Richard Palethorpe 49ef40a187 feat(classifier/VAD): support voice control on low power devices (#10804)
* feat(llama-cpp): route Score through the slot loop

Score previously bypassed the slot loop with a direct llama_decode: a
conflict guard aborted the whole process if scoring raced generation, the
config validator had to reject score alongside chat/completion/embeddings,
and every candidate re-decoded the full shared prompt.

Add SERVER_TASK_TYPE_SCORE to the (patched) upstream server so score tasks
are scheduled like any other slot work: generation and scoring serialize
naturally, the shared prompt is decoded once per call, and the slot's
prompt cache carries the conversation prefix across calls. Context
checkpoints at the score boundary and at the cache-divergence point keep
SWA/hybrid/recurrent models (e.g. LFM2.5) from re-prefilling the whole
prompt per candidate: warm-turn scoring on a 6-option set drops from ~8s
to ~0.5s on a desktop CPU.

The conflict guard and the validation split are removed; declaring score
with generation usecases on one config is now supported and shares the
slot cache.

Assisted-by: Claude:claude-fable-5
Signed-off-by: Richard Palethorpe <io@richiejp.com>

* feat(realtime): classifier wire types and pipeline config

Wire types and YAML config for realtime classifier mode: sessions carry a
localai_classifier extension (options with canned replies/tool calls,
softmax threshold, normalization, history trimming, fallback modes, and a
deterministic wake-word address gate), mirrored by pipeline.classifier in
the model YAML and surfaced in the config-meta registry. The
localai.classifier.result server event reports the full score distribution
per turn.

Assisted-by: Claude:claude-fable-5
Signed-off-by: Richard Palethorpe <io@richiejp.com>

* feat(realtime): classifier response flow

Classifier-mode responses: instead of autoregressive generation, each user
turn is prefill-scored against the option list (router.ScoreClassifier
prompt/candidate shapes over the Score primitive) and the winning option's
canned reply and tool call are emitted through the existing response
machinery. Below-threshold turns take the configured fallback (none /
canned reply / generate); empty transcripts and unaddressed turns (wake
word not mentioned) skip scoring entirely. The scoring probe defaults to
the latest user message only — small scorers echo canned replies from
prior turns back as the top option otherwise.

Built for hardware that can afford prompt processing but not decode: with
slot-based Score the option list stays KV-cached across turns, so a turn
costs roughly one forward pass over the new words.

session_update_error events now carry the validation cause instead of a
generic message.

Assisted-by: Claude:claude-fable-5
Signed-off-by: Richard Palethorpe <io@richiejp.com>

* fix(realtime): bound the VAD tick's scan window and buffer retention

The VAD tick loop re-scanned the entire input buffer every 300ms and only
trimmed it on zero-segment ticks or commits. Audio that keeps producing
segments without a committing pause (steady noise a mic pipeline lets
through, music, continuous speech) grew the buffer toward the 100MB cap
with each tick rescanning all of it — O(n^2), measured at ~3.3ms of silero
per buffered second: past ~90s retained, ticks run back to back and pin
~4 cores until the stream stops.

Silero's recurrent state only carries a few hundred ms of context, so
rescanning old audio buys nothing. Clip the slice handed to the VAD to the
largest silence the commit test can need to measure (server_vad silence
window or the semantic eagerness fallback) plus a warm-up margin, and
rebase the returned segment times so every downstream consumer keeps
whole-buffer coordinates. An open turn whose clipped window is all silence
now commits (the silence outran the window) instead of being discarded as
no-speech. Independently, retain at most 90s of raw buffer, rebasing the
live-feed and EOU cursors on trim — this also bounds the previously
unbounded VAD-error path. Turn boundaries are otherwise unchanged: no
forced commits, no new coordinator states.

pipeline.turn_detection.vad_window_sec can widen the scan window; values
below the automatic floor are ignored. The tick body is extracted into
vadTick so specs can drive turn detection synchronously (same shape as
classifySoundWindow); the babble reproduction that pinned 4 cores now
plateaus under 10% of one core.

Assisted-by: Claude:claude-fable-5
Signed-off-by: Richard Palethorpe <io@richiejp.com>

* fix(backend): let per-model threads override the global default

ModelOptions overrode a set per-model threads value with the app-level
--threads whenever the latter was non-zero — and WithThreads defaults it
to the physical core count, so it always was. The YAML threads: knob has
been dead config: a tiny VAD model could never opt down from the global
pool size.

