Concertina: Data-Centric Adaptive Pipeline Parallelism for Efficient Heterogeneous Long-Context LLM Training

Abstract:Long context training is crucial for extending LLM context windows. 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 introduce performance degradation. Moreover, the skewed sequence-length distribution in real-world datasets defeats any monolithic, static choice of PP granularity. In this paper, we propose \textit{Dynamic Pipeline Parallelism} (DPP), which transforms PP granularity from a static design choice into a workload-adaptive optimization space over packed, split, and hybrid chunks. DPP further introduces a new coupling between heterogeneous pipeline scheduling and gradient checkpointing. To solve this coupling, \name co-optimizes dynamic chunk scheduling with \textit{Stage-Aware Chunk-Level Adaptive Checkpointing}. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that \name achieves up to 1.69\texttimes\ speedup over FlexSP and up to 1.40\texttimes\ over MEPipe. The source code is available at this https URL.

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2509.21275 [cs.DC]

(or arXiv:2509.21275v5 [cs.DC] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2509.21275 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.