---

torchnative replaces PyTorch's compiled core — torch._C — with a native extension, so the genuine torch and transformers packages run on a phone the way they run on a workstation.

Models are not ported, converted, or re-expressed. They are imported.

from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM     # the real one
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("...")
model.generate(...)                                # on the device

[!WARNING] Pre-alpha. The operator layer matches upstream PyTorch numerically, 19 of 20 tested architectures reach zero missing operators, real checkpoints load, transformers imports and generates, and an Android device runs the built artefact — but there is no accelerator backend, torch.compile does not work, and three of six platforms have been executed rather than merely built. See Status and Platform support before depending on this.

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Why not a reimplementation

Every other route to on-device inference re-expresses the model somewhere else.

	approach	cost
llama.cpp	architectures rewritten in C++	each new architecture is a porting task
ExecuTorch · CoreML	ahead-of-time compiled graph	export step, and what runs is not what you wrote
MLC	lowered to its own runtime	same
torchnative	the real Python package	the substrate is hard; architectures are free

The reason nobody runs the real thing is that torch._C cannot be built for mobile. PyTorch's own build sets INTERN_BUILD_MOBILE for any Android or iOS toolchain, and that path forces BUILD_PYTHON off — so the mobile build is structurally incapable of producing the Python extension module the Python package needs.

torchnative supplies that module instead. Everything above it is upstream source, unmodified.

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What it does

1 · LLM inference

Run transformers models directly. No conversion step, no per-architecture port — if transformers supports it and the operators are covered, it runs.

import torch
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("meta-llama/Llama-3.2-1B")
tok   = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("meta-llama/Llama-3.2-1B")

out = model.generate(**tok("On-device inference is", return_tensors="pt"),
                     max_new_tokens=32, do_sample=True)

Today: this runs. SmolLM2-135M is pulled from the Hub through from_pretrained — 273 tensors, weights bit-identical to upstream — and generate emits the same twenty tokens upstream does when the model is loaded in float32.

Loaded in the checkpoint's native bfloat16, which is what you get if you pass no dtype, the tokens diverge. That is not a defect to fix: upstream disagrees with itself on one prompt in three under a mathematically equivalent change of accumulation order, so bitwise agreement in bf16 is not a bar any independent implementation can clear. See Status.

2 · Federated learning

Devices train locally and share updates, not data. Federated averaging is collective communication, so this is built on torch.distributed rather than beside it — broadcast the model, gather the updates, weighted all-reduce.

from torchnative.nn import federated

engine = federated.Engine(model, rounds=..., aggregator=federated.FedAvg())
engine.participate()          # local epochs, then contribute a delta

Today: the transport under it stands. torch.distributed works at world_size = 1, and its sixteen value-producing collectives are byte-identical to upstream's gloo; what needs a second rank refuses by name rather than pretending. torchnative.nn.federated above it is still empty.

3 · Test-time adaptation & training

A model that ships to a device meets data the training set never had. TTA, TTT and the wider test-time learning family let it adapt in place — and every method reduces to the same thing: a weight delta over base weights, differing only in lifetime and destination.

from torchnative import adapt

model = adapt.wrap(model, method=adapt.Tent())   # or TTT, memory-based, entropy-based
model.online()                                   # adapt as it serves

Today: planned; the delta abstraction is specified in docs/DESIGN.md §3. Lifetime is driven by system events — backgrounding, user switch, sync window — rather than by the domain boundaries a benchmark hands you.

---

How it works

your code · transformers · torch/*.py        upstream Python, unmodified
──────────────────────────────────────────
torch._C                                     ← replaced
  ├── _aten_dispatch                         the single door every operator passes
  ├── Python spellings                       torch.mm, x.softmax(), F.linear, ...
  └── kernels                                Rust, backed by candle
──────────────────────────────────────────
CPU today · Metal, Vulkan, NPU planned

One door. Every operator reaches its kernel through _aten_dispatch, and nothing bypasses it. That makes the surface measurable — an unimplemented operator names itself rather than failing downstream — and it gives graph capture, which NPU backends will need, exactly one place to attach.

Demand-driven. Nothing is implemented because it might be needed. The shim refuses by name, the refusal names the next thing to build, and that list comes from running real models.

Stable ABI. Built against CPython's limited API (abi3-py313), so one binary per platform loads on 3.13, 3.14 and later without a rebuild.

