oplm 0.1.3

open protein language model

OPLM

Open Protein Language Model — an encoder-only protein language model with a HuggingFace-native, ESM-C-style API. Load a pretrained checkpoint, hand it a list of sequences, and get back per-residue logits and embeddings.

Status: Pre-alpha (v0.0.1). The model, tokenizer, inference API, and HuggingFace integration are stable; pretrained checkpoints and benchmark results are still landing.

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Highlights

• ESM-C-style inference API — model.logits(sequences, LogitsConfig(...)) returns a structured LogitsOutput with sequence_logits, embeddings, hidden_states, and attentions. If you've used ESM-C, you already know it.
• HuggingFace-native — every model is a PreTrainedModel. Use OplmForMaskedLM.from_pretrained(...) or the transformers Auto* classes, load from the Hub, and save_pretrained / push_to_hub like any other model.
• ESM-C-compatible tokenizer — a 33-token OplmTokenizerFast with the same vocabulary and special tokens as ESM-C.
• Fast attention — built on PyTorch's scaled_dot_product_attention (a fused FlashAttention / memory-efficient kernel on CUDA, no separate flash-attn dependency), with a manual softmax path for returning attention weights.
• Five sizes — from a 5M-parameter ablation model up to 13B parameters.

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Installation

Requirements: Python ≥ 3.11 and PyTorch ≥ 2.10.

pip install oplm

Or from source:

git clone https://github.com/briney/oplm.git
cd oplm
pip install -e .

Inference needs no extras. The optional groups are for contributors:

pip install "oplm[train]"   # distributed training (Accelerate, W&B, datasets)
pip install "oplm[dev]"     # tests, linting, type checking

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Quick start

Per-residue logits and embeddings

The primary entry point is OplmForMaskedLM. from_pretrained loads the weights and attaches the matching tokenizer, so .logits() takes raw sequences directly:

import torch
from oplm import OplmForMaskedLM, LogitsConfig

model = OplmForMaskedLM.from_pretrained("brineylab/oplm-170M").eval()

sequences = [
    "MSHHWGYGKHNGPEHWHKDFPIAKGERQSPVDIDTHTAKYDPSLKPLSVSYDQATSLRIL",
    "MKTAYIAKQRQISFVKSHFSRQLEERLGLIEVQAPILSRVGDGTQDNLSGAEKAVQVKVK",
]

with torch.no_grad():
    out = model.logits(
        sequences,
        LogitsConfig(sequence=True, return_embeddings=True),
    )

out.sequence_logits   # (B, T, 33) per-residue amino-acid logits
out.embeddings        # (B, T, hidden_size) per-residue embeddings

B is the batch size and T is the padded sequence length (each sequence is wrapped with <cls> … <eos>).

Per-protein embeddings

For a single fixed-size vector per sequence, run the backbone (OplmModel) and mask-aware mean-pool over the residue dimension:

import torch
from oplm import OplmModel
from oplm.model import mean_pool

model = OplmModel.from_pretrained("brineylab/oplm-170M").eval()

batch = model.tokenize(sequences)            # BatchEncoding on the model's device
with torch.no_grad():
    out = model(
        input_ids=batch["input_ids"],
        attention_mask=batch["attention_mask"],
    )

per_residue = out.last_hidden_state          # (B, T, hidden_size)
per_protein = mean_pool(per_residue, batch["attention_mask"])  # (B, hidden_size)

oplm.model also exports cls_pool if you prefer the <cls> representation.

Using the transformers Auto* API

Importing oplm registers the config, models, and tokenizer with transformers, so the standard Auto* classes work too:

import oplm  # registers OPLM with transformers' Auto* classes
from transformers import AutoModelForMaskedLM, AutoTokenizer

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("brineylab/oplm-170M")
model = AutoModelForMaskedLM.from_pretrained("brineylab/oplm-170M").eval()

batch = tokenizer(sequences, return_tensors="pt", padding=True)
with torch.no_grad():
    logits = model(**batch).logits   # (B, T, 33)

AutoModel returns the bare encoder, and AutoModelForSequenceClassification / AutoModelForTokenClassification return the corresponding fine-tuning heads.

