Export a model to ExecuTorch with optimum.exporters.executorch

If you need to deploy 🤗 Transformers models for on-device use cases, we recommend exporting them to a serialized format that can be distributed and executed on specialized runtimes and hardware. In this guide, we’ll show you how to export these models to ExecuTorch.

Why ExecuTorch?

ExecuTorch is the ideal solution for deploying PyTorch models on edge devices, offering a streamlined process from export to deployment without leaving PyTorch ecosystem.

Supporting on-device AI presents unique challenges with diverse hardware, critical power requirements, low/no internet connectivity, and realtime processing needs. These constraints have historically prevented or slowed down the creation of scalable and performant on-device AI solutions. We designed ExecuTorch, backed by our industry partners like Meta, Arm, Apple, Qualcomm, MediaTek, etc. to be highly portable and provide superior developer productivity without losing on performance.

Summary

Exporting a PyTorch model to ExecuTorch is as simple as

optimum-cli export executorch --model "meta-llama/Llama-3.2-1B" --task "text-generation" --recipe "xnnpack" --output_dir "meta_llama3_2_1b"

Check out the help for more options:

optimum-cli export executorch --help

Exporting a model to ExecuTorch using the CLI

To export a 🤗 Transformers model to ExecuTorch, you’ll first need to install some extra dependencies:

pip install optimum[exporters-executorch]

The Optimum ExecuTorch export can be used through Optimum command-line:

optimum-cli export executorch --help

usage: optimum-cli export executorch [-h] -m MODEL [-o OUTPUT_DIR] [--task TASK] [--recipe RECIPE]

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit

Required arguments:
  -m MODEL, --model MODEL
                        Model ID on huggingface.co or path on disk to load model from.
  -o OUTPUT_DIR, --output_dir OUTPUT_DIR
                        Path indicating the directory where to store the generated ExecuTorch model.
  --task TASK           The task to export the model for. Available tasks depend on the model, but are among: ['audio-classification', 'feature-extraction', 'image-to-text',
                        'sentence-similarity', 'depth-estimation', 'image-segmentation', 'audio-frame-classification', 'masked-im', 'semantic-segmentation', 'text-classification',
                        'audio-xvector', 'mask-generation', 'question-answering', 'text-to-audio', 'automatic-speech-recognition', 'image-to-image', 'multiple-choice', 'image-
                        classification', 'text2text-generation', 'token-classification', 'object-detection', 'zero-shot-object-detection', 'zero-shot-image-classification', 'text-
                        generation', 'fill-mask'].
  --recipe RECIPE       Pre-defined recipes for export to ExecuTorch. Defaults to "xnnpack".

Exporting a checkpoint can be done as follows:

optimum-cli export executorch --model "meta-llama/Llama-3.2-1B" --task "text-generation" --recipe "xnnpack" --output_dir "meta_llama3_2_1b"

You should see a model.pte file is stored under “./meta_llama3_2_1b/“:

meta_llama3_2_1b/
└── model.pte

This will fetch the model on the Hub and exports the PyTorch model with the specialized recipe. The resulting model.pte file can then be run on the XNNPACK backend, or on many other ExecuTorh supported backends if exports with different recipes, e.g. Apple’s Core ML or MPS, Qualcomm’s SoCs, ARM’s Ethos-U, Xtensa HiFi4 DSP, Vulkan GPU, MediaTek, etc.

For example, we can load and run the model with ExecuTorch Runtime using the optimum.executorchruntime package as follows:

>>> from transformers import AutoTokenizer
>>> from optimum.executorchruntime import ExecuTorchModelForCausalLM

>>> tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("meta-llama/Llama-3.2-1B")
>>> model = ExecuTorchModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("meta_llama3_2_1b/", export=False)
>>> generated_text = model.text_generation(tokenizer=tokenizer, prompt="Simply put, the theory of relativity states that", max_seq_len=45)

Printing the generated_text would give that:

"Simply put, the theory of relativity states that the laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames of reference. In other words, the laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames of reference."

As you can see, converting a model to ExecuTorch does not mean leaving the Hugging Face ecosystem. You end up with a similar API as regular 🤗 Transformers models!

It is also possible to export the model to ExecuTorch directly from the ExecuTorchModelForCausalLM class by doing the following:

>>> from optimum.executorchruntime import ExecuTorchModelForCausalLM

>>> model = ExecuTorchModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("meta-llama/Llama-3.2-1B", export=True, task="text-generation", recipe="xnnpack")
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