---

Status

Working
ATen operators	139, each compared against upstream
Golden comparison cases	4284 / 4284 — values, shapes, dtypes, positional and keyword, through the door and through the member
Smoke tests	253
Signature and schema tables	4353 entries checked against upstream
Architectures — operator coverage	20 of 20 reach zero missing operators in the traced sweep
Architectures — actually forward	20 of 20 on this shim, matching upstream. GPT-BigCode was the last: identical argmax at every position, logits within 9e-08
Checkpoints	torch.load and safetensors, round-tripped against upstream
Build targets	macOS · Android · iOS · Linux · Windows — five of six build a wheel. WASM builds the extension and computes under Node, but a wheel needs dlopen (table)
Devices run	Android arm64 — import torch, 119 ops, nn forward. WASM runs under Pyodide — import torch and a matmul, though CPython 3.14 and no wheel
Speed vs upstream	desktop CPU, SmolLM2-135M prefill: 0.97x at 6 tokens, 1.13x at 128, 1.64x at 512 in float32 — the gap grows with sequence length and what is left is attention (SEQLEN.md). In bfloat16 it is 2.3x faster than upstream (DTYPE_PERF.md)

All twenty forward: Llama · GPT-2 · Qwen2 · Mistral · Gemma · GPT-NeoX · OPT · MPT · StarCoder2 · StableLM · OLMo · Phi · Mixtral · BERT · BLOOM · Cohere · Falcon · Mamba · Persimmon · GPT-BigCode

The two rows measure different things, and conflating them is a mistake this README made. The coverage sweep traces a forward pass on upstream torch and asks whether every operator it dispatches is implemented here — so it cannot see anything that is not an operator: an unbound tensor member, a missing torch.<name> spelling, a dtype-promotion rule.

Closing the six took 11 new kernels, 12 spellings, 16 tensor members, 13 _C surface names and 3 rule changes — and none of the six stopped on only one wall. Each had one to five more behind it, of a different kind each time: Cohere needed three spellings and no kernel at all, BERT went surface then spelling then kernel. "One operator away" was never true of any of them (docs/ARCH20.md).

Measured against transformers 5.x, which is what a fresh pip install transformers resolves today. 4.x costs four more architectures and needs a disjoint set of operators from Mixtral (docs/COMPAT.md).

uniform_ and normal_ are bit-identical to upstream, and multinomial consumes the same generator stream — a seeded run reproduces exactly. randn, rand, their _like forms and torch.normal are composed from those, and agree with upstream value for value under a seed.

Not working yet

• torch.compile does not work, and the reason is structural rather than a missing piece. Dynamo's frame-evaluation hook needs CPython internals — all six C files under torch/csrc/dynamo define Py_BUILD_CORE, and set_eval_frame reaches _PyInterpreterState_SetEvalFrameFunc on a _PyInterpreterFrame — which cannot coexist with the limited API in one extension. torch.compile and abi3 are mutually exclusive, and abi3 is what lets one binary per platform serve 3.13 and every later CPython. Eager is the supported path, and graph capture through the single door — already bit-exact against eager — is the route being pursued instead (docs/DYNAMO.md).
• CPU only. No GPU or NPU backend.
• The Android run is an emulator, not a phone. No number here describes real silicon.
• Apple is much faster than Android at f32 matmul, and that is the hardware. Accelerate reaches the AMX coprocessor; ARMv8.2-A NEON has no equivalent. Our Android throughput equals our own throughput on the same core under the same backend, at 88% of that core's NEON peak — so the kernels are not the gap. Upstream PyTorch has no Android wheel, so how we compare to it there is unmeasured. See docs/PERF_ANDROID.md.

Tracked with the measurements behind them in docs/DESIGN.md §11.1.

---

Platform support

Three axes, and they are not independent: a dtype only means something on a device, and a device only exists on a platform. Every ✅ has a run behind it.

