DeepSpeed: [BUG] DeepSpeed Inference with GPT-J using batches with padding gives wrong outputs

Describe the bug Using DeepSpeed Inference (using deepspeed.init_inference) gives weird outputs when using batch size > 1 and padding the inputs.

I’ll first state the problem with more detail and then explain what I tried in order to narrow it down.

The problem: I’m trying to run inference with GPT-J (EleutherAI/gpt-j-6B) on a very large dataset and therefore want to achieve the highest throughput possible for my setup. I’m using a p3.16xlarge instance with 8 V100 GPUs so I can in theory fit a batch size of more than 1, since DeepSpeed helps sharing the tensors across the GPUs. Since the inputs are of different length, I have to use padding. This is how I pad (let’s assume batch_size=4 so len(input_texts) = 4):

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("EleutherAI/gpt-j-6B")
tokenizer.padding_side = "left"
tokenizer.pad_token = tokenizer.eos_token
tokenized_inputs = tokenizer(
            list(input_texts), 
            return_tensors='pt', 
            padding=True,
            max_length=tokenizer.model_max_length - args.max_new_tokens, 
            truncation=True,
        )

Now to the problem, assuming these are sequence lengths of each input (in number of tokens of course): idx0, 1452 idx1, 1588 idx2, 1055 idx3, 650

The outputs I get from the model will be exactly what I expect for idx1 (since it’s the longest and has no padding), very close close to what I expect for idx0, but terrible for idx3. What I “expect” is either when I run the exact same code with DeepSpeed with batch_size=1 or when I run the same code without DeepSpeed on CPU with batch_size=4. On both of these cases (DeepSpeed bsz=1 and CPU bsz=4) the outputs are identical, and they also make sense (it’s an extraction task so I can tell whether it makes sense or not).

I tried figuring out what exactly causes this problem and based on the evidence I’ve gathered I think that the sequences that have a long padding on the left side somehow accumulate a huge attention weight that is not correctly masked by the attention mask. My evidence is:

1. If I run with DeepSpeed bsz=4 and with torch.float16, the outputs I get are: !!! (no matter the prompt). But if I run it with torch.float32 I get “normal” outputs, but as I said, they differ from what I expect (defined above). So this makes me think some tensor overflows with f16 but not with f32. Also I should mention that running with DeepSpeed with fp16 and bsz=1 works perfectly.
2. The longest input in the batch (which has no padding at all) gives the expected result. Those that are close to it in length have only a slightly weird output (small amount of padding tokens). Those that are much shorter (many padding tokens) have highly unrelated output.
3. They way the GPT-J attention mechanism works (at least the HuggingFace implementation) is that you add -10,000 to the attention weight where the attention mask is 0. This might not be enough if the many padding tokens accumulate a large attention weight. Although when I run it on CPU with the HuggingFace implementation everything is ok so it might not be the reason.
4. I’m pretty sure that the culprit is this function: https://github.com/microsoft/DeepSpeed/blob/a10e4811fe78b707289132c9695bade4715fe59b/csrc/transformer/inference/csrc/softmax.cu#L203 But unfortunately I don’t speak CUDA so it’s very hard for me to follow and point exactly what the problem is. For all I know the HuggingFace implementation of attention works (https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/blob/2c2a31ffbcfe03339b1721348781aac4fc05bc5e/src/transformers/models/gptj/modeling_gptj.py#L72).

To Reproduce

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("EleutherAI/gpt-j-6B")
tokenizer.padding_side = "left"
tokenizer.pad_token = tokenizer.eos_token
tokenizer.model_max_length = 2048

local_rank = int(os.getenv('LOCAL_RANK', '0'))
world_size = int(os.getenv('WORLD_SIZE', '1'))
device = torch.device(f'cuda:{local_rank}')

model = GPTJForCausalLM.from_pretrained("EleutherAI/gpt-j-6B")
model.config.pad_token_id = model.config.eos_token_id

model = deepspeed.init_inference(
    model,
    mp_size=world_size,
    dtype=torch.float32,
    replace_method='auto',
    replace_with_kernel_inject=True,
)
model.device = device

tokenized_inputs = tokenizer(
    list(input_texts), 
    return_tensors='pt', 
    padding=True,
    max_length=tokenizer.model_max_length - args.max_new_tokens, 
    truncation=True,
).to(device)

with torch.inference_mode():
    batch_output_tokens = model.generate(
        input_ids=tokenized_inputs['input_ids'],
        attention_mask=tokenized_inputs['attention_mask'],
        do_sample=False,
        max_new_tokens=args.max_new_tokens,
        min_length=tokenized_inputs.input_ids.shape[1]+args.max_new_tokens,
        repetition_penalty=1.1,
        pad_token_id=tokenizer.eos_token_id,
    )

batch_output_text = tokenizer.batch_decode(batch_output_tokens, skip_special_tokens=True)

Expected behavior Running DeepSpeed with batch_size=1 or batch_size=4 (or larger) should give the same outputs. Running DeepSpeed with fp16 and batch size > 1 should work and not give: “!!!”.

ds_report output

--------------------------------------------------
DeepSpeed C++/CUDA extension op report
--------------------------------------------------
NOTE: Ops not installed will be just-in-time (JIT) compiled at
      runtime if needed. Op compatibility means that your system
      meet the required dependencies to JIT install the op.
--------------------------------------------------
JIT compiled ops requires ninja
ninja .................. [OKAY]
--------------------------------------------------
op name ................ installed .. compatible
--------------------------------------------------
cpu_adam ............... [NO] ....... [OKAY]
cpu_adagrad ............ [NO] ....... [OKAY]
fused_adam ............. [NO] ....... [OKAY]
fused_lamb ............. [NO] ....... [OKAY]
sparse_attn ............ [NO] ....... [OKAY]
transformer ............ [NO] ....... [OKAY]
stochastic_transformer . [NO] ....... [OKAY]
async_io ............... [NO] ....... [OKAY]
utils .................. [NO] ....... [OKAY]
quantizer .............. [NO] ....... [OKAY]
transformer_inference .. [YES] ...... [OKAY]
--------------------------------------------------
DeepSpeed general environment info:
torch install path ............... ['/opt/conda/lib/python3.6/site-packages/torch']
torch version .................... 1.10.2+cu111
torch cuda version ............... 11.1
nvcc version ..................... 11.1
deepspeed install path ........... ['/opt/conda/lib/python3.6/site-packages/deepspeed']
deepspeed info ................... 0.6.0+2151c78, 2151c78, master
deepspeed wheel compiled w. ...... torch 1.10, cuda 11.1

System info (please complete the following information): SageMaker instance p3.16xlarge with SageMaker container 763104351884.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/pytorch-training:1.8.1-gpu-py36-cu111-ubuntu18.04

Launcher context Launching with deepspeed --num_gpus 8 run_inference.py

Docker context See above.