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Bring offline KD upgrades such as Ghost Token and Top-P to Megatron K… - #2459

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@AAnoosheh AAnoosheh commented Sep 17, 2026 •

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What does this PR do?

Type of change: New Feature

  • Top-P feature in Megatron KD loss
  • Ghost-token feature in Megatron KD loss
  • More intuitive and better loss balancing scheme with kd_loss_alpha parameter

Usage

# Add a code snippet demonstrating how to use this

Testing

Newly-expended unit tests

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  • Is this change backward compatible?: ❌
  • If you copied code from any other sources or added a new PIP dependency, did you follow guidance in CONTRIBUTING.md: N/A
  • Did you write any new necessary tests?: ✅
  • Did you update Changelog?: ✅
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Additional Information

Summary by CodeRabbit

  • New Features

    • Added configurable Top-P filtering for Top-K KL distillation, with a minimum retained token count.
    • Added kd_loss_alpha to balance language-model and distillation losses; the default is 0.9.
  • Behavior Changes

    • Top-K KL calculations now use full-vocabulary normalization and account for probability mass outside the selected tokens. Selection occurs after temperature scaling.
    • Intermediate losses are scaled to the logits-loss magnitude when their mean is positive.
    • Deprecated loss-scaling and skip-language-model options are ignored with warnings. A standalone skip setting maps to an equivalent alpha; an explicit alpha takes precedence. The language-model loss is omitted only when alpha is 1.0.

…D plugin

Signed-off-by: Asha Anoosheh <aanoosheh@nvidia.com>
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  • CHANGELOG.rst
  • examples/megatron_bridge/distill.py
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  • tests/gpu_megatron/torch/distill/plugins/test_distill_megatron.py

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📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

Megatron distillation configuration and CLI options now use kd_loss_alpha for LM/KD weighting and include Top-P controls. Top-K KL uses full-vocabulary normalization and represents omitted probability mass with a residual bucket. Tests cover KL behavior, loss weighting, and configuration handling.

Changes

Megatron distillation

Layer / File(s) Summary
Configuration and CLI semantics
CHANGELOG.rst, examples/megatron_bridge/distill.py, modelopt/torch/distill/plugins/megatron.py, tests/gpu_megatron/torch/distill/plugins/test_distill_megatron.py
Configuration and CLI options use kd_loss_alpha and add Top-P controls. Deprecated loss settings issue FutureWarnings. skip_lm_loss translates to alpha only when alpha is not supplied.
Top-K/Top-P KL computation
CHANGELOG.rst, modelopt/torch/distill/plugins/megatron.py, tests/gpu_megatron/torch/distill/plugins/test_distill_megatron.py
Top-K KL uses temperature-scaled logits and full-vocabulary normalization. It supports Top-P filtering and represents omitted probability mass with a residual ghost token. Tests cover normalization, temperature scaling, filtering, gradients, and tensor-parallel behavior.
Alpha-based loss balancing
CHANGELOG.rst, modelopt/torch/distill/plugins/megatron.py, tests/gpu_megatron/torch/distill/plugins/test_distill_megatron.py
The loss balancer combines LM and KD losses using kd_loss_alpha. It scales positive mean intermediate loss. Tests cover weighting, LM-loss exclusion, intermediate losses, and deprecated configuration handling.

Priority: ➖ Normal

Estimated code review effort: 4 (Complex) | ~40 minutes

Change: Feature

Sequence Diagram(s)

sequenceDiagram
  participant DistillationConfig
  participant TopKLogitsKLLoss
  participant TensorParallelShards
  participant LogitsAndIntermediatesLossBalancer
  DistillationConfig->>TopKLogitsKLLoss: provide Top-K and Top-P settings
  TopKLogitsKLLoss->>TensorParallelShards: compute full-vocabulary log normalization
  TensorParallelShards-->>TopKLogitsKLLoss: return normalization values
  TopKLogitsKLLoss-->>LogitsAndIntermediatesLossBalancer: provide KD loss
  LogitsAndIntermediatesLossBalancer->>LogitsAndIntermediatesLossBalancer: combine LM and KD losses using kd_loss_alpha
Loading

Merge Risk: 🔵 Low · up to 57fc7

This change updates Megatron distillation loss behavior with Top-P support, a ghost token, and alpha-based loss weighting. The only open concern is changelog wording, which is likely already fixed. Merge risk is low.

