ncp_olmo_eval

ncp_olmo_eval is a reproducible, scheduler-neutral evaluation toolkit for stock OLMo and NCP-ArchPreview checkpoints on vLLM. One fail-closed CLI covers immutable model registration, inference planning, sandboxed scoring, artifact validation, and final result materialization for GSM8K, SciQ, Core88, RULER, and HELMET. Public pinned assets, OCI build recipes, and scheduler adapters let the same protocol run on a workstation, Slurm, Kubernetes, or another cluster.

The distribution name ncp-olmo-eval, Python package ncp_olmo_eval, CLI commands, and NCP_OLMO_* environment variables are retained as stable compatibility identifiers. User-facing model-family terminology is NCP-ArchPreview.

The package does not submit to a cluster API. It emits ordinary JSON task specifications that can run in an existing allocation or through a thin Slurm, Kubernetes, or site-specific adapter. The published tree contains no private mount, registry, proxy, account, credential, checkpoint, or scheduler default.

Status: alpha. The public runtime supports vLLM only. Benchmark protocols and artifact checks are fail-closed; changing a seed, prompt, prepared-data identity, model identity, or source revision requires a new evaluation.

What is supported

NCP DFlash speculative decoding is available as a separately registered, experimental NCP-ArchPreview path for GSM8K and Core88. Exact-labelled modes fail closed unless token parity is proven; the currently evidenced tuned path is explicitly approximate and requires matched downstream quality A/B. It never changes the ordinary target-only protocol. See SPECULATIVE_DECODING.md.

Core88 scoring is a separate CPU/sandbox phase: one prediction-score snapshot, eight Python shards, eight BigCodeBench shards, eight DS-1000 shards, and 32 MultiPL-E shards. Generated programs must execute in the matching sealed sandbox image, not in the inference process.

SciQ is a standalone benchmark. It does not alter the Core88 88-task contract or silently fill an optional SciQ column in the Core88 30-column table.

See the exact protocol pins before comparing results.

Model compatibility

Registration checks, without modifying the checkpoint:

• config.json exists and is readable;
• either a complete indexed shard set or one unsharded weight file exists;
• at least one supported tokenizer file exists;
• indexed weight files exist and their sizes are recorded;
• later workflow steps see the same registered file contract.

For NCP-ArchPreview, install the package rather than only adding its source directory to PYTHONPATH; vLLM discovers the model through the installed plugin entry point. NCP-ArchPreview remains behind an explicit experimental opt-in gate.

Public NCP-ArchPreview checkpoints

The following public Hugging Face checkpoints are the reference model set for this workflow:

• NCP_ArchPreview_dolma3_8.9B_Stage1
• NCP_ArchPreview_dolma3_8.9B_Stage2_v1
• NCP_ArchPreview_dolma3_8.9B_Stage2_v2
• NCP_ArchPreview_dolma3_8.9B_Stage2_v3

The paired speculative-decoding draft is NCP_ArchPreview_dolma3_8.9B_Stage2_DFlash2_NCPFlash.

The current pinned runtime is Python 3.12, vLLM 0.13.0, Transformers 4.57.6, and huggingface-hub 0.36.2. Pre-release load smoke has also covered 17 local NCP-ArchPreview HF exports (14 Stage1 and three Stage2): every checkpoint loaded and produced a non-empty greedy continuation with the pinned runtime. That evidence is a load/route smoke, not a benchmark score or native backend parity claim.

Install

After the alpha is published to PyPI:

python -m pip install 'ncp-olmo-eval[vllm,helmet,scoring]==0.1.0a16'

Until then, or when validating a source revision, install from a clean checkout:

For the complete GPU runtime:

python3.12 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
python -m pip install --upgrade pip
python -m pip install -e '.[vllm,helmet,scoring]'

For CPU-only development and contract tests:

python3.12 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
python -m pip install -e '.[dev,scoring]'

Use .[gsm8k,dev] for CPU-only GSM8K preparation. The vllm and gsm8k extras both pin the official lm-eval==0.4.13 distribution and seal its tagged source commit into prepared manifests. A different harness version is rejected before the formal GSM8K/Core88 task data is read.

