Zephon: Elastic Determinism for Online, Stateful Foundation Model Data Loading Pipelines

Abstract:Deterministic data loading is important for foundation model development: model researchers need confidence that differences they observe across costly ablations are caused by the parameter they changed rather than non-determinism in the training data sequence. The data loader must provide elastic determinism, i.e., a deterministic sequence of global training data batches despite changes to the GPU topology across runs (e.g., due to GPU scarcity), frequent checkpoint-resume cycles, and different data processing execution backends. Achieving this is difficult because modern foundation model data pipelines tokenize, pack, and mix samples online, introducing stateful n-to-m transformations that break sample indexing. Existing data loaders largely assume indexable 1-to-1 pipelines, and the common workaround of offline materialization is expensive and, for some modalities such as video, infeasible. We present Zephon, a data loader for foundation models that supports online, stateful pipelines while providing elastic determinism and efficient resumption from checkpoints. It partitions the global stream into topology-independent lanes, serializes ordering decisions while parallelizing stateless work on interchangeable backends, and checkpoints only bounded in-flight state so recovery cost does not grow with training progress. We evaluate Zephon on text and vision-language workloads and show that it achieves competitive throughput while providing a combination of guarantees that no existing loader offers for online, stateful pipelines.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Databases (cs.DB)

arXiv:2610.03087 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2610.03087v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.03087 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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