fp16 flag silently fails

[rumeshmadhusanka]

Environment info

• transformers version: 4.15.0.dev0
• Platform: Linux-5.10.68+-x86_64-with-debian-bullseye-sid
• Python version: 3.7.12
• PyTorch version (GPU?): 1.9.1 (True)
• Tensorflow version (GPU?): 2.6.2 (True)
• Flax version (CPU?/GPU?/TPU?): 0.3.6 (gpu)
• Jax version: 0.2.25
• JaxLib version: 0.1.70
• Using GPU in script?: Y
• Using distributed or parallel set-up in script?: N

Models:

1. mT5-small
2. mT5-base

both have the same behavior

Library:

• Trainer: @sgugger

Information

The problem arises when using:

• my own modified scripts: https://github.com/rumeshmadhusanka/mt5-simplification/blob/main/finetune.py derived from and very much identical to the official translation example

The tasks I am working on is:

• text simplification
• translation

To reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Run a translation/simplification task task turning fp16 flag on My params(for simplification): model="google/mt5-base" !python mt5-simplification/finetune.py \ --model_name_or_path $model \ --do_train \ --fp16 \ --do_eval \ --adafactor \ --source_lang com \ --target_lang sim \ --source_prefix "com-sim: " \ --train_file train.json \ --validation_file valid.json \ --output_dir mt5-simplification \ --per_device_train_batch_size=4 \ --per_device_eval_batch_size=4 \ --save_total_limit=1 \ --adam_epsilon=1e-6 \ --learning_rate=3e-5 \ --save_strategy=epoch \ --report_to="wandb" \ --max_steps=1200 \ --warmup_steps=250 \ --overwrite_output_dir \ --log_level debug \ --output_dir saved \ --predict_with_generate

Some of the output logs:

0%| | 0/1200 [00:00<?, ?it/s]/kaggle/working/transformers/src/transformers/trainer.py:1366: FutureWarning: Non-finite norm encountered in torch.nn.utils.clip_gradnorm; continuing anyway. Note that the default behavior will change in a future release to error out if a non-finite total norm is encountered. At that point, setting error_if_nonfinite=false will be required to retain the old behavior. args.max_grad_norm, 14%|█████▌ | 166/1200 [00:39<03:58, 4.33it/s]/opt/conda/lib/python3.7/site-packages/torch/optim/lr_scheduler.py:134: UserWarning: Detected call of lr_scheduler.step() before optimizer.step(). In PyTorch 1.1.0 and later, you should call them in the opposite order: optimizer.step() before lr_scheduler.step(). Failure to do this will result in PyTorch skipping the first value of the learning rate schedule. See more details at https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/optim.html#how-to-adjust-learning-rate "https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/optim.html#how-to-adjust-learning-rate", UserWarning) {'loss': 0.0, 'learning_rate': 2.7347368421052632e-05, 'epoch': 0.02}
83%|████████████████████████████████▌ | 1000/1200 [04:10<10:45, 3.23s/it]{'loss': 0.0, 'learning_rate': 1.1557894736842106e-05, 'epoch': 0.03} 100%|███████████████████████████████████████| 1200/1200 [04:56<00:00, 4.39it/s][INFO|trainer.py:2033] 2021-12-18 02:11:18,316 >> Saving model checkpoint to saved/checkpoint-1200

train metrics epoch = 0.04 train_loss = 0.0 train_runtime = 0:05:11.02 train_samples = 120000 train_samples_per_second = 15.433 train_steps_per_second = 3.858 [INFO|trainer.py:2281] 2021-12-18 02:11:46,330 >> Running Evaluation [INFO|trainer.py:2283] 2021-12-18 02:11:46,330 >> Num examples = 2000 [INFO|trainer.py:2286] 2021-12-18 02:11:46,330 >> Batch size = 4 100%|█████████████████████████████████████████| 500/500 [01:56<00:00, 4.31it/s] eval metrics epoch = 0.04 eval_bleu = 0.0126 eval_gen_len = 8.16 eval_loss = nan eval_runtime = 0:01:56.24 eval_samples = 2000 eval_samples_per_second = 17.205 eval_steps_per_second = 4.301

When I run a translation task on Kaggle's GPU(Tesla P100-PCIE) or AWS's T4 GPU the training loss is always zero. This has been tried out multiple times with different training params.

Expected behavior

Loss not to be zero while training
Throw an error message if the GPU doesn't support fp16

[stas00]

It's not an issue of GPU not supporting fp16. It's an issue of many models trained in bf16 and attempted to be used with fp16 and overflowing due to the incompatible numerical range. bf16-pretrained models use much bigger weight values than fp16 can accommodate so it overflows.

Please see: https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/pull/10956 for various workarounds.

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