The scoring extra pins the exact SymPy/ANTLR runtime used by the Minerva, MATH, and MATH-500 scorer. The production runtime image installs that slice and runs its CPU smoke during image construction. See IMAGES.md for reproducible OCI and Core88 sandbox builds.

Prepare a portable environment

1. Copy configs/runtime.env.example to a private runtime file and replace shared paths for your site.
2. Download public-images.env from the matching GitHub release and source it to select the published immutable OCI digests. Public bases and release tags are listed in configs/public-image-bases.json.
3. Use the already pinned public Hugging Face assets in configs/assets.example.json. The gated Llama 2 tokenizer is deliberately separate in configs/assets.gated.example.json.
4. Download assets once on a connected host, seal them, then verify the sealed bundle before formal work:

ncp-olmo-eval-assets prepare \
  --manifest configs/assets.json \
  --output-root /shared/ncp-olmo-eval/assets
ncp-olmo-eval-assets verify \
  --lock /shared/ncp-olmo-eval/assets/assets.lock.json

Inference defaults to HF_HUB_OFFLINE=1, HF_DATASETS_OFFLINE=1, and TRANSFORMERS_OFFLINE=1. Missing assets fail instead of downloading during a measurement. See OFFLINE_ASSETS.md.

Quick start

The same lifecycle applies to every benchmark:

register -> infer -> run inference plan -> status
         -> score -> run scoring plan   -> status
         -> final -> run final plan     -> status/results

1. Register an immutable model identity

export EVAL_ROOT=/shared/ncp-olmo-eval/results

ncp-olmo-eval --root "$EVAL_ROOT" register \
  --checkpoint /models/olmo-or-ncp-archpreview \
  --backend vllm

The JSON response includes a versioned registration_name, for example vllm-abc123-v1. Reuse that name for all later commands. Registering the same checkpoint/backend path again fails unless --new-version is explicit.

For speculative decoding, first produce a target/draft-bound comparison artifact, then register both identities:

ncp-olmo-eval --root "$EVAL_ROOT" register \
  --checkpoint /models/ncp-archpreview-target \
  --backend vllm \
  --vllm-speculative-draft-model /models/ncp-dflash-draft \
  --vllm-speculative-verification /results/dflash/comparison.json \
  --vllm-speculative-allow-approximate

The unified entry refuses speculative inference without the comparison gate. The flag above is required for an approximate artifact; omit it only for a genuinely passing exact artifact. Exact-labelled modes are diagnostic in this release because the tested stateful NCP target did not pass full parity. The standalone A/B command and tuning controls are documented in SPECULATIVE_DECODING.md. The comparison must be generated by the current release: it seals the complete batch, continuous scheduler queue, adaptive draft-width map, and target/draft runtime settings. Legacy a12 artifacts that only prove output correctness are rejected rather than silently run at a different operating point.

The retained a14 matched-H200 validation, including the 1.43x mixed-length continuous-queue result, fixed batch/width sweep, cold-start cost, and downstream-quality caveats, is recorded in VALIDATION.md. These measurements describe one tested target/draft pair and are not a general speed or quality guarantee.

2. Plan and run inference

export EVALUATION=vllm-abc123-v1

# Read-only validation: no state or task files are written.
ncp-olmo-eval --root "$EVAL_ROOT" infer \
  --evaluation "$EVALUATION" --benchmark core88 --dry-run

# Materialize task.json/status.json files and a portable plan.json.
ncp-olmo-eval --root "$EVAL_ROOT" infer \
  --evaluation "$EVALUATION" --benchmark core88 --executor emit

The response prints task_plan. Archive that exact file, then execute it with one of the adapters below. --executor local is available when the CLI already runs inside an allocation with the requested resources, but multi-task plans run sequentially; use a scheduler adapter for Core88 parallelism.

scripts/run-plan-local.sh /absolute/path/to/plan.json

NCP_OLMO_SLURM_PARTITION=gpu \
NCP_OLMO_SLURM_CONTAINER_WRAPPER=scripts/run-task-apptainer.sh \
scripts/submit-plan-slurm.sh /absolute/path/to/plan.json

scripts/render-kubernetes-jobs.py /absolute/path/to/plan.json \
  --pvc shared-storage --mount-path /shared --output-dir /tmp/jobs

Inspect both scheduler state and artifact completeness:

ncp-olmo-eval --root "$EVAL_ROOT" status \
  --evaluation "$EVALUATION" --benchmark core88

A scheduler Succeeded state alone is insufficient. status marks inference complete only after benchmark-specific manifests, hashes, shard counts, source identity, model immutability, and prediction coverage pass validation.

