Checkpointing
When training a PyTorch model with 🤗 Accelerate, you may often want to save and continue a state of training. Doing so requires saving and loading the model, optimizer, RNG generators, and the GradScaler. Inside 🤗 Accelerate are two convenience functions to achieve this quickly:
- Use save_state() for saving everything mentioned above to a folder location
- Use load_state() for loading everything stored from an earlier
save_state
To further customize where and how states are saved through save_state() the ProjectConfiguration class can be used. For example
if automatic_checkpoint_naming is enabled each saved checkpoint will be located then at Accelerator.project_dir/checkpoints/checkpoint_{checkpoint_number}.
It should be noted that the expectation is that those states come from the same training script, they should not be from two separate scripts.
- By using register_for_checkpointing(), you can register custom objects to be automatically stored or loaded from the two prior functions,
so long as the object has a
state_dictand aload_state_dictfunctionality. This could include objects such as a learning rate scheduler.
Below is a brief example using checkpointing to save and reload a state during training:
from accelerate import Accelerator
import torch
accelerator = Accelerator(project_dir="my/save/path")
my_scheduler = torch.optim.lr_scheduler.StepLR(my_optimizer, step_size=1, gamma=0.99)
my_model, my_optimizer, my_training_dataloader = accelerator.prepare(my_model, my_optimizer, my_training_dataloader)
# Register the LR scheduler
accelerator.register_for_checkpointing(my_scheduler)
# Save the starting state
accelerator.save_state()
device = accelerator.device
my_model.to(device)
# Perform training
for epoch in range(num_epochs):
for batch in my_training_dataloader:
my_optimizer.zero_grad()
inputs, targets = batch
inputs = inputs.to(device)
targets = targets.to(device)
outputs = my_model(inputs)
loss = my_loss_function(outputs, targets)
accelerator.backward(loss)
my_optimizer.step()
my_scheduler.step()
# Restore the previous state
accelerator.load_state("my/save/path/checkpointing/checkpoint_0")Restoring the state of the DataLoader
After resuming from a checkpoint, it may also be desirable to resume from a particular point in the active DataLoader if
the state was saved during the middle of an epoch. You can use skip_first_batches() to do so.
from accelerate import Accelerator
accelerator = Accelerator(project_dir="my/save/path")
train_dataloader = accelerator.prepare(train_dataloader)
accelerator.load_state("my_state")
# Assume the checkpoint was saved 100 steps into the epoch
skipped_dataloader = accelerator.skip_first_batches(train_dataloader, 100)
# After the first iteration, go back to `train_dataloader`
# First epoch
for batch in skipped_dataloader:
# Do something
pass
# Second epoch
for batch in train_dataloader:
# Do something
pass