adding docs for FSDP

This commit is contained in:
Maxime Ellerbach
2026-06-15 14:15:09 +00:00
parent 0483afc743
commit 44fd3c0a0e
+46
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@@ -113,6 +113,52 @@ accelerate launch --num_processes=2 $(which lerobot-train) \
--policy=act
```
## Training Large Models with FSDP
DDP replicates the full model on every GPU, so a model that doesn't fit on one GPU won't fit under
DDP either. For large models, use **FSDP** (Fully Sharded Data Parallel), which shards parameters,
gradients, and optimizer state across GPUs. See the [accelerate FSDP guide](https://huggingface.co/docs/accelerate/usage_guides/fsdp) for background.
An example on how to launch LeRobot training with FSDP across 4 GPUs (1 machine):
```bash
accelerate launch --config_file fsdp.yaml --num_processes=4 $(which lerobot-train) \
--dataset.repo_id=${HF_USER}/my_dataset \
--policy.type=<your_policy> \
--output_dir=outputs/train/my_policy_fsdp
```
A minimal `fsdp.yaml` (FSDP1; shards params/grads/optimizer — ZeRO-3-equivalent):
```yaml
compute_environment: LOCAL_MACHINE
distributed_type: FSDP
mixed_precision: bf16
num_machines: 1
num_processes: 4
fsdp_config:
fsdp_version: 1
fsdp_sharding_strategy: FULL_SHARD # params + grads + optimizer (ZeRO-3)
fsdp_auto_wrap_policy: TRANSFORMER_BASED_WRAP
fsdp_transformer_layer_cls_to_wrap: <YourTransformerBlock> # repeated block class to shard
fsdp_use_orig_params: true # required: optimizer is built pre-prepare
fsdp_state_dict_type: FULL_STATE_DICT
```
Set `fsdp_transformer_layer_cls_to_wrap` to your model's repeated transformer-block class so each
block is sharded as its own unit. `fsdp_use_orig_params: true` is required because LeRobot builds the
optimizer before `accelerator.prepare()`.
### FSDP checkpoints
LeRobot gathers the full state dict across all ranks and the main process writes it as a single
`model.safetensors`, loadable as usual with `Policy.from_pretrained(...)`. Two thigs to look out for:
- With mixed precision, (`bf16`/`fp16`) FSDP keeps an fp32 master copy, so the checkpoint is fp32
(~2× the bf16 size on disk) and is cast back to the policy dtype on load.
- **Optimizer state is not saved under FSDP**, so **resume-from-checkpoint is not supported**.
Saved weights are fully usable for evaluation and fine-tuning.
## Notes
- The `--policy.use_amp` flag in `lerobot-train` is only used when **not** running with accelerate. When using accelerate, mixed precision is controlled by accelerate's configuration.