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Docstring Coverage ✅ Passed Docstring coverage is 81.48% which is sufficient. The required threshold is 80.00%. Docstring coverage is scoped to functions touched by this diff. Analyzed 27 functions across 3 files. (1 skipped: 1 …
Linked Issues check ✅ Passed Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check ✅ Passed Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Security Anti-Patterns ✅ Passed No configured security anti-pattern was introduced. The authoritative PR changes only examples/megatron_bridge/distill.py and modelopt/torch/distill/plugins/megatron.py; added-line scanning found …
Description Check ✅ Passed Check skipped - CodeRabbit’s high-level summary is enabled.
Title check ✅ Passed The title clearly identifies the main Megatron KD changes: Ghost Token and Top-P support. It is concise and related to the pull request objectives.
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/claude review

Signed-off-by: Asha Anoosheh <aanoosheh@nvidia.com>
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Claude review — 3 IMPORTANT, 2 SUGGESTION, 0 CRITICAL

Scope: full review (the trigger comment carried no scoping instructions). 4 files changed; reviewed all of modelopt/torch/distill/plugins/megatron.py, examples/megatron_bridge/distill.py, CHANGELOG.rst, and the test diff.

Algorithm verdict: the math checks out. I traced the loss end-to-end and did not find a correctness bug:

  • _tp_logsumexp correctly implements lse(x/T) = max/T + log(sum(exp((x - max)/T))); deferring the temperature division to the centered values is valid because the max is invariant under the monotonic scaling, and logits_max is detached (matching the old code’s student_logits_max.detach()).
  • The Top-K path is self-consistent: final_*_logits are already divided by T before _tp_logsumexp (which also folds in 1/T), so the subtraction yields true temperature-T full-vocab log-probs.
  • The Top-P mask is a genuine prefix — cumsum(probs) - probs is monotone non-decreasing, so < top_p selects a prefix, and |= arange < min_keep keeps it one. Excluding the entry’s own mass correctly guarantees the crossing entry (and thus top-1) survives.
  • Ghost token: kept + residual sums to 1 for both distributions, so the K+1 bucketed KL is a proper KL. Collective ordering under TP is identical across ranks, and pre_forward detaches targets so the teacher-side dist_nn.functional.all_reduce carries no gradient.
  • The convex-combination balancer also removes the old if kd_loss > 0 and original_loss > 0 Python-side tensor comparison, which was a per-step host sync — a real improvement.

The new tests are unusually good for this area: independent hand-written references for the ghost-token bucketing, temperature scaling, and Top-P masking, plus a cross-rank equality check on the Top-K loss.

The three blocking items

  1. [IMPORTANT Performance] _tp_logsumexp’s chunked loop delivers no memory saving and costs a full-vocab fp32 activation. Because predictions requires grad, autograd retains every chunk’s exp output — the docstring’s own NOTE concedes this. Net effect: LogitsKLLoss at TP=1 trades one fused F.log_softmax for a full-vocab fp32 cast plus vocab-sized retained exp chunks, and TopKLogitsKLLoss — whose whole purpose per the --logit_kl_topk help text is "replacing the full-vocab temporaries with [seq, k] ones" — now reintroduces a retained full-vocab fp32 activation. torch.logsumexp saves only its input and its [..., 1] output and recomputes in backward, so it is strictly better on both axes; real chunked savings would need an autograd.Function that recomputes exp in backward. num_chunks is also an unreachable knob — no caller passes it.

