NoulXP

A portable, open standard for calibrated single-pass decision models.

Formerly OpenDXP (to 0.3.1). pip install opendxp now installs noulxp, and packages made then (odxp.json, odxp/0.x) still run.

A System One model reads a state and answers typed questions (choice, score, noul) with a calibrated probability for every option, in one pass. Every such model ships its own inference code: Laya needs the laya package, Julia 1 its own package, Decider its own server. To run twenty models you install twenty runtimes, and to compare them you write twenty harnesses.

NoulXP makes the model a package that one engine runs without code written for it. A package declares which of two profiles it follows, carries its weights in a portable format (ONNX or GGUF), describes its input construction and calibration as data, and ships a conformance file: what the model's own code answers on a fixed set of requests. An engine that reproduces that file within 0.01 in probability, with the same decisions, runs the model faithfully.

Requests travel the same way everywhere: over HTTP between an application and any server (noulxp serve, or an engine such as the System One Engine), and over the Model Context Protocol between an AI agent and a tool (noulxp mcp). It is to decision models what MCP is to agent tools: one way to ask any model, on any machine.

• SPEC.md: the standard, version 0.2
• schemas/: JSON Schemas for every file in a package
• VALIDATION.md: Laya, Julia 1, Decider and AnyJev converted and checked
• badge/BADGE.md: the "NoulXP compatible" badge and its criteria
• PAPER.md: outline of the paper, and which experiments are done

NoulXP is open: the specification, the schemas and this reference implementation are Apache-2.0, and anyone may build an engine for it. The System One Engine, which serves the live playgrounds on System One Models, runs NoulXP packages and shows which models are NoulXP compatible.

The two profiles

ONNX runs through ONNX Runtime (CPU, CUDA, Core ML, OpenVINO, QNN, DirectML); GGUF through llama.cpp (CPU, Metal, CUDA, HIP, SYCL, Vulkan). The engine picks the device, not the model's author.

Other decision models need additions to the spec before they can be packaged. Von, open-jev and GLiNER2.5-Decide are encoders, but Von isolates each option's attention and sets its temperature from the input, open-jev reads every question of a request in one sequence and pools spans of tokens, and GLiNER2.5-Decide encodes a schema of labels and returns one label with a confidence rather than every option's probability. Among language models, lev averages two option orders and has a learned head for its longest menus, and this-that-model answers every question of a request in one sequence. Nimble and JevK5 also read one-token answers; no converter exists for them yet.

New in 0.2, a causal-letters prompt can lay out each question type on its own, inside the model's chat template, and ask a question once per cyclic shift of its options, combining the shifts per option so that no option wins by its position. That is how AnyJev (Nokia) turns an instruction-tuned language model into a decision model without training it: noulxp export anyjev packages such a model, and AnyJev's own code writes its conformance file.

What is here

The noulxp Python package (Python 3.11+) is the reference implementation:

• Reference runtimes for both profiles. They read only the package and contain nothing specific to any model. The encoder runtime runs on CUDA when onnxruntime has it and on the CPU otherwise; Core ML, OpenVINO, QNN and DirectML are used when named (--device coreml), and it compiles shape buckets for providers that need fixed shapes. The causal runtime drives llama.cpp's low-level API, one row per decode, with every layer on the GPU when the build has one.
• Converters for Laya, Julia 1, Decider and AnyJev (noulxp export).
• The models' own inference for writing conformance files (noulxp.native): Laya through the laya package, AnyJev through the anyjev package; Julia 1 and Decider through faithful rebuilds of their authors' code, checked on the authors' published cases.
• Servers for the two bindings: noulxp serve answers requests over HTTP on any machine, and noulxp mcp gives every package to AI agents as an MCP tool.
• Conformance tools: noulxp conformance generate runs the model's own code on the NoulXP 0.1 request set (52 requests, 91 questions, 11 languages including Nepali and Thai); noulxp check replays it through the reference runtime and writes a JSON report.

