Enable NullTokenizer for pretraining to reduce I/O access #4057
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asolergi-nv wants to merge 4 commits intoNVIDIA:mainfrom
Open
Enable NullTokenizer for pretraining to reduce I/O access #4057asolergi-nv wants to merge 4 commits intoNVIDIA:mainfrom
asolergi-nv wants to merge 4 commits intoNVIDIA:mainfrom
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janEbert
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Mar 31, 2026
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When using this for training, I think it would be really important to have a small check whether the automatically assigned tokens actually match what the true tokenizer uses. Maybe as a script in |
deepakn94
approved these changes
Apr 6, 2026
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What does this PR do ?
Problem
During pretraining, Megatron-LM requires a tokenizer config even though data is already pretokenized. The tokenizer is only used for 3 integer values (vocab_size, eod, pad), yet every rank loads tokenizer files from the filesystem. At scale, this causes expensive redundant I/O on shared filesystems like Lustre. This PR is a improvement over #2865.
Changes
Update NullTokenizer so it can serve as a zero-I/O tokenizer for real pretokenized data:
Usage
Before: requires tokenizer files:
After: zero file I/O
Contribution process
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