  2. [IMPORTANT Compatibility] Both new deprecations are invisible in practice. Python’s default filter ignores DeprecationWarning unless it is raised from __main__, and DistillationConfig is constructed from library/example code. So a user whose script says DistillationConfig(skip_lm_loss=True, kd_loss_scale=2.0) silently switches from "skip the LM loss" to 0.1 * lm + 0.9 * kd with no output whatsoever. pytest enables the warning, which is why the new tests pass — the user never sees it. Use FutureWarning (the precedent this repo’s CHANGELOG.rst sets for the recipe-alias and single-format-CLI-flag deprecations), and prefer translating an explicit skip_lm_loss=True to kd_loss_alpha=1.0 over overriding a value the user deliberately set.

  3. [IMPORTANT Compatibility] --no_skip_lm_loss and --kd_loss_scale in examples/megatron_bridge/distill.py are now dead arguments with zero warning path: they are still parsed but have no remaining reads, and since they are no longer forwarded to ModelOptDistillConfig, even the config-level DeprecationWarning cannot fire. distill.py --kd_loss_scale 5.0 --no_skip_lm_loss runs to completion, prints nothing, and optimizes a different objective. Gate a FutureWarning on args.kd_loss_scale is not None / args.no_skip_lm_loss, matching the convention already documented for the other deprecated flags in this tree.

Suggestions (non-blocking)

  1. [SUGGESTION] The ghost residual log((1 - kept_mass).clamp(min=1e-8)) is a cancellation in probability space. At logit_kl_topk=1024 on a real vocabulary the top-K holds >0.9999 of the mass, so 1 - kept_mass is dominated by the sum’s rounding error; once it underflows, clamp pins the value and zeroes its gradient, so the term stops teaching anything exactly when the student is close to the teacher. log(-expm1(logsumexp(kept))) stays accurate and differentiable. Worth noting the new tests build their reference with a different formula (torch.log1p(-mass)) and atol=1e-5 papers over the gap — tighten them to whichever formula ships.

  2. [SUGGESTION] The example CLI exposes --logit_kl_top_p and --logit_kl_top_p_min_k but not logit_kl_ghost_token, even though the ghost token is the change that alters logit_kl_topk semantics by default and CHANGELOG.rst directs users to logit_kl_ghost_token: false to opt out.

Risk assessment: moderate. The algorithm work is sound and well tested, and the breaking changes are honestly documented in CHANGELOG.rst. The risk is concentrated in delivery rather than math: this PR’s checklist marks it backward compatible, but it silently changes the training objective for every existing DistillationConfig and distill.py user, with warnings that Python suppresses (item 2) or that never reach the config at all (item 3). Items 2 and 3 are small, contained fixes that convert a silent behavior change into a loud one. Item 1 is a memory regression on the largest tensor in the model, inside the very class that exists to shrink it.

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🟠 Major · Use the logits-loss magnitude when scaling intermediate losses. · megatron.py:583-584

modelopt/torch/distill/plugins/megatron.py:583-584
🎯 Functional Correctness | 🟠 Major | ⚡ Quick win

Use the logits-loss magnitude when scaling intermediate losses.

When add_ghost_token=False, the masked partial KL can be negative. If intermediate_loss > 0, line 583 then creates a negative dynamic_scale. This reverses the gradient contributed by the intermediate loss and can push intermediate representations away from their targets.

The balancer contract scales intermediate losses to the logits-loss magnitude. Taking the absolute value preserves the sparse KL definition.

Proposed fix
-            dynamic_scale = logits_loss.detach() / intermediate_loss.detach()
+            dynamic_scale = logits_loss.detach().abs() / intermediate_loss.detach()
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In `@modelopt/torch/distill/plugins/megatron.py` around lines 583 - 584, Update
the dynamic_scale calculation near intermediate_loss_scaled to use the absolute
magnitude of detached logits_loss in the numerator, while leaving the
intermediate_loss denominator and scaling flow unchanged.

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Outside diff comments:
In `@modelopt/torch/distill/plugins/megatron.py`:
- Around line 583-584: Update the dynamic_scale calculation near
intermediate_loss_scaled to use the absolute magnitude of detached logits_loss
in the numerator, while leaving the intermediate_loss denominator and scaling
flow unchanged.