SetDefaults already fills an unset per-model value from the app config,
which is the intended precedence; resolve threads through a helper that
honors it (explicit threads: 0 still means unset).

Assisted-by: Claude:claude-fable-5
Signed-off-by: Richard Palethorpe <io@richiejp.com>

* chore(gallery): single-thread the silero VAD

Silero is a ~2MB recurrent model with no exploitable graph parallelism:
measured per-call latency is identical at 1 and 10 ORT threads, while
every extra pool thread just spin-waits between the realtime loop's
frequent tiny inferences.

Assisted-by: Claude:claude-fable-5
Signed-off-by: Richard Palethorpe <io@richiejp.com>

* docs(realtime): classifier mode, VAD scan window, threads precedence

Document the realtime classifier mode (options, threshold guidance,
wake-word address gate, empty-transcript handling), the VAD scan window
and 90s buffer retention (pipeline.turn_detection.vad_window_sec), the
per-model threads precedence, and the M3 classifier note in the realtime
state-machine design doc.

Assisted-by: Claude:claude-fable-5
Signed-off-by: Richard Palethorpe <io@richiejp.com>

* perf(llama-cpp): score all candidates in one batched decode

One scoring call is now a single SERVER_TASK_TYPE_SCORE task: the slot
decodes the shared prefix (prompt + longest common candidate token
prefix) once, then forks one sequence per candidate off it
(metadata-only for the unified KV cache, copy-on-write for recurrent
state) and decodes every candidate's unique tail in one llama_decode.
Previously each candidate was its own task that restored the boundary
checkpoint and re-decoded its full tail sequentially, paying
per-candidate task and decode overhead.

The context reserves SERVER_SCORE_FORK_SEQS extra sequence ids (and
recurrent-state cells) beyond the parallel slots via the new
common_params::n_seq_score_forks. Forking requires the unified KV cache
(already this backend's default) since per-sequence streams would shrink
n_ctx_seq; an explicit kv_unified:false disables forking and Score calls
that need it fail cleanly. Candidates beyond the fork/output budget
decode in successive chunks.

Wire contract and scores are unchanged: per-token logprobs are stitched
from the shared region and the forked tails. Verified bitwise
deterministic call-to-call and independent of candidate order (no
cross-fork leakage via equal-length candidate swap); ranking matches the
per-candidate implementation on the drone battery (winner softmax
0.99996 vs 0.99997), and >16-candidate chunking, prefix-of-another and
empty candidates all pass.

Measured on a desktop CPU: warm /api/score calls 0.52s -> 0.23s; warm
realtime classifier turns 196-303ms. The 9-candidate drone turn decodes
~17 unique tail tokens in one batch instead of nine sequential ~220ms
checkpoint-restore tasks.

Assisted-by: Claude:claude-fable-5
Signed-off-by: Richard Palethorpe <io@richiejp.com>

* fix(realtime): gate scoring capacity by model usecase

Reserve llama.cpp scoring slots only for models that explicitly declare the score usecase, while allowing score to coexist with chat and completion. Reject incompatible unified-KV settings and classifier activation on models without scoring capacity.

Propagate application defaults when resolving realtime and preload pipeline stages so unset thread counts are resolved consistently without overriding explicit model settings.

Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5
Signed-off-by: Richard Palethorpe <io@richiejp.com>

* fix(ci): honor APT mirrors in the prebuilt llama-cpp compile step

The builder-prebuilt path installs gcc-14 with apt directly and ignored
the APT_MIRROR/APT_PORTS_MIRROR build args the from-source path already
honors, so an ubuntu mirror outage broke every arm64 backend build. Pass
the args into the stage and run apt-mirror.sh (already in the build
context via COPY . /LocalAI) before the apt step.

Assisted-by: Claude:claude-fable-5
Signed-off-by: Richard Palethorpe <io@richiejp.com>

* feat(realtime): classifier argument slots via constrained completion

Hybrid classify-then-complete: a classifier option's canned tool call can
declare typed argument slots (number | enum | string, with defaults and
prompt hints) referenced as "{{name}}" in the arguments template. When
the option wins, the slots are filled by a short grammar-constrained
completion that continues the exact scoring prompt — rendered by the same
cached ScoreClassifier, so the llama.cpp prompt cache is already warm —
with the chosen route JSON re-opened at the first slot field. A GBNF
grammar pins the field skeleton and frees only the values; temperature 0,
a couple dozen tokens at most (~300ms on a desktop CPU for two slots).

