This is a rewrite of the create functionality for the MLX engine.
The core idea behind the create functionality is to break the import/convert into a pipeline of distinct phases:
* Read (scan the safetensors directory for the various bits of metadata)
* Classify (determine what the import type)
* Plan (determine any transforms that need to be done)
* Write (transform any data as necessary and write out the blobs)
* Create the manifest
Each architecture has a "policy" which determines how to convert the model correctly. A number of different formats for safetensors are supported including:
* nvfp4 (two formats: model optimized, torch)
* fp8 datatypes (convert to mxfp8)
* standard bf16 based weights
A number of cleanups/simplifications have been done including:
* using the baked in names for the tensors instead of munging them into something else
* unified 3d expert tensors (instead of separate per expert tensors)
* fewer unnecessary transforms to the various tensors in a model (keep a model as close to the source as possible)
* unified capability checking
* draft model handling (for MTP) is done on the same path
Image generation has been intentionally removed.
The heuristic schedule grew the draft toward a fixed cap on acceptance alone,
maximizing accepted-tokens-per-step rather than throughput, and on a
steep-forward target it regressed below no speculation. Replace it with an
engine-level controller that drafts the depth maximizing
committed-tokens-per-wallclock from live per-position acceptance and persisted
per-width forward cost, with no draft-length cap; the heuristic schedule and
the OLLAMA_MLX_MTP_* env vars go with it.
Generalize the draft path so a head that maintains a KV cache (EAGLE-style)
and Gemma's read-only single-position assistant both fit one drafter
interface with no per-model branches, and make the committed stream the
drafter's maintenance mechanism — every committed run is reported, the
drafter pairs each draft slot with its look-ahead token and flushes completed
pairs to the draft caches. The draft KV thus stays prefix-cached alongside
the target in every session, drafting or not.
This reverts commit 98e26b8c37.
The DFlash integration is too invasive to keep at this stage: it
threads DFlash-specific logic through the pipeline, base model
interfaces, and the cache layer. The recurrent cache also now
has qwen3.5 model-specific code. Revert it now and reintroduce
the self-contained, generally-useful pieces (YaRN RoPE DRY-out, draft
architecture autodetection, gated-delta fp32 state) as separate
follow-up commits.
This change adds dflash block diffusion speculative decoding to the MLX runner. Included in this change:
support for qwen3.6 moe/dense speculative decoding
draft model recurrent cache playback
RoPE/YaRN changes (DRY out the laguna/dflash MoE YaRN implementation)
support for greedy sampling / leviathan/chen sampling
This change adds support for MTP (multi-token prediction) speculative decoding for the
gemma4 model family.
It includes:
* support for importing safetensors based gemma4 draft models with `ollama create`
* a new DRAFT command in the Modelfile for specifying draft models
* a --quantize-draft flag for the ollama create command to quantize the draft model
* cache support for speculation
* changes to the rotating cache to be able to handle MTP correctly
* sampling support for draft model token prediction
---------
Co-authored-by: Daniel Hiltgen <daniel@ollama.com>
Gives a single extension point for per-call context (positions,
sequence IDs, masks) as multi-sequence batching grows, without having
to churn every model's Forward signature again.
* mlx: Support NVIDIA TensorRT Model Optimizer import
* x/create: support FP8 safetensors import
Decode HF F8_E4M3 safetensors with block scale companions into MLX-importable tensor blobs, including compressed-tensors weight_scale metadata, packed NVFP4 layouts, and mixed-precision tensor headers.
Use that source-precision metadata during create quantization: default FP8-sourced imports to mxfp8, allow source FP8 to target MLX low-bit formats, preserve source-quantized NVFP4 layouts, selectively keep or promote tensors based on their source precision, and detect quantized dtype from mixed-precision safetensors manifests.
* review comments
Improve the MLX model creation pipeline with several model-agnostic changes:
- Rewrite supportsVision to use vision_config instead of architecture name
- Add supportsAudio for audio encoder detection
- Add alignment checking (isAligned) for quantization group sizes
- Support per-projection mixed quantization in MoE expert packing
- Record per-tensor quant metadata in safetensors blobs
- Parse per-tensor quant metadata at model load time
- Validate quantize output is non-empty before storing
- Fix pin/unpin cleanup in expert group quantization
- Promote v_proj/k_proj/down_proj to INT8 for INT4 base quant
- Add MetalIsAvailable() utility
- Skip audio encoder tensors from quantization
Add QuantizedEmbedding and EmbeddingLayer interface so models can
use quantized embedding weights and expose tied output projections.
This change updates gemma3, glm4_moe_lite, llama, qwen3, and qwen3_5
to use the new interface.
* prefer rocm v6 on windows
Avoid building with v7 - more changes are needed
* MLX: add header vendoring and remove go build tag
This switches to using a vendoring approach for the mlx-c headers so that Go
can build without requiring a cmake first. This enables building the new MLX
based code by default. Every time cmake runs, the headers are refreshed, so we
can easily keep them in sync when we bump mlx versions. Basic Windows
and Linux support are verified.
* ci: harden for flaky choco repo servers
CI sometimes fails due to choco not actually installing cache. Since it just speeds up the build, we can proceed without.
* review comments
Currently, context length is unbounded - the cache will keep
growing forever independent of the model's trained context
length. This caps it and enforces semantics similar to most
cloud services:
- Long prompts will result in an error, not truncation.
- Generation that exceeds the context will be stopped
The previous approach tracked array lifecycles through reference
counting, where each array recorded its inputs and a reference count
that was decremented as dependents were freed. This is not really
necessary as MLX tracks references internally. It is also error
prone as it is easy to create new arrays and forget to free them
when the Go variable goes out of scope.
Instead, we can pin just the arrays we want (typically outputs and
specific intermediates, like the cache). All other arrays are freed
by default when we run sweep. This avoids most causes of memory leaks
while still giving the freedom to save what we want.
This change adds a new x/tokenizer package which includes:
* New BPE and SentencePiece tokenizers
* Removing the dependency on the imagegen tokenizers
* Fixes to multibyte decoding in the pipeline
* Various correctness and benchmark tests
Not included in this PR is the WordPiece tokenizer for BERT models which will be
added when we add embedding models. The imagegen tokenizers will also be removed in
a follow-up PR.