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❌ Patch coverage is 91.66667% with 7 lines in your changes missing coverage. Please review.
✅ Project coverage is 78.40%. Comparing base (6a10687) to head (83c1a1d).
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Files with missing lines Patch % Lines
modelopt/torch/distill/plugins/megatron.py 91.66% 7 Missing ⚠️
Additional details and impacted files
@@            Coverage Diff             @@
##             main    #2459      +/-   ##
==========================================
+ Coverage   69.18%   78.40%   +9.22%     
==========================================
  Files         620      620              
  Lines       69615    69654      +39     
==========================================
+ Hits        48160    54615    +6455     
+ Misses      21455    15039    -6416     
Flag Coverage Δ
examples-diffusers 21.07% <1.19%> (-0.02%) ⬇️
examples-gpt-oss 13.45% <1.19%> (-0.01%) ⬇️
examples-hf_ptq 22.87% <1.19%> (-0.05%) ⬇️
examples-llm_distill 13.51% <1.19%> (-0.01%) ⬇️
examples-llm_eval 17.41% <1.19%> (-0.01%) ⬇️
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examples-llm_sparsity 15.85% <1.19%> (-0.01%) ⬇️
examples-megatron_bridge 26.78% <77.38%> (-0.11%) ⬇️
examples-specdec_bench 13.22% <1.19%> (-0.01%) ⬇️
examples-speculative_decoding 17.75% <1.19%> (-0.08%) ⬇️
examples-torch_onnx 21.62% <1.19%> (-0.02%) ⬇️
examples-torch_trt 15.24% <1.19%> (-0.01%) ⬇️
examples-vllm_serve 13.69% <1.19%> (-0.01%) ⬇️
gpu 58.36% <91.66%> (+36.72%) ⬆️
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Signed-off-by: Asha Anoosheh <aanoosheh@nvidia.com>
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Inline comments:
In `@modelopt/torch/distill/plugins/megatron.py`:
- Around line 104-112: Update the skip_lm_loss handling in the
DistillationConfig initialization path so skip_lm_loss=True preserves the
previous derived kd_loss_alpha behavior instead of forcing kd_loss_alpha to 1.0;
retain the FutureWarning during migration, and leave kd_loss_scale and CLI
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Claude review (2nd pass, commit 3f751f3) — 0 CRITICAL, 1 IMPORTANT, 3 SUGGESTION

Scope: full review — the trigger comment carried no scoping instructions. 4 files changed; reviewed all of modelopt/torch/distill/plugins/megatron.py, examples/megatron_bridge/distill.py, CHANGELOG.rst, and the test diff.

Prior round: 3 of 4 resolved

Prior finding Status
Chunked _tp_logsumexp gave no memory saving Fixed — chunking and the unreachable num_chunks knob are gone; TP=1 now uses torch.logsumexp. I re-derived the TP>1 branch: exp retains a vocab-sized fp32 tensor, but ATen's logsumexp materializes (x - max).exp() transiently too, so the two forms have the same peak and the same retention. No win available there — dropping this one.
DeprecationWarning invisible outside __main__ Fixed — all four sites now use FutureWarning, matching the recipe-alias precedent.
--no_skip_lm_loss / --kd_loss_scale dead with no warning path Fixed — both now warn at distill.py:465-474, gated on is not None / truthiness so defaults stay quiet.
Ghost residual cancellation in probability space Fixed — now log(-expm1(log_kept)) with a clamp(max=-1e-7) guard, and the top_k == vocab case cancels exactly (the new test asserts atol=1e-6 against dense KL).

Algorithm verdict: still clean

Re-traced the parts that changed. .abs() on dynamic_scale only rescales the intermediate loss, so a negative no-ghost partial KL cannot flip that gradient's sign; the value cancellation the new test asserts (-0.5 + abs(-0.5) == 0) is cosmetic, not a gradient effect. The Top-P prefix mask, ghost-token bucketing, temperature folding, and cross-rank collective ordering all check out as in the last pass. The new tests are strong — independent hand-written references per feature rather than golden values.

