Improve information about group offloading and layerwise casting

docs/source/en/optimization/memory.md

@@ -198,6 +198,17 @@ export_to_video(video, "output.mp4", fps=8)
 
 Group offloading (for CUDA devices with support for asynchronous data transfer streams) overlaps data transfer and computation to reduce the overall execution time compared to sequential offloading. This is enabled using layer prefetching with CUDA streams. The next layer to be executed is loaded onto the accelerator device while the current layer is being executed - this increases the memory requirements slightly. Group offloading also supports leaf-level offloading (equivalent to sequential CPU offloading) but can be made much faster when using streams.
 
+<Tip>
+
+- Group offloading may not work with all models out-of-the-box. If the forward implementations of the model contain weight-dependent device-casting of inputs, it may clash with the offloading mechanism's handling of device-casting.
+- The `offload_type` parameter can be set to either `block_level` or `leaf_level`. `block_level` offloads groups of `torch::nn::ModuleList` or `torch::nn:Sequential` modules based on a configurable attribute `num_blocks_per_group`. For example, if you set `num_blocks_per_group=2` on a standard transformer model containing 40 layers, it will onload/offload 2 layers at a time. This drastically reduces the VRAM requirements. `leaf_level` offloads individual layers at the lowest level, which is equivalent to sequential offloading. However, unlike sequential offloading, group offloading can be made much faster when using streams, with minimal compromise to end-to-end generation time.
+- The `use_stream` parameter can be used on CUDA devices to enable layer prefetching. It defaults to `False` and is disabled by default. Layer prefetching allows overlapping computation and data transfer of modeling weights, which drastically reduces the overall execution time compared to other offloading methods. However, it may increase the VRAM requirements slightly.
+- If specifying `use_stream=True` on VAEs, make sure to do a dummy forward pass (possibly with dummy inputs) before the actual inference to avoid device-mismatch errors. This may not work on all implementations. Please open an issue if you encounter any problems.
+
+For more information about available parameters and an explanation of how group offloading works, refer to [`~hooks.group_offloading.apply_group_offloading`].
+
+</Tip>
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 ## FP8 layerwise weight-casting
 
 PyTorch supports `torch.float8_e4m3fn` and `torch.float8_e5m2` as weight storage dtypes, but they can't be used for computation in many different tensor operations due to unimplemented kernel support. However, you can use these dtypes to store model weights in fp8 precision and upcast them on-the-fly when the layers are used in the forward pass. This is known as layerwise weight-casting.
@@ -235,6 +246,13 @@ In the above example, layerwise casting is enabled on the transformer component
 
 However, you gain more control and flexibility by directly utilizing the [`~hooks.layerwise_casting.apply_layerwise_casting`] function instead of [`~ModelMixin.enable_layerwise_casting`].
 
+<Tip>
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+- Layerwise casting may not work with all models out-of-the-box. Sometimes, the forward implementations of the model contain weight-dependent typecasting of inputs. Such implementations are not supported due to the currently simplistic implementation of layerwise casting, which assumes that the forward pass is independent of the weight precision and that the input dtypes are always in `compute_dtype`. An example of an incompatible implementation can be found [here](https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/blob/7f5077e53682ca855afc826162b204ebf809f1f9/src/transformers/models/t5/modeling_t5.py#L294-L299).
+- Layerwise casting may fail on custom modeling implementations that make use of [PEFT](https://github.com/huggingface/peft) layers. Some minimal checks to handle this case is implemented but is not extensively tested or guaranteed to work in all cases.
+
+</Tip>
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 ## Channels-last memory format
 
 The channels-last memory format is an alternative way of ordering NCHW tensors in memory to preserve dimension ordering. Channels-last tensors are ordered in such a way that the channels become the densest dimension (storing images pixel-per-pixel). Since not all operators currently support the channels-last format, it may result in worst performance but you should still try and see if it works for your model.