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Add bf16 autocast to the training loop (gitea #47)
giant/ had no autocast/GradScaler/torch.compile anywhere despite the
project's ~10x-native-Geant4 eval-budget target. This adds bf16 mixed
precision to the training step (both FlowDDPMStageTrainer and
WGANStageTrainer) via a new train.precision config key ("fp32" default,
"bf16" opt-in) and giant.training.amp.resolve_autocast.

torch.compile is a separate, much larger surface (data-dependent routed
dispatch, the autoregressive sampler's per-token control flow, arbitrary
rollout batch sizes) and is left for a follow-up issue, per discussion.

Scope decisions made during planning:
- fp32 + bf16 only, no fp16/GradScaler. fp16 breaks two things in this
  codebase: routers.py's three 1e-8 epsilons sit below fp16's ~6e-8
  subnormal floor, and gradient_penalty's grad norm overflows fp16's
  range at ordinary early-WGAN-GP gradient magnitudes. Every training
  GPU in the fleet (A100/L40S/H200/RTX 4070) has native bf16; only
  pre-Ampere V100s would need fp16.
- resolve_autocast raises loudly if bf16 is requested on hardware that
  can't do it, rather than silently falling back to fp32.
- Autocast wraps the training step only; val_loss (and the
  best-checkpoint selection it drives) stays fp32 so it's comparable
  across every run recorded so far.
- _route_forward's mixture accumulator (giant/model/trunks.py) was a
  hard-fp32 torch.zeros with no dtype, so under autocast a RoutedTrunk
  silently returned a different output dtype than an unrouted
  ExpertTrunk purely because router.enabled was set. Fixed to match the
  experts' own dtype; the gate weights (forced fp32 for their own
  numerical stability) are cast down before combining, so the
  mixture's numerics stay solid without reintroducing the dtype split.
- Added explicit fp32 guards (autocast(enabled=False)) around spots
  that are correct in fp32 but degrade quietly rather than crash in
  bf16: the router's balance/entropy losses and gate softmax, the
  stage-2 stick-breaking cumprod, and gradient_penalty's
  double-backward + grad norm.

Benchmarked on the local RTX 4070 against configs/baseline.toml's
hyperparams (hidden_dim 512/6 blocks, bs 4096) on a synthetic dataset:
bf16 gave 1.05-1.35x training throughput and 18-33% lower peak GPU
memory across one-shot/routed/autoregressive stage-2 configs, with the
autoregressive path (the dominant cost per baseline.toml) benefiting
most on both axes.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-17 15:36:12 +02:00
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