Install

pip install "noulxp[onnx]"          # encoder-markers runtime (ONNX Runtime)
pip install "noulxp[gguf]"          # causal-letters runtime (llama-cpp-python)
pip install "noulxp[export,laya]"   # converters (torch, transformers, onnx, onnxscript, laya)
pip install "noulxp[gguf,anyjev]"   # AnyJev: its converter and its own Decider (anyjev, torch, transformers)

From a clone, for development:

pip install -e ".[dev]"             # tests and linting

Use a package

import noulxp

model = noulxp.load("packages/laya-typed-decisions")      # device="auto": the best available
out = model.predict(
    "Customer: I was charged twice and still have no refund.",
    {
        "intent": {"type": "choice", "instructions": "What does the customer want?",
                   "criteria": {"refund": None, "cancel order": None, "other": None}},
        "urgency": {"type": "score", "instructions": "How urgent is this?",
                    "criteria": ["low", "medium", "high"]},
        "angry": {"type": "noul", "instructions": "The customer is angry."},
    },
)
# {"answers": {"intent":  {"type": "choice", "choice": ..., "probabilities": {...}, "confidence": ...},
#              "urgency": {"type": "score", "score": ..., "legend": {...}, "probabilities": {...}, ...},
#              "angry":   {"type": "noul", "noul": ..., ...}},
#  "usage": {"input_tokens": ..., "output_tokens": 0}}

From the shell: noulxp run PACKAGE --request request.json [--device cpu|coreml|cuda|gpu]. noulxp info lists this machine's backends.

Serve it

noulxp serve packages/laya-typed-decisions packages/julia-1

Any machine now answers the System One request over HTTP (SPEC.md 11), the same request and path TypeSafe's Jev API and the System One Engine answer, so their clients work unchanged:

curl -s localhost:8790/v1/models          # what this server holds
curl -s localhost:8790/v1/systemone -H 'content-type: application/json' -d '{
  "model": "supersonic-labs/julia-1",
  "state": "Customer: I was charged twice and still have no refund.",
  "questions": {"angry": {"type": "noul", "instructions": "The customer is angry."}}
}'

It listens on 127.0.0.1:8790. To listen anywhere else it needs a token (--token, or NOULXP_TOKEN), which clients send as Authorization: Bearer .... --check runs each package's conformance file at start and reports the result in /v1/models; --cors ORIGIN lets a browser page call it.

A request that finds its model idle is answered at once; requests that arrive while the model reads wait and are read together, up to --batch (32) in one pass, so a GPU does more as more clients call it. --batch 1 answers one at a time. A causal-letters package decodes rows together with --batch-rows 16.

Measure it

noulxp bench path/to/package --device cuda --rounds 3 --usd-per-hour 0.49
noulxp bench http://127.0.0.1:8790 --model nokia/anyjev-qwen3-1.7b --concurrency 1,4,16,64

bench reports requests and decisions per second (a decision is one question answered), latency percentiles and, given the machine's price per hour, the cost per 1,000 decisions, for a package in this process or for any server that speaks the HTTP binding (noulxp serve, an engine, a hosted API). Publish it with noulxp check on the same machine: speed means nothing without the answers being the model's own.

A causal-letters package can read a request's rows together: --batch-rows 16 (and --batch-cache per-row), for check, bench and the Python runtime. Whether that keeps a package compatible on a given machine is what noulxp check --batch-rows 16 answers.

GPUs trade precision for speed by default (TF32 in ONNX Runtime, 16-bit accumulation in llama.cpp's CUDA backend). --precision exact asks for float32 products on check, bench, serve and mcp: on an NVIDIA A40 it brought every encoder package to the CPU's numbers and made AnyJev's BF16 package pass on CUDA, costing 1 to 50 % of the speed (SPEC.md 8.1). Check at the precision you serve with.

Calibrate it to your data

A package's temperatures are data (SPEC.md 7), so how sure a model says it is can be fitted to the requests you serve without touching its weights:

noulxp calibrate packages/julia-1 labelled.jsonl --test held-out.jsonl --out julia-cal.json
noulxp serve packages/julia-1 --calibration julia-cal.json

labelled.jsonl is one request per line with a label per question: an option's key, a distribution over the options, or an answer object (another model's, say):

{"state": "I was charged twice.", "questions": {"intent": {"type": "choice", "criteria": ["refund", "cancel"]}, "angry": {"type": "noul"}}, "labels": {"intent": "refund", "angry": false}}

It fits one temperature per question type (the least mean KL from the labels, the log loss for one-hot labels), prints confidence, accuracy, KL, Brier and ECE before and after, and writes a calibration.json whose source records the labels' hash. Label with what was right (one option per question) to make the model's confidence match how often it is right; label with distributions, such as a bigger model's answers, to match their spread (--hard-labels fits to each distribution's leading option instead). Use requests the model was not trained on. The package is untouched: noulxp check still checks it at its own temperatures, and a server answering at a fitted file names it (its sha256) in /v1/models. On the typed-decisions test split, Julia 1 answers with a mean confidence of 0.96 and is right 72 % of the time; fitted to 50 held-out requests labelled with one option each, its confidence came to 0.72 (ECE 0.236 to 0.044), with the same decisions. run, serve, mcp and bench take --calibration; in Python, noulxp.load(path, calibration=...).

