seniorPyTorch
What is activation recomputation vs activation offloading?
Updated May 17, 2026
Short answer
Recomputation recalculates activations; offloading moves them to CPU memory.
Deep explanation
Checkpointing recomputes forward activations during backward pass, while offloading stores activations on CPU RAM and transfers them back when needed. Offloading reduces GPU memory but introduces transfer latency.
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