Error17 reports
Fix ChildFailedError
in Accelerate
✅ Solution
The "ChildFailedError" in Accelerate usually arises from unhandled exceptions or errors within the child processes during distributed training, such as a missing key in the model state dict or NCCL timeouts. To resolve this, carefully examine the complete traceback to identify the root cause (e.g., missing model weights or network issues), and address the specific error in your code or environment configuration. Increasing NCCL timeout values or ensuring all processes have access to necessary model components are common fixes.
Related Issues
Real GitHub issues where developers encountered this error:
FSDP2 fails due to `KeyError: 'lm_head.weight'`Dec 3, 2025
I'm getting a "AttributeError: 'Accelerator' object has no attribute '_cp_context'" error when trying to fine-tune a model with TRL and accelerate using Context parallelismDec 1, 2025
NCCL timeout for validationNov 28, 2025
GPT-OSS fails to load with FSPD2Nov 11, 2025
`TypeError: NoneType object is not callable` occurs when using `fsdp_auto_wrap_policy=NO_WRAP` with `fsdp_activation_checkpointing=true`Oct 30, 2025
Timeline
First reported:Feb 1, 2025
Last reported:Dec 3, 2025