MLXLLM
Documentation
- Porting and implementing models
- MLXLLMCommon -- common API for LLM and VLM
- MLXLLM -- large language model example implementations
- MLXVLM -- vision language model example implementations
Contents
This is a port of several models from:
Tokenization is provided via the TokenizerLoader protocol – see the main
README for available integration packages.
The LLMModelFactory.swift provides minor overrides and customization -- if you require overrides for the tokenizer or prompt customizations they can be added there.
This is set up to load models from Hugging Face, e.g. https://huggingface.co/mlx-community
The following models have been tried:
- mlx-community/CodeLlama-13b-Instruct-hf-4bit-MLX
- mlx-community/Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct-4bit
- mlx-community/Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct-4bit
- mlx-community/Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct-4bit
- mlx-community/Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct-4bit
- mlx-community/Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3-4bit
- mlx-community/Mistral-Nemo-Instruct-2407-4bit
- mlx-community/OpenELM-270M-Instruct
- mlx-community/Phi-3.5-MoE-instruct-4bit
- mlx-community/Phi-3.5-mini-instruct-4bit
- mlx-community/Qwen1.5-0.5B-Chat-4bit
- mlx-community/SmolLM-135M-Instruct-4bit
- mlx-community/gemma-2-2b-it-4bit
- mlx-community/gemma-2-9b-it-4bit
- mlx-community/phi-2-hf-4bit-mlx
- mlx-community/quantized-gemma-2b-it
Currently supported model types are:
- Cohere
- Gemma
- Gemma2
- InternLM2
- Llama / Mistral
- MiniCPM (v1/v2/v4; v3 uses a different architecture)
- OpenELM
- Phi
- Phi3
- PhiMoE
- Qwen2
- Qwen3
- Qwen3-Next
- Starcoder2
- MiMo
- MiMo_v2_flash
- MiniMax
- GLM4
- GLM4MOE
- AceReason
- NemotronH
See llm-tool
Quick Start
Using LLMs and VLMs from MLXLMCommon is as easy as:
import MLXLLM
import MLXLMHuggingFace
import MLXLMTokenizers
let model = try await loadModel(
using: TokenizersLoader(),
id: "mlx-community/Qwen3-4B-4bit"
)
let session = ChatSession(model)
print(try await session.respond(to: "What are two things to see in San Francisco?"))
print(try await session.respond(to: "How about a great place to eat?"))
For more information see Evaluation or Using Models for more advanced API.
Adding a Model
If the model follows the typical LLM pattern:
config.json,tokenizer.json, andtokenizer_config.json*.safetensors
You can follow the pattern of the models in the Models directory
and create a .swift file for your new model:
Create a Configuration
Create a configuration struct to match the config.json (any parameters needed).
public struct YourModelConfiguration: Codable, Sendable {
public let hiddenSize: Int
// use this pattern for values that need defaults
public let _layerNormEps: Float?
public var layerNormEps: Float { _layerNormEps ?? 1e-6 }
enum CodingKeys: String, CodingKey {
case hiddenSize = "hidden_size"
case _layerNormEps = "layer_norm_eps"
}
}
Create the Model Class
Create the model class. The top-level public class should have a structure something like this:
public class YourModel: Module, LLMModel, KVCacheDimensionProvider, LoRAModel {
public let kvHeads: [Int]
@ModuleInfo var model: YourModelInner
public func loraLinearLayers() -> LoRALinearLayers {
// TODO: modify as needed
model.layers.map { ($0.attention, ["q_proj", "v_proj"]) }
}
public init(_ args: YourModelConfiguration) {
self.kvHeads = Array(repeating: args.kvHeads, count: args.hiddenLayers)
self.model = YourModelInner(args)
}
public func callAsFunction(_ inputs: MLXArray, cache: [KVCache]?) -> MLXArray {
// TODO: modify as needed
let out = model(inputs, cache: cache)
return model.embedTokens.asLinear(out)
}
}
Register the Model
In LLMModelFactory.swift register the model type itself (this is independent of the model id):
public class LLMTypeRegistry: @unchecked Sendable {
...
private var creators: [String: @Sendable (URL) throws -> any LanguageModel] = [
"yourModel": create(YourModelConfiguration.self, YourModel.init),
Add a constant for the model in the LLMRegistry (not strictly required but useful
for callers to refer to it in code):
public class LLMRegistry: @unchecked Sendable {
...
static public let yourModel_4bit = ModelConfiguration(
id: "mlx-community/YourModel-4bit",
defaultPrompt: "What is the gravity on Mars and the moon?"
)
and finally add it to the all list -- this will let users find the model configuration by id:
private static func all() -> [ModelConfiguration] {
[
codeLlama13b4bit,
...
yourModel_4bit,
Using a Model
LoRA
Lora.swift contains an implementation of LoRA based on this example:
See llm-tool/LoraCommands.swift for an example of a driver and llm-tool for examples of how to run it.