Fix Megatron GRPO vocab-parallel log-prob gradients - #9947
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taking-lying-flat wants to merge 1 commit into
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Fix Megatron GRPO vocab-parallel log-prob gradients#9947taking-lying-flat wants to merge 1 commit into
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August 19, 2026 11:28
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What changed
-100label masking by substituting a safe target before cross entropy and masking the resulting token log-probability.Why
The previous forward path produced the correct target-token log-probability, but its ordinary
torch.distributed.all_reducedid not propagate the remote autograd graph. When the target token belonged to another TP rank, non-owner vocabulary shards received zero or otherwise incorrect logits gradients.This affects the differentiable current-policy forward used directly by Megatron GRPO policy loss when tensor parallelism is greater than one.
Megatron Core's vocab-parallel cross entropy provides the required custom backward: every vocabulary shard keeps its softmax gradient, while only the shard owning the target token subtracts the target contribution.