InfiniPipe: Elastic Pipeline Parallelism for Efficient Variable-Length Long-Context LLM Training

Abstract

Long context training is crucial for LLM's context extension. Existing schemes, such as sequence parallelism, incur substantial communication overhead. Pipeline parallelism (PP) reduces this cost, but its effectiveness hinges on partitioning granularity. Batch-level PP employing sequence packing exhibits high memory consumption in long-context scenarios, whereas token-level PP splitting sequences into slices alleviates memory overhead but may incur hardware under-utilization. Moreover, the skewed distribution of sequence length in real-world datasets renders monolithic and static granularity PP's sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we propose 1) \textit{Elastic Pipeline Parallelism} (EPP) that orchestrates token-level PP and batch-level PP to adapt to resource and workload heterogeneity, and 2) \textit{Stage-Aware Chunk-Level Adaptive Checkpointing} that efficiently integrates gradient checkpointing with EPP. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that InfiniPipe achieves a 1.69x speedup over state-of-the-art systems. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/wsjdsg/InfiniPipe-code.git.