Legend — ✅ measured working · ❌ measured refusing · ⚠️ built, never executed · 🔲 not built · — not applicable to that platform

Platforms

	macOS arm64	Android arm64	iOS arm64	Linux x86_64	Windows x86_64	WASM
in the target matrix	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	— deliberately
rust target installed	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
target CPython	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅ Pyodide 3.14
candle builds	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
candle computes	✅	✅	⚠️	⚠️	⚠️	✅ under Node
extension builds	✅	✅	✅	✅ cargo-zigbuild	✅ cargo-xwin	✅ emscripten
wheel builds	✅	✅	✅	✅ manylinux_2_17	✅ win_amd64	❌ WASI has no dlopen
symbols resolve	✅	✅	✅	⚠️ weaker: ELF names only versioned imports	✅ PE names every one	✅ stub behaviour proven against the real host
dlopen + PyInit_ runs	—	—	—	—	—	✅
installs	✅	✅	⚠️	⚠️	⚠️	✅ mounted, no wheel
import torch	✅	✅	⚠️	⚠️	⚠️	✅
computes	✅	✅	⚠️	⚠️	⚠️	✅
on PyPI 0.0.4a0	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	—
can be run here	✅	emulator	❌	❌	❌	✅ Node

The last row is why the columns differ. iOS, Linux and Windows have no runtime on this machine — no device, and no docker, colima, podman, lima or qemu — so the deepest rung any of them can reach here is symbols resolve.

WASM is the exception, and it has now been executed. A complete emsdk with emcc and a bundled Node 24 sits in this machine's cache — command -v node finds nothing only because it is not on PATH, which an earlier draft of this line published as "no node on this machine". Under a real Pyodide the extension loads, import torch returns 2.13.0 from the vendored tree, and a @ b and an nn.Linear forward match a host build. Two things keep it short of the others: Pyodide ships CPython 3.14, not 3.13, so the module is tied to one interpreter rather than to an abi3 floor — Emscripten voids abi3 regardless — and torch/__init__.py imports torch.multiprocessing, which a browser sandbox cannot supply, so that import is stubbed by the harness rather than solved. There is still no WASM wheel (docs/WASM.md).

Devices

device	macOS	Android	iOS	Linux	Windows	WASM	what it is
cpu	✅	✅	⚠️	⚠️	⚠️	✅	the only device that holds a tensor
meta	✅	✅	⚠️	⚠️	⚠️	🔲	shape and dtype, no storage
mps	❌	—	❌	—	—	—	candle has the backend; not enabled
vulkan	—	❌	—	🔲	🔲	—	refuses by name; compute proven in a probe, not wired
NNAPI · CoreML	—	❌	❌	—	—	—	needs the graph path, blocked at decomposition
cuda	❌	❌	❌	🔲	🔲	—	constructible as a label, refuses to allocate
WebGPU	—	—	—	—	—	🔲	the only accelerator a browser offers

dtypes on cpu

11 of 46 storable, and the same 11 on both platforms measured — Android was probed on the device rather than inferred from the host.

dtype	macOS	Android	iOS	Linux · Windows · WASM	arithmetic path
float32	✅	✅	⚠️	⚠️ · ⚠️ · 🔲	macOS: AMX via Accelerate · Android: NEON gemm, 88% of core peak
float64	✅	✅	⚠️	⚠️ · ⚠️ · 🔲	gemm
bfloat16 · float16	✅	✅	⚠️	⚠️ · ⚠️ · 🔲	widened to f32 in registers, accumulated, narrowed once — upstream's rule. Prefill is 1.19x float32 here and 2.3x faster than upstream's own bfloat16; decode still materialises the widened weight (docs/DTYPE_PERF.md)
bool uint8 uint32 int16 int32 int64	✅	✅	⚠️	⚠️ · ⚠️ · 🔲	integer kernels
float8_e4m3fn	⚠️	⚠️	⚠️	⚠️ · ⚠️ · 🔲	constructs, then hangs on most paths — excluded from the golden suite
int8 qint8 quint8	❌	❌	❌	❌	candle's DType has no I8: the tensor cannot be created
the other 35	❌	❌	❌	❌	complex, other float8, 4-bit — refuse by name

The last two rows are ❌ everywhere rather than 🔲, because the cause is in candle's type system and does not vary by platform.

