Knovaryn

Knovaryn — open-source, MCP-native training-data foundry

Turn permitted PDFs and documents into traceable, quality-gated SFT, DPO/preference, KTO, and evaluation datasets that any MCP-capable agent can build, review, and export — every example traced to its source.

Status

Alpha (0.2.0) — the core pipeline, provenance, quality gates, durable jobs, MCP/REST/CLI/SDK interfaces, and release integrity are implemented and tested (400+ offline tests). Public beta is pending owner acceptance; the project is not yet a stable release and APIs may change. No change is auto-published — publishing is always an explicit, gated action.

1. Install

One command, no API keys, no network needed to get started:

pip install knovaryn

From source (for development):

git clone https://github.com/waalwalker1/knovaryn.git
cd knovaryn
uv sync --dev

Optional extras are opt-in: docling, docetl, litellm, s3, parquet, hub, mcp, ml. See the configuration reference.

2. 90-second offline demo

The demo runs the complete pipeline on bundled sample documents with a deterministic fake provider — no API keys, no network:

uv run knovaryn demo --examples 20 --json
uv run knovaryn doctor        # environment + storage health

In about 90 seconds you get a release bundle: dataset card, per-file manifest, quality/source/license/privacy reports, lineage, and a detached checksum.

3. Real-document quickstart

Point Knovaryn at documents you are permitted to use and drive the pipeline through the MCP tools (or REST / SDK):

1. knovaryn_create_project — create a project.
2. knovaryn_add_source — add permitted documents with declared licenses.
3. knovaryn_estimate_run — dry-run cost estimate.
4. knovaryn_start_pipeline — run SFT / preference / KTO / evaluation.
5. knovaryn_validate_dataset — quality gates quarantine failures.
6. knovaryn_create_dataset_version + knovaryn_export_dataset — ship it.

See PDF → SFT dataset, build DPO preference data, and grounded QA datasets.

4. MCP quickstart

Knovaryn is an MCP training-data server: a 23-tool Model Context Protocol server any MCP-capable agent can drive.

pip install "knovaryn[mcp]"
knovaryn-mcp                     # stdio (default MCP host transport)
# or remote over Streamable-HTTP:
knovaryn-mcp --transport streamable-http --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8000

Connect your agent and ask it to build a dataset — see MCP training-data server and MCP clients.

5. What it produces

A Knovaryn release is an immutable, versioned bundle:

• trainer-ready records in JSONL / Parquet and framework layouts (trl_sft, trl_preference, kto, sharegpt, alpaca, openai_chat, huggingface_layout, evaluation);
• a dataset card, per-file manifest, quality/source/license/privacy reports;
• a detached checksum + reproducible bundle, verified with knovaryn verify-release.

6. Traceability (a concrete example)

Every exported row carries source_document_ids, source_span_ids, and a content_hash. You can walk any example backward:

TrainingExample → chunk → SourceSpan → ParsedDocument → SourceDocument
                                                          → exact page + section

The export provenance gate resolves every document/span reference to an existing record in the same project and recomputes the content hash. A row that cannot be resolved blocks the export — Knovaryn never returns a "successful" export it cannot defend.

7. Quality and policy gates

Candidates are scored against a dated acceptance policy and pass fail-closed gates — failure means quarantine, never silent export:

• schema · grounding · completeness/answerability · format
• refusal · duplicate · contamination (train/val/test leakage)
• privacy · license

Human review (knovaryn_review_example) records an approve/reject decision as a new immutable revision — it never mutates an example in place. See quality gates.

8. Supported stack

9. Architecture

One application-services core behind a durable pipeline engine, exposed through four interfaces:

Source → Parse → Split → Chunk → Generate → Validate → Version → Export → Publish

Everything runs as durable jobs (leases, heartbeats, checkpoints, idempotency, budgets) so a crash resumes instead of redoing paid work. Diagrams (system architecture, pipeline flow, durable jobs, MCP session, security, value):

Architecture at a glance →

10. Security & privacy

• Offline-first — no credentials required for the demo, tests, or first run.
• Secrets from the environment only — never hard-coded, never logged, redacted at the display boundary.
• Secure intake — path-traversal/symlink protection, verified archives, URL ingestion off by default, SSRF defenses, loopback HTTP binding, no shell-command MCP tools.
• Publication is dry-run by default and gated on license approval — nothing is pushed anywhere without explicit action. See license & privacy.

11. Benchmarks (methodology & limitations)

Reproducible benchmarks cover parse fidelity, lineage resolution, generation validity, groundedness, duplicate/leakage rate, pipeline throughput, crash recovery, and export compatibility. Honest framing: offline fake-provider throughput measures framework overhead only — it is not synthetic-data generation throughput or model quality. See the benchmark methodology.

12. Comparison — when to choose Knovaryn

Compared factually with related tools (Synthetic Data Kit, Distilabel, Docling, Easy Dataset) in the peer landscape and comparisons: choose Knovaryn when you want a document-grounded, provenance-enforced, gate-and-export foundry driven over MCP — not just a parser or a composition SDK.

13. Documentation

• Docs site (MkDocs) · Guides · Concepts · Architecture
• Reference — CLI · Configuration · Exporters
• README diagrams

14. Contributing & community

Please read CONTRIBUTING.md, the code of conduct, and SECURITY.md. See GOVERNANCE.md, ROADMAP.md, and CHANGELOG.md.

15. License & citation

Apache-2.0 for original code (see LICENSE). Dataset licensing is kept separate from code licensing and governed by the source-license registry. Third-party licenses: LICENSES-THIRD-PARTY.md.

If you use Knovaryn in research, please cite it — see CITATION.cff.