diff --git a/deepspeed/runtime/pipe/engine.py b/deepspeed/runtime/pipe/engine.py
index cadb5b82e36f..df1cbebeb665 100644
--- a/deepspeed/runtime/pipe/engine.py
+++ b/deepspeed/runtime/pipe/engine.py
@@ -49,7 +49,7 @@ class PipelineEngine(DeepSpeedEngine):
     This engine is created by ``deepspeed.initialize()`` when a :class:`PipelineModule`
     is provided.
     """
-    def __init__(self, *super_args, **super_kwargs):
+    def __init__(self, has_bool_tensors=False, *super_args, **super_kwargs):
         super().__init__(*super_args, **super_kwargs)
         assert isinstance(self.module, PipelineModule), "model must base PipelineModule"
 
@@ -57,6 +57,7 @@ def __init__(self, *super_args, **super_kwargs):
 
         # We schedule the all-reduces, so disable it in super().backward()
         self.enable_backward_allreduce = False
+        self.has_bool_tensors = has_bool_tensors
 
         # used to disable the pipeline all-reduce when used with 1-bit Adam/1-bit LAMB
         self.pipeline_enable_backward_allreduce = True
@@ -854,7 +855,7 @@ def _exec_send_activations(self, buffer_id):
         # NCCL does not like to send torch.BoolTensor types, so cast the mask to half().
         # We could do char, but with half() we can eventually flatten with other fp16
         # messages (TODO)
-        if self.module.__class__.__name__ == 'GPT2ModelPipe':
+        if self.module.__class__.__name__ == 'GPT2ModelPipe' or self.has_bool_tensors:
             outputs = list(outputs)
             outputs[-1] = outputs[-1].half()
             outputs = tuple(outputs)
@@ -873,7 +874,7 @@ def _exec_send_activations(self, buffer_id):
                                       f'{type(outputs)}')
 
         # Restore the boolean tensor
-        if self.module.__class__.__name__ == 'GPT2ModelPipe':
+        if self.module.__class__.__name__ == 'GPT2ModelPipe' or self.has_bool_tensors:
             outputs = list(outputs)
             outputs[-1] = outputs[-1].bool()
             outputs = tuple(outputs)
@@ -899,7 +900,7 @@ def _exec_send_grads(self, buffer_id):
         # a grad that needs to be communicated. We free the buffer immediately
         # after, so no need to restore it. The receiver also has a hack that skips
         # the recv. This is because NCCL does not let us send torch.BoolTensor :-(.
-        if self.module.__class__.__name__ == 'GPT2ModelPipe':
+        if self.module.__class__.__name__ == 'GPT2ModelPipe' or self.has_bool_tensors:
             inputs = list(inputs)
             inputs.pop()
             inputs = tuple(inputs)
@@ -960,7 +961,7 @@ def _exec_recv_activations(self, buffer_id):
 
             # NCCL does not like to send torch.BoolTensor types, so un-cast the
             # attention mask
-            if self.module.__class__.__name__ == 'GPT2ModelPipe':
+            if self.module.__class__.__name__ == 'GPT2ModelPipe' or self.has_bool_tensors:
                 recvd[-1] = recvd[-1].bool()
 
             recvd = tuple(recvd)
diff --git a/deepspeed/runtime/pipe/module.py b/deepspeed/runtime/pipe/module.py
index 4da0f1c09f2c..e65c39fcbe94 100644
--- a/deepspeed/runtime/pipe/module.py
+++ b/deepspeed/runtime/pipe/module.py
@@ -95,7 +95,8 @@ def __init__(self,
                  base_seed=1234,
                  partition_method='parameters',
                  activation_checkpoint_interval=0,
-                 activation_checkpoint_func=checkpointing.checkpoint):
+                 activation_checkpoint_func=checkpointing.checkpoint,
+                 checkpointable_layers=None):
         """Modules to be parallelized with pipeline parallelism.
 
         The key constraint that enables pipeline parallelism is the
@@ -137,6 +138,10 @@ def forward(self, inputs):
 
         self.loss_fn = loss_fn
 
+        self.checkpointable_layers = checkpointable_layers
+        if checkpointable_layers is not None:
+            assert isinstance(checkpointable_layers, list), "param `checkpointable_layers` must be type of list."
+
         self.seed_layers = seed_layers
         self.seed_fn = seed_fn
         self.base_seed = base_seed
@@ -602,6 +607,8 @@ def _is_checkpointable(self, funcs):
         if self.__class__.__name__ in ('GPTModelPipe', 'GPT2ModelPipe'):
             return all('ParallelTransformerLayerPipe' in f.__class__.__name__
                        for f in funcs)
+        if self.checkpointable_layers is not None:
+            return all(f.__class__.__name__ in self.checkpointable_layers for f in funcs)
 
         params = [f.parameters() for f in funcs if isinstance(f, torch.nn.Module)]
         return any(len(list(p)) > 0 for p in params)