Quantisation — beside the dtype system, not inside it

candle keeps quantisation in a separate QTensor type, which is why int8 being unstorable does not block it. Reached through torchnative.quant, which swaps nn.Linear.

format	macOS	Android	iOS	Linux · Windows · WASM	note
Q8_0	✅	✅	⚠️	⚠️ · ⚠️ · 🔲	lossless on integer operands — bit-identical to a dense linear
Q4_0	✅	✅	⚠️	⚠️ · ⚠️ · 🔲	29.5% logit RMS on SmolLM2; degrades generation
Q4K	✅	✅	⚠️	⚠️ · ⚠️ · 🔲	a k-quant, needing k % 256 — a model constraint, not a platform one

All three were measured on macOS and on the Android device with the same probe. SmolLM2 cannot use the k-quants because its layers are 576 wide and 576 is not a multiple of 256 — that is about the model, and an earlier draft of this table wrongly put it in the platform column.

Android Q4K is 1.60× f32 at prefill as shipped, and 3.29× with +dotprod — which cannot be turned on, candle having no runtime dispatch and ARMv8.0 devices no sdot (docs/QUANT.md).

Linux, Windows and WASM

Linux x86_64 crosses four of six layers (docs/LINUX.md). One thing blocks it, and it is not the linker — rust-lld ships with rustup and links ELF fine. It is that x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu is the one target rustup ships no glibc stubs for, and that candle → tokenizers → onig → onig_sys is a C crate, so the build stops at failed to find tool "x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc" before linking is even reached. cargo-zigbuild supplies all of it and is not installed; that is a decision, not an oversight.

Windows x86_64 has its CPython distribution and nothing else yet.

WASM runs. Under Emscripten and the Node in this machine's emsdk, candle computes a quantised matmul to 511.96875 — bit-identical to the host, the same quantisation error rather than a round number agreeing — and dlopen loads our own cdylib, whose PyInit_ executes and returns a module definition (docs/WASM.md §7). The onig subtree drops out there, so the dependency count falls 129 → 80.

What it costs is abi3. Pyodide pins CPython 3.13, 3.14 and 3.15 to Emscripten 4.0.9, 5.0.3 and 6.0.5 — three releases, three compilers — so WASM would be one binary per CPython feature release rather than one per platform. That is a different distribution model from the other five, not a variation on it. WASI is separately blocked: no dlopen, so torch._C cannot be a wheel there at all. And PEP 783 forbids -pthread, so the honest line is scalar and single-threaded — simd128 is off because candle's own WASM SIMD backend does not compile.

It is absent from the matrix on purpose: that table is a kernels backend matrix, and kernels has no wasm backend — the same gap it already records for vulkan.

---

Verification

Correctness here means agreeing with upstream PyTorch, so the strategy is comparison rather than assertion.

Golden comparison	Every operator runs on both upstream torch and this shim, compared on value, shape and dtype. It has caught a float16 GEMM accumulating in float16 where torch accumulates in float32, cumsum routed through the wrong kernel, and integer overflow where torch refuses.
The harness tests itself	--self-test injects a fault shaped like a plausible misimplementation at each comparator and fails if the comparator accepts it — 11 comparators × 11 fault modes, with any comparator never exercised reported as failure. It found that the previous fault injection reached exactly one case out of 1781.
Tokens are not enough	A wrong gelu approximation produced identical tokens while logits differed by 5.9e-04. End-to-end tests compare logits too, with a tolerance measured to sit between normal float32 noise and that failure.

sh rust/torch_c/pytests/run.sh                  # smoke tests + harness self-test
python tools/golden/compare.py                  # golden comparison against upstream
python rust/torch_c/pytests/verify_schemas.py   # signature tables vs upstream

---

Roadmap

The next milestone is the device abstraction, because everything waits on it — a distributed rank needs a device to point at, and every accelerator attaches there.

torchnative.nn.federated    rounds · client selection · aggregation · dropout
  └ torch.distributed       ProcessGroup · collectives (transport)
      └ backends            ours, via register_backend
          └ devices         CPU · Metal · Vulkan · NPU

Device abstraction	torch.device, per-device dispatch. Everything else waits on it.
Metal	candle already has the backend; disabled here for build isolation, not absent.
torch.distributed	From world_size = 1 upward. Unblocks transformers as a side effect.
Vulkan	No candle backend and no vulkan slot in the kernels contract — genuinely new work. Wiring and correctness are testable on an emulator; only the performance question needs a phone.
NPU	NNAPI, CoreML and QNN compile at runtime, so no export step is added — but they take a whole subgraph, not one operator. That needs a capture layer, and the single door is where it attaches.

