Most LoRA merges in HF libraries use PEFT internally, so when LoRA doesn’t work well, it could be a PEFT version issue, etc. There was a bug in a slightly earlier version. However, this is unlikely if the training and execution environments are the same…
Also, I’ve been seeing some problems related to deepspeed on the forums recently. It could be that it is simply because it is so widespread, but it is also possible that there is some kind of bug.