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support online mtp sft - #4548

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liuzhenhai93:support_online_mtp_sft_dev
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support online mtp sft#4548
liuzhenhai93 wants to merge 2 commits into
NVIDIA:devfrom
liuzhenhai93:support_online_mtp_sft_dev

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@liuzhenhai93

@liuzhenhai93 liuzhenhai93 commented Apr 30, 2026

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What does this PR do ?

support mtp sft during rl train
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@liuzhenhai93
liuzhenhai93 requested review from a team as code owners April 30, 2026 03:48
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@Victarry

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/ok to test e43c4d5

@Victarry
Victarry self-requested a review April 30, 2026 10:10
@ericharper

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Why do we need to do this in GPTModel? Can it happen in the RL loop?

@liuzhenhai93

liuzhenhai93 commented May 15, 2026

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Why do we need to do this in GPTModel? Can it happen in the RL loop?

The gradient flow of mtp should be decoupled from the main model during rl training, which cannot be trivially achieved without intrusive modifications to Megatron core

@liuzhenhai93
liuzhenhai93 force-pushed the support_online_mtp_sft_dev branch from e43c4d5 to 32bae69 Compare May 15, 2026 08:11
@Victarry

Victarry commented Jun 1, 2026

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Thanks for the original proposal here. I refactored this into a new PR: #5080

The new version keeps the same online RL + MTP goal, but changes the API shape a bit:

  • return_logits=True lets RL callers pass sampled labels for the MTP auxiliary CE loss while still receiving main LM logits for the external RL loss.
  • mtp_isolated_loss=True isolates the MTP auxiliary objective from the main decoder hidden states, shared embeddings, and output layer weights.
  • The default pretraining/SFT behavior remains unchanged.

I also added @liuzhenhai93 as a co-author on the new PR commit, since it is based on the original idea and implementation from this PR.

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4 participants