.. _train-validating-checkpoints:

Validating checkpoints asynchronously

During training, you may want to validate the model periodically to monitor training progress. The standard way to do this is to periodically switch between training and validation within the training loop. Instead, Ray Train allows you to asynchronously validate the model in a separate Ray task, which does the following:

Runs validation in parallel without blocking the training loop
Runs validation on different, potentially cheaper hardware than training, since validation doesn't require optimizer states or gradients and can use 2-4x less GPU memory
Leverages :ref:autoscaling <vms-autoscaling> to launch user-specified machines only for the duration of the validation
Lets training continue immediately after saving a checkpoint with partial metrics (for example, loss) and then receives validation metrics (for example, accuracy) as soon as they are available. If the initial and validated metrics share the same key, the validated metrics overwrite the initial metrics.

When to use async validation

Asynchronous validation is preferable to alternating between training and validation within the same training loop in the following scenarios:

Validation takes a large percentage of total training time. If validation is a significant fraction of your end-to-end training time, running it asynchronously can substantially reduce wall clock time by overlapping validation with training.
Cheaper GPUs are available for validation. Validation doesn't require optimizer states or gradients, so it can use 2-4x less GPU memory than training. If you have a pool of cheaper GPUs or an autoscaling setup that can provision them, async validation lets you run validation on those cheaper machines instead of occupying your expensive training GPUs.
Training throughput stops scaling linearly with more workers. As worker count increases, allreduce overhead grows and limits training speed, so doubling workers no longer doubles throughput. Validation, however, scales more linearly since it requires no gradient synchronization. Asynchronous validation can therefore utilize otherwise idle cluster capacity without impacting training.

The best way to know if async validation helps your workload is to try it. Converting is straightforward (see the tutorial below), so you can run both approaches and compare.

Tutorial

First, define a validation_fn that takes a :class:ray.train.Checkpoint to validate and any number of json-serializable keyword arguments. This function should return a dictionary of metrics from that validation. The following is a simple example for teaching purposes only. It is impractical because the validation task always runs on cpu; for a more realistic example, see :ref:train-distributed-validate-fn.

.. literalinclude:: ../doc_code/asynchronous_validation.py :language: python :start-after: validation_fn_simple_start :end-before: validation_fn_simple_end

.. note::

In this example, the validation dataset is a ray.data.Dataset object, which is not
json-serializable. We therefore include it with the validation_fn closure instead of passing
it as a keyword argument.

.. warning::

Don't pass large objects to the ``validation_fn`` because Ray Train runs it as a Ray task and
serializes all captured variables. Instead, package large objects in the ``Checkpoint`` and
access them from shared storage later as explained in :ref:`train-checkpointing`.

Next, register your validation_fn with your trainer by settings its validation_config argument to a :class:ray.train.v2.api.report_config.ValidationConfig object that contains your validation_fn and any default keyword arguments you want to pass to your validation_fn.

Next, within your rank 0 worker's training loop, call :func:ray.train.report with validation set to True, which will call your validation_fn with the default keyword arguments you passed to the trainer. Alternatively, you can set validation to a :class:ray.train.v2.api.report_config.ValidationTaskConfig object that contains keyword arguments that will override matching keyword arguments you passed to the trainer. If validation is False, Ray Train will not run validation.

.. literalinclude:: ../doc_code/asynchronous_validation.py :language: python :start-after: validation_fn_report_start :end-before: validation_fn_report_end

Finally, after training is done, you can access your checkpoints and their associated metrics with the :class:ray.train.Result object. See :ref:train-inspect-results for more details.

.. _train-distributed-validate-fn:

Write a distributed validation function

The validation_fn above runs in a single Ray task, but you can improve its performance by spawning even more Ray tasks or actors. The Ray team recommends doing this with one of the following approaches:

Creating a :class:ray.train.torch.TorchTrainer that only does validation, not training.
(Experimental) Using :func:ray.data.Dataset.map_batches to calculate metrics on a validation set.

Choose an approach


You should use ``TorchTrainer`` if:

* You want to keep your existing validation logic and avoid migrating to Ray Data.
  The training function API lets you fully customize the validation loop to match your current setup.
* Your validation code depends on running within a Torch process group — for example, your
  metric aggregation logic uses collective communication calls, or your model parallelism
  setup requires cross-GPU communication during the forward pass.
* You want a more consistent training and validation experience. The ``map_batches`` approach involves
  running multiple Ray Data Datasets in a single ray cluster; we are currently working on better support
  for this.

You should use ``map_batches`` if:

* You care about validation performance. Preliminary benchmarks show that ``map_batches`` is
  faster.
* You prefer Ray Data’s native metric aggregation APIs over PyTorch, where you must implement
  aggregation manually using low-level collective operations or rely on third-party libraries
  such as `torchmetrics <https://lightning.ai/docs/torchmetrics/stable>`_.

Example: validation with Ray Train TorchTrainer

Here is a validation_fn that uses a TorchTrainer to calculate average cross entropy loss on a validation set. Note the following about this example:

It report\s a dummy checkpoint so that the TorchTrainer keeps the metrics.
While you typically use the TorchTrainer for training, you can use it solely for validation like in this example.
Because training generally has a higher GPU memory requirement than inference, you can set different resource requirements for training and validation, for example, A100 for training and A10G for validation.

.. literalinclude:: ../doc_code/asynchronous_validation.py :language: python :start-after: validation_fn_torch_trainer_start :end-before: validation_fn_torch_trainer_end

(Experimental) Example: validation with Ray Data map_batches


The following is a ``validation_fn`` that uses :func:`ray.data.Dataset.map_batches` to
calculate average accuracy on a validation set. To learn more about how to use
``map_batches`` for batch inference, see :ref:`batch_inference_home`.

.. literalinclude:: ../doc_code/asynchronous_validation.py
    :language: python
    :start-after: __validation_fn_map_batches_start__
    :end-before: __validation_fn_map_batches_end__

Checkpoint metrics lifecycle
-----------------------------

During the training loop the following happens to your checkpoints and metrics :

1. You report a checkpoint with some initial metrics, such as training loss, as well as a
   :class:`ray.train.v2.api.report_config.ValidationTaskConfig` object that contains the keyword
   arguments to pass to the ``validation_fn``.
2. Ray Train asynchronously runs your ``validation_fn`` with that checkpoint and configuration.
3. When that validation task completes, Ray Train associates the metrics returned by your ``validation_fn``
   with that checkpoint.
4. After training is done, you can access your checkpoints and their associated metrics with the
   :class:`ray.train.Result` object. See :ref:`train-inspect-results` for more details.

.. figure:: ../images/checkpoint_metrics_lifecycle.png

    How Ray Train populates checkpoint metrics during training and how you access them after training.