Handle Trial Errors and Early Stopping Requests

When a trial encounters an error or fails unexpectedly, Determined will restart it from the latest checkpoint up to some maximum number of times, which is configured by max_restarts in the experiment configuration. After Determined reaches max_restarts, any further trials that fail will be marked as errored and will not be restarted. For the adaptive (ASHA) search method, which adapts to validation metric values, we do not continue training errored trials, even if the search method would typically call for us to continue training. This behavior is useful when some parts of the hyperparameter space result in models that cannot be trained successfully (e.g., the search explores a range of batch sizes and some of those batch sizes cause GPU OOM errors). An experiment can complete successfully as long as at least one of the trials within it completes successfully.

Trial code can also request that training be stopped early, e.g., via a framework callback such as tf.keras.callbacks.EarlyStopping or manually by calling determined.TrialContext.set_stop_requested(). When early stopping is requested, Determined will finish the current training or validation workload and checkpoint the trial. Trials that are stopped early are considered to be “completed”, whereas trials that fail are marked as “errored”.