Slot declarations and hints ride the option descriptions in the shared
system prompt, informing scoring and the fill alike at no per-turn token
cost. The localai.classifier.result event carries the final arguments and
a fill_latency_ms. On inference failure the slots' defaults apply; a slot
without a default fails the response (or falls through with
fallback.mode: generate). Slot filling requires completion alongside
score in the scoring model's known_usecases.

Verified end-to-end on the Pi drone demo: "fly forward three meters" in
distance mode classifies forward and infers {"distance": 3, "units":
"meters"} in ~310ms, and the drone flies exactly 3 units.

Assisted-by: Claude:claude-fable-5
Signed-off-by: Richard Palethorpe <io@richiejp.com>

* feat(realtime): splice filled slot values into classifier replies

A classifier option's spoken reply can now reference its tool's argument
slots ("Going forward {{distance}} {{units}}."): the values inferred by
the slot-fill completion — or the recovery defaults — are spliced into
the reply as plain text before it is emitted, so what the assistant says
confirms what it actually inferred. Placeholders without a value stay
literal, and options without slots are untouched.

FillToolArguments now returns the raw slot values alongside the spliced
arguments JSON to make the reply templating possible.

Assisted-by: Claude:claude-fable-5
Signed-off-by: Richard Palethorpe <io@richiejp.com>

* fix(realtime): harden classifier slot completion

Reserve context for constrained slot filling, size completions from their encoded output, and encode enum grammar literals as valid JSON. Reject empty enum values and cover the failure modes with regression tests.

Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5
Signed-off-by: Richard Palethorpe <io@richiejp.com>

* feat(realtime): prewarm the classifier scoring prompt on registration

Swapping a session's classifier option list (a voice-switched command
mode, for instance) made the next turns pay a full re-prefill of the new
option-list prompt — measured 2.4s vs 0.3s warm on a desktop CPU, and
worse: on hybrid-memory models like LFM2.5, whose state cannot be
partially rewound (llama.cpp can only restore checkpoints), *every*
probe change re-prefilled from scratch whenever the last checkpoint
missed the probe boundary, so even same-list turns intermittently cost
full prefills.

Registering an option list (pipeline seed or session.update) now fires a
best-effort background prewarm: two throwaway scores with distinct
probes. The first prefills the new option-list prompt; the second,
diverging exactly where per-turn probe text starts, plants the backend's
rewind point (KV checkpoint) at the stable-prefix boundary that every
real turn reuses. The prewarm hides behind the canned mode-switch reply
— by the time it finishes speaking, the cache is warm. Idempotent per
option set, detached from the registering request's lifetime.

Measured on the drone demo (LFM2.5-1.2B, desktop CPU): first turn after
a mode switch 2374ms -> 340ms; intermittent same-list full prefills
(1.3-2.1s) all -> under 0.5s. For clients that swap lists frequently,
options: [parallel:2] on the scoring model additionally keeps one slot
per list via prefix-similarity routing (+26MB RSS, unified KV).

Assisted-by: Claude:claude-fable-5
Signed-off-by: Richard Palethorpe <io@richiejp.com>

* perf(llama-cpp): checkpoint scoring at the caller-declared stable prefix

Hybrid-memory models (LFM2.5 shortconv, Qwen3.5 deltanet — where new
small models are headed) cannot rewind their state, so any prompt-cache
reuse that needs a rewind falls back to a full re-prefill. For classifier
scoring that meant every probe change re-processed the whole option-list
prompt: the server's checkpoints were placed reactively (at wherever the
previous task happened to diverge), so a checkpoint past the next
divergence was erased rather than restored — measured as intermittent
2-10s turns on prompts with a 95%+ common prefix.

The classifier now computes the probe-invariant prompt prefix once (the
byte-wise common prefix of two synthetic probe renders) and declares its
length with every Score request; the server maps it to a token boundary
and forces a KV checkpoint exactly there on each score prefill. That
checkpoint sits at or before every future divergence under the same
option list, so it always survives and always restores — repeat scoring
costs probe+candidates regardless of how the probe changes.

