence length scales up, the memory cost for storing
activation values becomes huge during the Backpropagation (BP) process, even
with the application of gradient checkpointing technique. To tackle this
challenge, we propose a memory-efficient and exact BP method called StreamBP,
which performs a linear decomposition of the chain rule along the sequence
dimension in a layer-wise manner, significantly reducing the memory cost of
activation values and logits. The proposed method is applicable to common
objectives such as SFT, GRPO, and DPO. From an implementation perspective,
StreamBP achieves less computational FLOPs and faster BP speed by leveraging
the causal structure of the language model. Compared to gradient checkpointing,
StreamBP scales up the maximum sequence length of BP by 2.8-5.5 times larger,
while using comparable or even less BP time. Note that StreamBP's sequence
length scaling ability can be directly transferred to batch size scaling for
accelerating training. We further develop a communication-efficient distributed
StreamBP to effectively support multi-GPU training and broaden its
applicability. Our code can be easily integrated into the training pipeline of
any transformer models and is available at https://github.com/Ledzy/StreamBP.