3. Score and finalize

After inference reports INFERENCE_COMPLETE:

ncp-olmo-eval --root "$EVAL_ROOT" score \
  --evaluation "$EVALUATION" --benchmark core88 --executor emit
# Run the returned scoring task_plan, then refresh status.

ncp-olmo-eval --root "$EVAL_ROOT" final \
  --evaluation "$EVALUATION" --benchmark core88 --executor emit
# Run the returned final task_plan, then refresh status again.

Scoring always creates a fresh attempt. Core88 finalization fails closed when the evaluator revision/tree digest, workflow identity, schema, coverage, hashes, or aggregates disagree. Eligible cached scorer evidence may be reused; otherwise the finalizer reopens raw predictions and results for a complete rescore. A clean installed wheel or OCI image works without .git in the worker because the release records a path-independent evaluator tree digest.

Long-context preparation

RULER and HELMET consume sealed tokenizer/profile-specific inputs. Prepare each dataset with the tokenizer of the model being evaluated:

ncp-olmo-eval-prepare ruler --help
ncp-olmo-eval-prepare helmet --help

ncp-olmo-eval --root "$EVAL_ROOT" infer \
  --evaluation "$EVALUATION" --benchmark ruler \
  --data-root /shared/prepared/ruler/tokenizer-hash --executor emit

Prepared data is content-addressed. A tokenizer or profile mismatch is rejected rather than silently reusing an incompatible cache.

Portability and trust boundaries

• Task specs contain an argument vector, non-secret environment, resource request, paths, and an optional immutable image digest—never interpolated shell or scheduler configuration.
• All paths in one plan must resolve identically in every worker/container.
• Site adapters provide accounts, queues, PVCs, registry credentials, proxies, secrets, and driver/runtime compatibility.
• Core88 program execution requires the matching no-network sandbox image.
• HELMET citation/judge steps require sealed local assets and, when applicable, credentials injected only at execution time. Secrets are rejected in task JSON.

See PORTABILITY.md for status semantics and executor requirements.

Release preflight

Run the checked-in release checklist from a clean checkout. At minimum:

ruff check src tests scripts
python -m compileall -q src tests
pytest -q
find scripts -name '*.sh' -print0 | xargs -0 -n1 bash -n
python -m py_compile scripts/*.py
python -m build
git diff --check

The CI workflow additionally installs the built wheel at a different path, validates source-identity-aware Core88 finalization, builds the published runtime scorer slice, and executes the formal BigCodeBench sandbox smoke. Release workflows publish the wheel through PyPI Trusted Publishing and build the five public OCI images from pinned public inputs.

Alpha limitations

• Only vLLM is exposed by the public unified workflow.
• NCP DFlash is pinned to vLLM 0.13.0, is opt-in, and is formally routed only to GSM8K/Core88. Approximate output requires a separate registration and matched downstream score A/B. The tested stateful target does not establish exact speculative parity, so exact-labelled modes remain diagnostic gates.
• CUDA driver compatibility, image publication, and scheduler integration are site responsibilities.
• Core88 sandbox images depend on pinned upstream runtime artifacts that may have separate redistribution terms.
• Strict numerical parity with native Megatron is not claimed. Optional parity tools may consume externally produced reference artifacts, but the private training stack is not bundled.
• The compatibility smoke above does not replace task-level accuracy and long-context validation for a newly exported checkpoint.

Documentation

• Evaluation protocols
• Portable execution contract
• Offline assets
• OCI and sandbox images
• Release checklist
• Contributing
• Security

License

Original repository code is licensed under Apache License 2.0. Third-party code, benchmark data, model weights, and container bases retain their own terms; in particular, the MultiPL-E runtime has an additional machine-learning-training restriction. See NOTICE and THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md. The repository license does not license NCP-ArchPreview weights; each Hugging Face model card must declare its independently reviewed weight license.