ImportError: Using the Trainer with PyTorch requires accelerate>=0.20.1
Author: om-pramod
Pull request: no
Labels: name: solved

### System Info

@muellerzr and @pacman100

I'm trying to use the Trainer with PyTorch in my Python project, but I'm encountering an ImportError stating that accelerate>=0.20.1 is required. Despite having installed the accelerate package, I'm still getting this error.

Here's the error message I'm seeing:
ImportError: Using the `Trainer` with `PyTorch` requires `accelerate>=0.20.1`: Please run `pip install transformers[torch]` or `pip install accelerate -U`

 
![MergedImages](https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/assets/86967995/a6e7dff3-1738-4fa3-8750-3490fc75614a)


I have tried both suggested solutions (pip install transformers[torch] and pip install accelerate -U), but the issue persists.

Could anyone please provide guidance on how to resolve this issue?

Thank you!

### Who can help?

_No response_

### Information

- [X] The official example scripts
- [ ] My own modified scripts

### Tasks

- [X] An officially supported task in the `examples` folder (such as GLUE/SQuAD, ...)
- [ ] My own task or dataset (give details below)

### Reproduction

Here's a minimal code snippet that reproduces the issue:

from transformers import TrainingArguments, Trainer

# Define the training arguments
training_args = TrainingArguments(
  output_dir='./results',        
  num_train_epochs=3,            
  per_device_train_batch_size=16, 
  per_device_eval_batch_size=64,  
  warmup_steps=500,              
  weight_decay=0.01,             
  logging_dir='./logs',          
  logging_steps=10,
)

When running this code, I receive the following error:
ImportError: Using the `Trainer` with `PyTorch` requires `accelerate>=0.20.1`: Please run `pip install transformers[torch]` or `pip install accelerate -U`


Despite having installed the accelerate package, I continue to encounter this error. I have attempted to upgrade the accelerate package using pip install --upgrade accelerate, and cleared the pip cache using pip cache purge, but the issue remains unresolved.

The versions of the relevant packages I'm using are as follows:
import transformers
import accelerate

print(transformers.__version__)
print(accelerate.__version__)


Output:
4.12.5
0.21.0

As you can see, I'm using transformers version 4.12.5 and accelerate version 0.21.0, both of which should be compatible with each other 

### Expected behavior

Expected Behavior:

I expect the `Trainer` to work seamlessly with `PyTorch` without any import errors. Specifically, I expect the `accelerate` package to be correctly recognized by the `Trainer`, allowing me to run my code without encountering the `ImportError` stating that `accelerate>=0.20.1` is required.

The `accelerate` package is a key dependency for the `Trainer` to function properly, and despite having installed it, I continue to face this issue. I have tried both suggested solutions (`pip install transformers[torch]` and `pip install accelerate -U`) to no avail.

Therefore, I believe there might be a compatibility issue between the `Trainer` and the `accelerate` package, or perhaps an issue with my current Python environment setup. I would appreciate any guidance on how to troubleshoot and resolve this issue.

Comments:
I see that you are using the accelerated runtime from Google Colaboratory. Have you tried restarting the session after installing the accelerate package? I know, it is obvious, but just to be completely foolproof.

I encountered the same issue. When I executed the command !pip install accelerate -U and then went to Runtime -> Restart Session, the problem was resolved by not running any further pip commands afterwards.

@GinUTE's directions are correct. I believe at some point you should have gotten a red warning message when installing the accelerate version later saying some packages were installed that were already imported in the environment directing you to restart your runtime. If this is not the case please provide us with a fully working colab notebook with the full execution order etc in-tact. I may be able to find some way to guard this warning better. Thanks!

I am getting the same error for TrainingArguments when running locally on an M2 Mac.  My "accelerate" version is 0.25.0 and restarting the kernel does not work.  Google Colab works fine though.

cc @SunMarc for MPS 

Hi @RealCyclotomic, could you please provide a snippet ? Can you show me what the following snippet returns ? 
```python
from transformers.utils.import_utils import _is_package_available
_accelerate_available, _accelerate_version = _is_package_available("accelerate", return_version=True)
print(_accelerate_available)
print(_accelerate_version)
```
This is what is used to get check if one has the right version of accelerate inside transformers. 

It was false.  But I just upgraded "accelerate" from 0.25.0 to 0.26.1 and now it says true, and the error for TrainingArguments() has gone away.  Thank you.

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. If you think this still needs to be addressed please comment on this thread.

Please note that issues that do not follow the [contributing guidelines](https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md) are likely to be ignored.

If the problem persists even after restarting the colab session, then make sure you are running your code on the GPU. [This line](https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/blob/0d04b1e25a79ef18af419881d708fafc665851c7/src/transformers/utils/import_utils.py#L745C40-L745C65) in transformers library needs cuda enabled environment for accelerate to be loaded.

That’s for bitsandbytes, not accelerate, which doesn’t require a GPU :) (the former *does* though)