The one blocking item

[IMPORTANT Compatibility] kd_loss_alpha: float = 0.9 has a real default, so __post_init__ cannot tell "user set 0.9" from "user left it alone" — and skip_lm_loss=True therefore overrides an explicitly-passed alpha. Benign when a human passes both; not benign for the only call site in this repo, which constructs Megatron-Bridge's ModelOptDistillConfig, not this class. skip_lm_loss was an ordinary bool = True field until this PR, so a downstream subclass re-declaring that old default was previously harmless and is now load-bearing: it would make --kd_loss_alpha 0.5 a silent no-op, skip the LM loss entirely, and warn about a field the user never set. The tests construct DistillationConfig directly, so they can't see it. Worth confirming what the installed ModelOptDistillConfig declares, and giving kd_loss_alpha the same None sentinel so an explicit alpha is unstompable regardless — full diff in the inline comment.

Suggestions (non-blocking)

  • --logit_kl_topk's help text still promises it replaces "the full-vocab temporaries with [seq, k] ones", which the full-vocab normalizer makes false. Same claim in the class docstring NOTE:.
  • logits.amax(...) is mutated in place by a non-autograd all_reduce while carrying grad history; detaching one line earlier is free and removes the hazard.
  • if intermediate_loss > 0: is the same per-step host sync this PR just removed one line below.
  • Still open from last round: logit_kl_ghost_token has no distill.py flag, and the example builds its config in code rather than from a yaml — so the CHANGELOG's logit_kl_ghost_token: false opt-out isn't reachable for distill.py users. Cheap to add alongside --logit_kl_top_p.

Risk: moderate

The math is sound and now well covered by tests, and the delivery gaps from the last round are genuinely fixed. What remains is the precedence question above — plus a note that the PR checklist still marks this backward compatible while it changes the default objective from "KD only" to 0.1 * lm + 0.9 * kd for every existing user with no warning at all (intentional and documented under Backward Breaking Changes, but the checkbox and the CHANGELOG disagree). One consolation: the most common legacy call, DistillationConfig(skip_lm_loss=True, ...), translates to alpha=1.0 and is behaviorally identical to before.

Comment thread examples/megatron_bridge/distill.py Outdated
Comment thread CHANGELOG.rst Outdated
Signed-off-by: Asha Anoosheh <aanoosheh@nvidia.com>
Signed-off-by: Asha Anoosheh <aanoosheh@nvidia.com>
AAnoosheh and others added 2 commits September 23, 2026 17:09
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Signed-off-by: Asha Anoosheh <aanoosheh@nvidia.com>
With kd_loss_alpha < 1 the LM loss is now mixed into the total, so the
per-token student loss must be reduced first, as Megatron's loss
function does during training.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Signed-off-by: Asha Anoosheh <aanoosheh@nvidia.com>

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CHANGELOG.rst (1)

36-36: 📐 Maintainability & Code Quality | 🔵 Trivial | ⚡ Quick win

Shorten the alpha and deprecation entries to one or two sentences.

Line 36 has four sentences and Line 73 has three. Both lines include implementation detail. Tell users what changed and what they must do. The PR description can hold the translation mechanics.

📝 Proposed wording
-- ``LogitsAndIntermediatesLossBalancer`` (Megatron distillation plugin) no longer rescales ... ``examples/megatron_bridge/distill.py`` gains ``--kd_loss_alpha``.
+- Megatron distillation now combines losses as ``(1 - kd_loss_alpha) * lm_loss + kd_loss_alpha * kd_loss`` (default ``0.9``) instead of rescaling the KD loss to the LM loss magnitude, so the LM loss is now computed by default. Set ``DistillationConfig.kd_loss_alpha`` (or ``--kd_loss_alpha`` in ``examples/megatron_bridge/distill.py``) to ``1.0`` to keep KD-only training.
-- ``DistillationConfig.kd_loss_scale`` and ``DistillationConfig.skip_lm_loss`` (Megatron distillation plugin) are deprecated. ... likewise deprecated and ignored.
+- ``DistillationConfig.kd_loss_scale`` and ``DistillationConfig.skip_lm_loss``, and the ``--kd_loss_scale`` / ``--no_skip_lm_loss`` flags of ``examples/megatron_bridge/distill.py``, are deprecated and emit a ``FutureWarning``. Use ``kd_loss_alpha`` instead.