Give it to an AI agent (MCP)

noulxp mcp serves packages as tools of the Model Context Protocol, on stdio (SPEC.md 12): an agent calls decide with a request and gets the answer, with a calibrated probability per option, as structured output. In an MCP client's configuration (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor and others):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "julia-1": {
      "command": "noulxp",
      "args": ["mcp", "/path/to/packages/julia-1"]
    }
  }
}

It speaks both eras of MCP: the current revision (per-request metadata, server/discover) and the initialize handshake that earlier clients use.

Convert a model and check it

# 1. Convert: the package's graph references the checkpoint's weights, so it adds a few MB.
noulxp export laya    ckpt/laya-typed-decisions   packages/laya-typed-decisions
noulxp export julia   ckpt/julia-1                packages/julia-1
noulxp export decider ckpt/decider-2b-gguf        packages/decider-2b
noulxp export anyjev  ckpt/qwen3-1.7b             packages/anyjev-qwen3-1.7b \
    --gguf ckpt/Qwen3-1.7B-F16.gguf --base Qwen/Qwen3-1.7B   # llama.cpp's convert_hf_to_gguf.py --outtype f16

# 2. Record what the model's own code answers (on the CPU).
noulxp conformance generate packages/julia-1 --native ckpt/julia-1 --runtime julia

# 3. Replay it through the reference runtime.
noulxp check packages/julia-1                    # the reference: CPU
noulxp check packages/julia-1 --device coreml    # a backend: Core ML
noulxp validate packages/julia-1                 # schemas, parsers, coverage, hashes

# 4. A derived package at another precision, checked against the same answers.
noulxp quantize packages/julia-1 packages/julia-1-int8 --to int8       # fp16 for GPUs
noulxp quantize packages/decider-2b packages/decider-2b-q6_k --to q6_k # from F16/BF16
noulxp check packages/julia-1-int8

--runtime laya uses the laya package (the laya extra) and --runtime anyjev the anyjev package (the anyjev extra); julia and decider use noulxp.native (with the export extra, and llama-cpp-python for Decider).

Make your model NoulXP compatible

1. Pick the profile. If your model scores a marker token per option with a bidirectional encoder, it is encoder-markers. If it is a language model that reads the probability of option letters after a prompt, it is causal-letters; an instruction-tuned model asked in its chat template, in rotation, uses the typed layouts of SPEC.md 6.7 and 6.8.
2. Export the weights. encoder-markers: ONNX with the signature in SPEC.md 5.4 (input_ids, attention_mask, marker_positions, marker_mask, question_type → option_logits), dynamic dimensions named batch, tokens, options. noulxp.export.onnx_graph.export_graph does this for any torch module with that forward, and points the graph at your model.safetensors instead of copying it. causal-letters: your GGUF file.
3. Describe the input as data. Write template.json or prompt.json (SPEC.md sections 5 and 6): the head and option texts, the special tokens, the budgets and truncation rule, or the prompt pieces, labels and score mode. If your input cannot be described this way, open an issue: that is what the next version of the standard needs to know.
4. Declare calibration: the temperatures your code applies, by type and option count (section 7).
5. Generate conformance with your own code. Add a native adapter in src/noulxp/native/ that loads your model with your package and returns System One answers, then run noulxp conformance generate. The file records which code produced it.
6. Check. noulxp check must pass on the CPU (level 2, "NoulXP compatible"; SPEC.md section 10). Put the report next to the package and the badge in your model card.

Tests

pytest

The tests port the models' own input construction verbatim (Laya's build_sequence, Julia's sequence(), Decider's prompt builder) and require the declarative templates to give the same token ids, marker positions and refusals on hundreds of random requests. For AnyJev they run its own code (its core is numpy alone): its prompts, chat rendering and Decider on a fake model, which the typed layouts and rotations must match row for row and to 1e-12 in probability. A toy ONNX graph with the standard signature exercises generate and check end to end. Nothing is downloaded.

Licence

Apache-2.0. Converted packages carry the models' own weights and remain under the models' licences (see NOTICE).