---

Install

pip install torchnative

Every published version is a pre-release, so if your resolver is configured to skip those, ask for one by name: pip install --pre torchnative.

0.0.4a0 ships five platform wheels, all cp313-abi3 — one binary per platform, loadable by CPython 3.13 and every later release. Each carries the _C extension and the vendored upstream tree, so import torch resolves to this build.

They are not all verified to the same depth, and the table says which is which.

wheel	built	installed	import torch	computes
macosx_11_0_arm64	✅	✅	✅	✅
android_21_arm64_v8a	✅	✅	✅	✅
ios_12_0_arm64_iphoneos	✅	—	—	—
manylinux_2_17_x86_64	✅	—	—	—
win_amd64	✅	—	—	—

The iOS simulator wheel is built but deliberately not published: it loads only under a simulator, so on PyPI it would be a trap for anyone whose resolver reached it.

Linux and Windows are in the same position as iOS and for the same reason — this machine has no Linux or Windows runtime and no container tooling, so verification stops at the artefact. Every import in the Linux wheel resolves, and every import in the Windows one is attributed to a naming DLL, which is the stronger of the two checks because PE records a DLL per import where ELF records only versioned ones (docs/LINUX.md, docs/WINDOWS.md).

macOS is checked in a clean virtualenv and Android on a device, unpacked into its CPython's site-packages — in both, torch.__file__ lands inside the install, aten.mm returns the right answer and an nn.Linear forward runs (docs/WHEEL.md §7).

[!IMPORTANT] The iOS wheel has never been executed. What is verified is everything short of running it: its 222 undefined symbols all resolve against the device Python.framework and the iOS SDK, checked through the two-level namespace bindings dyld itself uses, and every file in it outside the extension is byte-identical to the simulator wheel, which does import and compute. What is not verified is the load itself, @rpath resolution inside a real app bundle, and code signing — none of which can be answered without a device (docs/IOS.md).

If you run it on a phone, we would like to hear either way.

[!NOTE] 0.0.1a0 is still on PyPI and does not work — it is py3-none-any and carries the torchnative skeleton alone, no _C and no torch, so it installs cleanly and then fails to import. Ask for 0.0.4a0 or later.

There is no source distribution. Building needs a Rust toolchain and a vendoring step that pip cannot drive, so an sdist would install and then fail; the recipe is below instead.

Building from source

Requires a Rust toolchain and CPython 3.13+.

bash vendor/vendor_torch.sh     # assemble the vendored torch tree
bash vendor/install_shim.sh     # build the extension and install it

Building a wheel

Additionally requires pip, setuptools and wheel in the building interpreter, and a C compiler for the empty libtorch_global_deps (see docs/WHEEL.md §3.2).

bash vendor/vendor_torch.sh
bash vendor/install_shim.sh
python tools/wheel/build.py                            # -> dist/*.whl
python tools/wheel/verify.py dist/torchnative-*.whl    # clean venv, real import

verify.py is the part that matters: it installs into a throwaway virtualenv and asserts that torch.__file__ resolves inside it. A check that lets the development tree answer proves nothing about the wheel.

Cross-compilation is documented in docs/RUST_CROSSBUILD.md, including the PyO3 configuration iOS needs in order not to link libpython.

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Repository layout

torchnative/     the Python library
rust/torch_c/    the torch._C replacement (Rust · PyO3 · candle)
tools/golden/    the upstream comparison harness
tools/wheel/     build a platform wheel, and prove it installs (docs/WHEEL.md)
vendor/          scripts that assemble the vendored torch tree (not checked in)
docs/            design, measurements, and the reasoning behind open decisions

docs/ is written to be read. It records what was measured, what was assumed, and where an earlier conclusion turned out to be wrong — corrections are left visible rather than edited away. Start with DESIGN.md; SURFACE_HONESTY.md and HARNESS.md show the standard the rest aims for.

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Related

• PythonMultiplatform — embeds CPython 3.13 into Kotlin Multiplatform; the deployment target for this library
• pypackpack — the build and bundling tool
• Hugging Face kernels — the fused-kernel contract this adopts, with resolution moved from runtime download to build time, since downloading executable code is not permitted on every target platform

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License

MIT — see LICENSE.

PyTorch is vendored under its own BSD-3-Clause license. The vendored tree is assembled at build time and is not redistributed in this repository.