torchmortem 0.1.0

Diagnostic autopsy for PyTorch training runs

🩻 torchmortem

Diagnostic autopsy for PyTorch training runs.

torchmortem hooks into your PyTorch training loop and produces a diagnostic report (an "autopsy", if you will) telling you why your training might be broken and how to fix it.

If you need full-fledged experiment tracking, hyperparameter sweeps, or collaborative dashboards, this is probably not the right tool. Instead, go look at platforms like Weights & Biases or TensorBoard.

Installation

Install into a virtual environment with uv:

uv venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
uv pip install -e ".[dev]"

Or install from PyPI (once published):

pip install torchmortem

Requires Python >=3.10 and PyTorch >=2.0.

Quick Start

from torchmortem import Autopsy

with Autopsy(model, optimizer=optimizer) as autopsy:
    for epoch in range(num_epochs):
        for batch in dataloader:
            loss = model(batch)
            loss.backward()
            optimizer.step()
            autopsy.step(loss=loss.item())

autopsy.report("autopsy_report.html")

How it works

torchmortem is built using a plugin architecture for maximum extensibility.

• Collectors (implementing Collector in collectors/base.py) attach PyTorch hooks to a model and record raw signals during training.
• Detectors (implementing Detector in detectors/base.py) analyze the collected signals and return findings.
• The interpreter (DefaultInterpreter in interpreters/default.py, override-able via the protocol in interpreters/base.py) synthesizes the findings from all detectors by applying the rules defined in interpreters/rules.
• The interpreter produces human-readable reports using renderers (defined in renderers/).

Built-in feature set

Individual detectors:

• Vanishing / exploding gradients -- inter-layer gradient ratio analysis
• Dead units -- persistently inactive neurons (dead ReLU problem)
• Activation saturation -- sigmoid/tanh layers stuck in flat regions
• Unhealthy update ratios -- ||update||/||weight|| deviating from ~1e-3
• Loss dynamics -- catapult phase, edge-of-stability, plateaus, divergence
• Rank collapse -- representation dimensionality shrinking over training
• Weight norm pathologies -- explosion, stagnation, inter-layer imbalance
• Gradient noise -- SNR and batch size efficiency

Cross-signal insights (correlation rules):

• Gradient starvation -- vanishing gradients + dead units
• Instability feedback loop -- exploding gradients + weight explosion
• Representation bottleneck -- rank collapse + loss stagnation
• Curvature traps -- edge-of-stability + plateau

Report features:

• Executive summary -- 3-5 sentence assessment with the top recommendation
• Per-layer health scores -- 0-1 score for each layer, visualized as a heatmap
• Interactive charts -- loss curve, gradient norms, weight norms, update ratios, dead unit fractions, effective rank
• Cross-signal insights -- root-cause explanations synthesized from multiple detectors
• Findings -- each with severity, explanation, affected layers, remediation, and references
• JSON output -- for CI pipelines and programmatic analysis

Sampling Configuration

Control the overhead/detail tradeoff:

# Presets
Autopsy(model, sampling="thorough")  # max detail
Autopsy(model, sampling="balanced")  # default
Autopsy(model, sampling="fast")      # minimal overhead

# Granular control
from torchmortem import SamplingConfig
Autopsy(model, sampling=SamplingConfig(
    default_interval=1,
    expensive_interval=50,
    overrides={"curvature": 20},
))

Examples

See the examples/ directory:

• basic_mlp.py -- Deep MLP with sigmoid activations (vanishing gradients, dead units)
• healthy_resnet.py -- Well-configured residual network
• transformer_debug.py -- Transformer with high LR and no clipping
• cnn_overfit.py -- Small CNN that overfits on a toy image dataset
• lstm_vanishing.py -- Vanilla LSTM with extreme sequence length

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! The plugin architecture aims to make it relatively easy for contributors to add new features. Please refer to CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

Custom detector example

Here is a complete example of a custom detector that flags any layer whose gradient norm exceeds a configurable threshold:

import numpy as np
from torchmortem.registry import register_detector
from torchmortem.types import CollectorState, Finding, RunMetadata, Severity


@register_detector
class LargeGradientDetector:
    """Flags layers where the gradient norm exceeds a fixed threshold."""

    name: str = "large_gradient"
    required_collectors: list[str] = ["gradient"]

    def __init__(self, threshold: float = 100.0) -> None:
        self._threshold = threshold

    def analyze(
        self,
        collector_states: dict[str, CollectorState],
        metadata: RunMetadata,
    ) -> list[Finding]:
        grad_state = collector_states["gradient"]
        norms = grad_state.series.get("grad_norm")
        if norms is None or len(grad_state.steps) == 0:
            return []

        findings: list[Finding] = []
        for idx, layer in enumerate(grad_state.layers):
            layer_norms = norms[:, idx]
            max_norm = float(np.max(layer_norms))
            if max_norm > self._threshold:
                findings.append(Finding(
                    detector=self.name,
                    severity=Severity.WARNING,
                    category="gradient_flow",
                    title=f"Large gradient in {layer}",
                    summary=f"Gradient norm in {layer} reached {max_norm:.1f}, exceeding the {self._threshold:.1f} threshold.",
                    detail=f"The maximum gradient L2 norm observed in {layer} was {max_norm:.1f}. Large gradients can destabilize training and cause weight explosion.",
                    affected_layers=[layer],
                    step_range=(int(grad_state.steps[0]), int(grad_state.steps[-1])),
                    remediation=[
                        "Add gradient clipping (torch.nn.utils.clip_grad_norm_).",
                        "Reduce the learning rate.",
                    ],
                ))
        return findings

The detector will be picked up automatically once the module containing it is imported before the Autopsy context manager is entered.

License

torchmortem is provided under the MIT License.