[Feature]: Expose option to load new model weights from disk

[edbeeching]

🚀 The feature, motivation and pitch

In an async RL setting, we often want to perform fast generation with a vllm endpoint on a separate node and occasionally sync model weights from disk. It would be good if this option was available on the vllm endpoint.

Alternatives

SGLang already exposes this option: https://docs.sglang.ai/backend/native_api.html#Update-Weights-From-Disk

Additional context

No response

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[mgoin]

Hi @edbeeching can you see if this feature achieves what you need? https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/pull/12084

We have been actively working on adding new features to better support RL workflows

[ghost]

@mgoin it would be nice to allow unload model(to save gpu memory) /reload model too

#6566 can only unload lora #3281 require to reprogram the entire http interface

[lewtun]

@mgoin thanks for the pointer to https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/pull/12084 !

What Ed is referring to is whether this collective can be exposed in the OpenAI-compatible server as a dedicated endpoint. For context, we'd like to spin up a vllm server on N nodes and run training on M nodes. At each training step, we'd like to synchronise the weights so that the vllm server is generating from the current policy.

We did look at https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/pull/12084, but it seems to require us to adopt ray which adds a rather high amount of complexity to trl

[michaelnny]

To add some context, in vLLM version 0.7.x, without using tensor parallel, we can update the weights using this hacking code, but it no longer works with 0.8.x, as we get error AttributeError: 'LLMEngine' object has no attribute 'model_executor'

    def _sync_vllm_weights(self, llm: LLM, state_dict: dict) -> None:
        # only works with vLLM 0.7.*
        model = llm.llm_engine.model_executor.driver_worker.model_runner.model
        model.load_weights(state_dict.items())

[mgoin]

@youkaichao could you look at this? I remember there might be a new way to access the model

[youkaichao]

AttributeError: 'LLMEngine' object has no attribute 'model_executor'

llm.llm_engine.model_executor only works in v1 when you set VLLM_ENABLE_V1_MULTIPROCESSING=0 environment variable.

for more future-proof and stable interface, i think you should use LLM.collective_rpc, which is available in v1 after https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/pull/15444 (0.8.3 i think).

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