Each model repo also bundles its modeling code, so consumers who don't have oplm installed can load it with trust_remote_code=True:

model = AutoModelForMaskedLM.from_pretrained("brineylab/oplm-170M", trust_remote_code=True)

Coming from ESM-C?

OPLM mirrors the ESM-C inference surface so existing pipelines port with minimal changes:

• LogitsConfig(sequence=..., return_embeddings=...) is the same knob object.
• model.logits(...) returns a LogitsOutput; read output.embeddings exactly as you would with ESM-C.
• The tokenizer vocabulary (33 tokens, <cls>/<pad>/<eos>/<mask> specials) matches ESM-C.

The main difference: OPLM's .logits() and .tokenize() accept a list[str] of sequences directly, rather than pre-encoded protein tensors. Per-residue logits live in output.sequence_logits.

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Model sizes

OPLM ships eight size presets, selected on the command line with --preset <name>. A preset is an architecture recipe (it sets the core dimensions only); it does not download weights. To load pretrained weights, pass a Hub id or a local checkpoint directory to --model (see below).

Preset	Parameters	Layers	Hidden	Heads
50M	~50M	16	512	8
170M	~170M	24	768	12
400M	~400M	32	1024	16
800M	~800M	40	1280	16
1B	~1.6B	50	1600	25
3B	~3.3B	64	2048	32
6B	~6B	80	2560	40
12B	~12.5B	100	3200	50

All sizes share the 33-token tokenizer and a 1024-position context window.

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Command line

oplm ships a small CLI; oplm --help lists every command.

Encode sequences to a file

oplm encode MKWVTFISLLLLFSSAYS MLPGLALLLLAAWTARA \
  --model brineylab/oplm-170M \
  --output embeddings.pt

--model accepts a Hub id, a local HuggingFace export directory, or a training checkpoint directory. The saved tensor holds the per-residue embeddings, (num_sequences, T, hidden_size).

Inspect a model

oplm info --preset 400M

──────────────── OPLM Model Info ────────────────
                Architecture
 Parameters        412.3M (412,302,369)
 Hidden size       1024
 Layers            32
 Attention heads   16
 Head dim          64
 Intermediate size 2816
 FFN activation    swiglu
 ...

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Training

OPLM trains with HuggingFace Accelerate (FSDP, mixed precision, gradient checkpointing, optional Muon optimizer) over parquet sequence datasets, with a built-in eval harness for MLM metrics and structure-based contact prediction.

oplm train --preset 400M --config configs/my_run.yaml

See docs/TRAIN.md for the full training guide.

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Configuration

Models and runs are configured through a layered system (defaults → preset → YAML → CLI overrides) built on a HuggingFace PretrainedConfig. Architecture toggles, optimizer/scheduler settings, and the dataset schema are all set here.

See docs/CONFIG.md for the field-by-field reference.

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Architecture

OPLM is a pre-norm, bidirectional encoder transformer with RoPE and QK-norm: LayerNorm by default (RMSNorm available), SwiGLU feed-forward, untied input/output embeddings, standard multi-head attention, depth-stable residual scaling, and a BERT-style MLM head. A curated set of independently togglable research features (Canon depthwise convolutions, partial-RoPE/NoPE, sandwich / hybrid / post-SDPA norm) layers on top, each off by default.

For the complete specification, see docs/MODEL_ARCHITECTURE.md.

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Development

pip install -e ".[dev]"

pytest                  # run tests
pytest -m "not slow"    # skip slow tests
pytest --cov=oplm       # with coverage

ruff check src/         # lint
ruff format src/        # format
ty check src/           # type check (Astral's `ty`, not mypy)

Contributor and agent instructions live in AGENTS.md.

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License

MIT — see LICENSE.