As per coding guidelines: "Keep each entry to one or two sentences written for external users: what changed and what they need to do. No ... root-cause analysis, or implementation detail".

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In `@CHANGELOG.rst` at line 36, Shorten the Megatron distillation changelog
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Inline comments:
In `@CHANGELOG.rst`:
- Line 35: Update the CHANGELOG description for TopKLogitsKLLoss to say it
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In `@CHANGELOG.rst`:
- Line 36: Shorten the Megatron distillation changelog entries for
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Comment thread CHANGELOG.rst Outdated
@AAnoosheh

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Ran test with Qwen3-1.7B teacher --> Qwen3-0.6B student to compare before/after changes:

Dataset: pinned Nemotron post-training chat revision, 800 train / 64 validation, completion-only masking, 32,768-token left-context truncation.
Numerical checks: baseline distributed Top-K check passed; all 9 PR ghost/Top-P checks passed; independent reference checks passed.
Training: every variant reached step 100 with checkpoints at 50 and 100; skipped and NaN iterations were zero.
Held-out dense KL at step 100: baseline Top-K 0.5631, ghost Top-K 0.5455, Top-P 0.5458 (all started at 0.6225).
Top-P retained 17.88 tokens on average and truncated below Top-128 for 99.31% of evaluated positions.
Post-warmup median step times were 1.52 s, 1.56 s, and 1.57 s for baseline, ghost Top-K, and Top-P respectively.

AAnoosheh and others added 3 commits September 30, 2026 12:10
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Signed-off-by: Asha Anoosheh <aanoosheh@nvidia.com>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Signed-off-by: Asha Anoosheh <aanoosheh@nvidia.com>
Signed-off-by: Asha Anoosheh <aanoosheh@nvidia.com>
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/claude review

Comment thread modelopt/torch/distill/plugins/megatron.py Outdated
Comment on lines 491 to 496
kd_config = ModelOptDistillConfig(
skip_lm_loss=not args.no_skip_lm_loss,
kd_loss_scale=args.kd_loss_scale,
kd_loss_alpha=args.kd_loss_alpha,
logit_kl_topk=args.logit_kl_topk,
logit_kl_top_p=args.logit_kl_top_p,
logit_kl_top_p_min_k=args.logit_kl_top_p_min_k,
)

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[IMPORTANT Compatibility] ModelOptDistillConfig is imported from the external megatron.bridge.training.post_training.distillation (line 49), not from ModelOpt. This PR renames/removes fields on ModelOpt's DistillationConfig and then passes the new names to the bridge's class, so the example is only correct for a megatron-bridge version that tracks those fields.

Two concrete ways this breaks across the repo boundary:

  • If bridge's ModelOptDistillConfig is a standalone dataclass mirroring the fields (rather than a subclass of modelopt...DistillationConfig), then kd_loss_alpha=, logit_kl_top_p= and logit_kl_top_p_min_k= raise TypeError: __init__() got an unexpected keyword argument against every currently released bridge — the example dies at startup.
  • kd_loss_scale kept its name but changed type from float = 1.0 to float | None = None. Any bridge-side or Megatron-LM-side code that reads cfg.kd_loss_scale and arithmetically uses it now gets None. (skip_lm_loss is safe, since __post_init__ still assigns a bool to it.)

Nothing inside ModelOpt reads kd_loss_scale, so this is purely a cross-repo question. Please confirm against the bridge version this repo pins: that ModelOptDistillConfig inherits (or has been updated to mirror) the new fields, and that no bridge code reads kd_loss_scale. If the bridge change has not landed yet, this example needs to wait on it or guard the new kwargs — and the CHANGELOG.rst breaking-change entry should name the minimum megatron-bridge version, since users upgrading ModelOpt alone will hit it.

