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 deterministic inference


Deterministic Inference across Tensor Parallel Sizes That Eliminates Training-Inference Mismatch

Zhang, Ziyang, Ding, Xinheng, Yuan, Jiayi, Liu, Rixin, Mao, Huizi, Xing, Jiarong, Liu, Zirui

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Deterministic inference is increasingly critical for large language model (LLM) applications such as LLM-as-a-judge evaluation, multi-agent systems, and Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, existing LLM serving frameworks exhibit non-deterministic behavior: identical inputs can yield different outputs when system configurations (e.g., tensor parallel (TP) size, batch size) vary, even under greedy decoding. This arises from the non-associativity of floating-point arithmetic and inconsistent reduction orders across GPUs. While prior work has addressed batch-size-related nondeterminism through batch-invariant kernels, determinism across different TP sizes remains an open problem, particularly in RL settings, where the training engine typically uses Fully Sharded Data Parallel (i.e., TP = 1) while the rollout engine relies on multi-GPU TP to maximize the inference throughput, creating a natural mismatch between the two. This precision mismatch problem may lead to suboptimal performance or even collapse for RL training. We identify and analyze the root causes of TP-induced inconsistency and propose Tree-Based Invariant Kernels (TBIK), a set of TP-invariant matrix multiplication and reduction primitives that guarantee bit-wise identical results regardless of TP size. Our key insight is to align intra- and inter-GPU reduction orders through a unified hierarchical binary tree structure. We implement these kernels in Triton and integrate them into vLLM and FSDP. Experiments confirm zero probability divergence and bit-wise reproducibility for deterministic inference across different TP sizes. Also, we achieve bit-wise identical results between vLLM and FSDP in RL training pipelines with different parallel strategy. Code is available at https://github.com/nanomaoli/llm_reproducibility.



Swapout: Learning an ensemble of deep architectures

Neural Information Processing Systems

We describe Swapout, a new stochastic training method, that outperforms ResNets of identical network structure yielding impressive results on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100.


Swapout: Learning an ensemble of deep architectures

Singh, Saurabh, Hoiem, Derek, Forsyth, David

Neural Information Processing Systems

We describe Swapout, a new stochastic training method, that outperforms ResNets of identical network structure yielding impressive results on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100. Swapout samples from a rich set of architectures including dropout, stochastic depth and residual architectures as special cases. When viewed as a regularization method swapout not only inhibits co-adaptation of units in a layer, similar to dropout, but also across network layers. We conjecture that swapout achieves strong regularization by implicitly tying the parameters across layers. When viewed as an ensemble training method, it samples a much richer set of architectures than existing methods such as dropout or stochastic depth. We propose a parameterization that reveals connections to exiting architectures and suggests a much richer set of architectures to be explored. We show that our formulation suggests an efficient training method and validate our conclusions on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 matching state of the art accuracy. Remarkably, our 32 layer wider model performs similar to a 1001 layer ResNet model.