mlx-arsenal

Low-level operations and reusable building blocks missing from MLX core — the toolbox you want when porting PyTorch models to Apple Silicon.

Tip: if you use Claude Code for MLX ports, the mlx-porting skill teaches Claude to reach for mlx-arsenal submodules (diffusion, spatial, attention, norm, encoding, moe, tiling, etc.) before hand-rolling ops.

Install

pip install mlx-arsenal

Or directly from source:

pip install git+https://github.com/dgrauet/mlx-arsenal.git

Modules

Module	Components	Replaces (PyTorch)
mlx_arsenal.spatial	interpolate_nearest, interpolate_3d, avg_pool1d, replicate_pad, upsample_nearest/bilinear, pixel_shuffle/unshuffle, patchify/unpatchify, PatchEmbed2d/3d	F.interpolate, F.avg_pool1d, F.pad(mode="replicate"), F.pixel_shuffle
mlx_arsenal.layout	to_channels_last/first, channels_last ctx manager, convert_conv_weights, load_safetensors	NCHW ↔ NHWC conversion, weight transposition
mlx_arsenal.conv	weight_norm, WeightNorm	nn.utils.weight_norm
mlx_arsenal.attention	causal_mask, sliding_window_mask, spatial_only_mask, temporal_only_mask, sliding_tile_block_mask, sliding_tile_centered_mask, radial_box_mask, radial_gaussian_mask, classify_heads_from_qk, classify_heads_from_probs, classify, Kind, block_contiguous_permutation, invert_permutation	Attention mask creation, head-pattern profiler, SVG2 block-contiguous token permutation
mlx_arsenal.norm	PixelNorm, ScaleNorm	Custom normalization layers
mlx_arsenal.encoding	FourierEmbedder	Sinusoidal positional encoding
mlx_arsenal.diffusion	get_timestep_embedding, TimestepEmbedding, get_sampling_sigmas, dynamic_shift_schedule, FlowMatchEulerDiscreteScheduler, DDIMScheduler, euler_step, classifier_free_guidance, TeaCacheController, PerLayerAttentionCache, PerHeadAttentionCache, splice_heads, cfg_head_similarity, cfg_skip_mask, CFGSimilarityProfiler, CFGSkipController, WindowResidualController	Flow-matching + DDIM diffusion primitives, TeaCache, AST attention caches, ASC cond/uncond skip, WA-RS residual sharing
mlx_arsenal.moe	MoEGate, MoELayer	Top-k mixture-of-experts dispatch
mlx_arsenal.rasterize	rasterize_triangles, interpolate	Differentiable triangle rasterization with Metal z-buffer
mlx_arsenal.tiling	tiled_process, temporal_slice_process	Memory-efficient large tensor processing
mlx_arsenal.streaming	BlockStreamer, BlockLoraSource, LoraFuser	Low-RAM transformer block streaming from mmap'd safetensors
mlx_arsenal.modulation	AdaLNModulation, ScaleShiftTable, modulate, gated_residual	DiT AdaLN modulation primitives (1 / 2 / 6 / 9-param variants)
mlx_arsenal.ffn	FeedForward, GatedFFN, GeGLU, SwiGLU	Transformer FFN / MLP blocks (vanilla + gated variants)
mlx_arsenal.loader	SDOps, SafetensorsStateDictLoader, StateDict, read_safetensors_metadata	State-dict key remapping chain + safetensors loader
mlx_arsenal.rope	rope_frequencies_1d, rope_frequencies_nd, apply_rotary_emb, rotate_half, meshgrid_nd	Rotary Position Embeddings (N-D, interleaved + half-rotated variants)

Quick start

from mlx_arsenal.spatial import interpolate_nearest, avg_pool1d, replicate_pad
from mlx_arsenal.layout import to_channels_last, convert_conv_weights
from mlx_arsenal.attention import causal_mask

# Resize a video tensor (B, D, H, W, C)
x_resized = interpolate_nearest(x, size=(8, 32, 32))

# Temporal pooling
pooled = avg_pool1d(temporal_features, kernel_size=2)

# Pad with edge replication (like F.pad mode="replicate")
padded = replicate_pad(x, [(0,0), (2,0), (1,1), (1,1), (0,0)])

# Convert PyTorch conv weights to MLX channels-last layout
mlx_weights = convert_conv_weights(pytorch_weights)

# Causal attention mask for autoregressive decoding
mask = causal_mask(seq_len=128, offset=kv_cache_len)

Block streaming (low-RAM transformers)

Run a 20+ GB transformer on a Mac without holding every block resident at once: keep one shared block module, and rebind its weights from memory-mapped safetensors before each block's forward.

from mlx_arsenal.streaming import BlockStreamer

# Build the model with ONE block in transformer_blocks (not num_layers).
model = build_my_transformer(num_layers=1)
load_non_block_weights(model, weights_path)

streamer = BlockStreamer(
    weights_path,
    block_prefix="transformer.transformer_blocks.",
)
assert streamer.block_count == num_layers  # discovered from safetensors

shared_block = model.transformer_blocks[0]
prev_idx = None
for i in range(streamer.block_count):
    streamer.bind(shared_block, idx=i, evict_previous=prev_idx)
    x = shared_block(x, ...)  # use the rebound block
    prev_idx = i

For LoRA: pass a lora_fuser callable to BlockStreamer and one or more BlockLoraSource instances to bind(..., lora_sources=...). Quantization-aware fusion strategies stay in the caller — arsenal only handles the discovery + indexing.

Requirements

• Python >= 3.10
• MLX >= 0.27.0
• Apple Silicon Mac

Development

pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest tests/

# Optional: install the pre-commit hook so ruff runs on every `git commit`.
pip install pre-commit
pre-commit install

License

Apache 2.0