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Checked against the pinned Megatron-Bridge: ModelOptDistillConfig is declared as class ModelOptDistillConfig(mtd_mcore.DistillationConfig): pass, a field-less subclass. It inherits kd_loss_alpha, logit_kl_top_p, and logit_kl_top_p_min_k automatically, so the example works with any Bridge version that keeps that subclass, and no minimum-version note is needed. Nothing in Bridge's or Megatron-LM's source reads kd_loss_scale or skip_lm_loss. Passing either field now raises a ValueError with migration guidance, so nothing can silently read a None. The only remaining references are Bridge docs and an example YAML, plus two Megatron-LM functional-test configs. Each is fixed by deleting those keys, since the default kd_loss_alpha=1.0 reproduces skip_lm_loss: true. I'll follow up with companion PRs there.

Comment thread modelopt/torch/distill/plugins/megatron.py Outdated
Comment thread modelopt/torch/distill/plugins/megatron.py

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Claude review — Megatron KD Top-P + ghost token + kd_loss_alpha

Scope: full review (the trigger comment carried no scoping instructions). All 4 changed files reviewed: modelopt/torch/distill/plugins/megatron.py (+144/-73), examples/megatron_bridge/distill.py, tests/gpu_megatron/.../test_distill_megatron.py, CHANGELOG.rst.

Findings — CRITICAL: 0 · IMPORTANT: 2 · SUGGESTION: 2

# Severity Where Issue
1 IMPORTANT Performance megatron.py:450-487 Full-vocab fp32 temporaries reintroduced, and the student's is now retained through backward
2 IMPORTANT Compatibility distill.py:491-496 New kwargs passed to the external megatron.bridge ModelOptDistillConfig; kd_loss_scale changed type to None
3 SUGGESTION megatron.py:89-97 skip_lm_loss is both the rejected input and the derived output — breaks dataclasses.replace() / asdict() round-trips
4 SUGGESTION megatron.py:499-513 Ghost-token clamp(max=-1e-7) can make the KL slightly negative and silently zeroes its gradient; undocumented

Most impactful

Finding 1 is the one I would want resolved before merge. This hunk reverts an ordering that a recent change landed deliberately — the deleted comment read "Reduce before the fp32 cast: casting the full vocab first defeats the point" — so targets.float()/T and predictions.float()/T are both materialized over the full local vocab shard again. The worse half is that student_logp now depends on _tp_logsumexp(output_student), so autograd saves the full-vocab fp32 student tensor until backward, where previously the loss graph only touched the gathered [.., K] slices. For seq*batch = 8192 with a 256k vocab at TP=8 that is on the order of a GiB on the last pipeline stage. The full-vocab normalizer is inherent to the ghost-token formulation and cannot be removed, but the teacher's copy can be freed, and the docstring's NOTE: ... mind the value of K for memory and communication is now actively misleading since cost is O(full vocab) regardless of K. The inline comment has a concrete reordering.

Finding 2 is a cross-repo question I could not settle from this checkout (megatron-bridge is not installed here). The example builds the bridge's config class with kd_loss_alpha=/logit_kl_top_p=/logit_kl_top_p_min_k=; if that class mirrors rather than inherits ModelOpt's DistillationConfig, the example raises TypeError on startup against released bridge versions. Separately, kd_loss_scale kept its name but went from float = 1.0 to None, so any bridge-side reader of it now silently gets None rather than a helpful error.

What I verified and found correct

The algorithm core holds up. Specifically traced:

  • Ghost-token partition is exact. The K + 1 buckets partition the full vocab: log(1 - sum(kept)) is log(sum over non-kept), so both the value and its gradient w.r.t. truncated and never-selected logits are right, with no double-counting against the masked kept terms. The expm1 formulation is the correct way to keep this accurate near kept-mass 1.
  • Top-P mask semantics. (cumsum - probs) < top_p is exclusive-prefix nucleus, so the entry that crosses the threshold is retained and top-1 always survives; the min_k floor broadcasts correctly over [s, b, K], and top_p = 1.0 keeps everything. The mask derives from teacher log-probs that are identical on every TP rank, so it is consistent across ranks — which is what keeps tp_reduce=False valid.
  • _tp_logsumexp refactor. Mathematically equivalent to the code it replaces in both the TP=1 and TP>1 paths. Detaching the max before the in-place all_reduce is safe: the amax node is unreachable from the loss, so the version-counter bump is never checked.
  • Balancer host-sync removal is a genuine win. Replacing if intermediate_loss > 0: with torch.where drops a per-step GPU-to-CPU sync from the training loop, and clamp(min=finfo.tiny) keeps the unselected branch finite so no NaN leaks through. dynamic_scale is fully detached, so the inf that branch can hold cannot reach backward.
  • Defaults preserved. kd_loss_alpha=1.0 yields skip_lm_loss=True, hence skip_original_loss=True, hence total = kd_loss — matching the old skip_lm_loss=True default end to end, including the MTP-aware zeroing at megatron.py:669. The example's --kd_loss_alpha default of 1.0 reproduces the old --no_skip_lm_loss default too.
  • Tests. Good coverage for the new code: dense equivalence at K = vocab, a hand-written K+1 reference, temperature scaling at three values, a top-P truncation reference with a min_k floor case and a finite-gradient assertion, cross-TP-rank loss equality, and validation tests for both the new asserts and the removed fields. Both breaking changes and the new feature have CHANGELOG.rst entries under the right sub-sections.

I did not flag the tp_size gradient factor introduced by the dist_nn.functional collective backwards — it applies uniformly to both the all_gather path (pre-existing) and the new all_reduce path, so relative weighting is unchanged and it is out of scope here.

Risk assessment

Moderate. The math is sound and well-tested, and the API break is intentional and documented. Risk is concentrated in the two IMPORTANT items: a memory regression on the most memory-constrained rank, in a loss whose entire purpose is avoiding full-vocab work; and an unverified dependency on an external package's config schema. Neither is a correctness bug — both are the kind of thing that surfaces as an OOM or an import-time TypeError in a user's first run rather than in CI.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

…, dtype-tied ghost floor

- Compute each full-vocab normalizer once and free the teacher's fp32 copy
  before materializing the student's; document the memory/communication cost.
- Stop writing back into the removed skip_lm_loss field so configs survive
  dataclasses.replace()/asdict() round-trips; read kd_loss_alpha == 1.0 instead.
- Tie the ghost-token clamp floor to the dtype's eps and document its effects.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Signed-off-by: Asha Anoosheh <aanoosheh@nvidia.com>
Comment thread modelopt/torch/distill/plugins/megatron.py Outdated
Comment thread examples/megatron_bridge/distill.py

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Left 2 minor comments. Approved

AAnoosheh and others added 3 commits October 5, 2026 14:58
…ogit_kl_top_k

The loss now covers Top-K and optional Top-P truncation, so the class name no
longer implies Top-K only; the old name remains as a deprecated alias. The
Megatron-Bridge example flag matches --logit_kl_top_p.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Signed-off-by: Asha Anoosheh <aanoosheh@nvidia.com>
Main's MTP-freeze check and its parametrized MTP test used skip_lm_loss,
which is now removed; both are expressed through kd_loss_alpha instead.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Signed-off-by: Asha Anoosheh <aanoosheh@nvidia.com>
…s a property

skip_lm_loss and kd_loss_scale are no longer dataclass fields, so configs
round-trip through dataclasses.replace()/asdict() while passing either name
still raises a ValueError with a migration hint. skip_lm_loss is now a
read-only property derived from kd_loss_alpha == 1.0.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Signed-off-by: Asha Anoosheh <aanoosheh@nvidia.com>
@AAnoosheh
AAnoosheh merged commit 1a47237 into main Oct 5, 2026
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@AAnoosheh
AAnoosheh deleted the aanoosheh/topk-kd-topp-ghost branch October 5, 2026 14:57
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