Also:
- prewarm reruns on every option-list registration instead of memoizing
  per list: with boundary checkpoints a redundant rewarm costs two
  probe-sized decodes, while skipping one after a slot eviction (three
  lists sharing fewer slots evict in LRU cascades) silently moves a full
  re-prefill onto the user's next turn
- new llama.cpp backend option rs_seq:N exposes bounded recurrent-state
  rollback outside speculative decoding; measured impractical for
  deltanet-scale states (65GB for 64 snapshots on Qwen3.5-4B) but cheap
  insurance for small-state models
- docs: the multi-list recipe (parallel:N + sps:0.5 — the default slot
  similarity threshold funnels distinct lists onto one slot)

Measured on the drone demo (LFM2.5-1.2B scorer, desktop CPU), steady
state: every turn 285-421ms including mode switches, vs 2.4s post-switch
and intermittent 1.3-2.9s re-prefills before.

Assisted-by: Claude:claude-fable-5
Signed-off-by: Richard Palethorpe <io@richiejp.com>

* fix(realtime): align classifier cache guidance

Document the single-score prewarm behavior and clean the vendored score patch formatting.

Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5
Signed-off-by: Richard Palethorpe <io@richiejp.com>

* fix(llama-cpp): guard score task for fork backends

TurboQuant and Bonsai reuse the primary gRPC server against llama.cpp forks that do not carry LocalAI's slot-based Score patches. Compile the Score integration only for the patched primary backend and return UNIMPLEMENTED from fork builds instead of referencing absent task types and common_params fields.

Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5 [gh]
Signed-off-by: Richard Palethorpe <io@richiejp.com>

* fix(dev): generate gRPC code before commit lint

The coverage phase regenerates ignored protobuf bindings, but lint runs first and can fail against missing or stale output. Generate the pinned bindings before lint so the gate always type-checks the current schema.

Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5
Signed-off-by: Richard Palethorpe <io@richiejp.com>

---------

Signed-off-by: Richard Palethorpe <io@richiejp.com>
2026-07-29 12:50:22 +02:00
2026-04-08 19:23:16 +02:00
2025-02-15 18:17:15 +01:00
2023-05-04 15:01:29 +02:00




LocalAI stars LocalAI License

Follow LocalAI_API Join LocalAI Discord Community

mudler%2FLocalAI | Trendshift

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LocalAI is the open-source AI engine. Run any model - LLMs, vision, voice, image, video - on any hardware. No GPU required.

A small core, not a bundle. Each backend wraps a best-in-class engine (llama.cpp, vLLM, whisper.cpp, stable-diffusion, MLX...) in its own image, pulled only when a model needs it. You install nothing you don't use.

  • Composable by design: backends are separate and pulled on demand, so you install only what your model needs
  • Open and extensible: load any model, or build your own backend in any language against an open interface
  • Drop-in API compatibility: OpenAI, Anthropic, and ElevenLabs APIs across every backend
  • Any model, any modality: LLMs, vision, voice, image, and video behind one API
  • Any hardware: NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, Apple Silicon, Vulkan, or CPU-only
  • Multi-user ready: API key auth, user quotas, role-based access
  • Built-in AI agents: autonomous agents with tool use, RAG, MCP, and skills
  • Privacy-first: your data never leaves your infrastructure

A small LocalAI core with backends (llama.cpp, vLLM, MLX, whisper.cpp, stable-diffusion, kokoro, parakeet.cpp...) plugged in as separate on-demand images

Created by Ettore Di Giacinto and maintained by the LocalAI team.

📖 Documentation | 💬 Discord | 💻 Quickstart | 🖼️ Models | FAQ

Guided tour

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/08cbb692-57da-48f7-963d-2e7b43883c18

Click to see more!

User and auth

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/228fa9ad-81a3-4d43-bfb9-31557e14a36c

Agents

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/6270b331-e21d-4087-a540-6290006b381a

Usage metrics per user

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/cbb03379-23b4-4e3d-bd26-d152f057007f

Fine-tuning and Quantization

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/5ba4ace9-d3df-4795-b7d4-b0b404ea71ee

WebRTC

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/ed88e34c-fed3-4b83-8a67-4716a9feeb7b

Quickstart

macOS

Download LocalAI for macOS

Note: The DMG is not signed by Apple. After installing, run: sudo xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/LocalAI.app. See #6268 for details.

Containers (Docker, podman, ...)

Already ran LocalAI before? Use docker start -i local-ai to restart an existing container.

CPU only:

docker run -ti --name local-ai -p 8080:8080 localai/localai:latest

NVIDIA GPU:

# CUDA 13
docker run -ti --name local-ai -p 8080:8080 --gpus all localai/localai:latest-gpu-nvidia-cuda-13

# CUDA 12
docker run -ti --name local-ai -p 8080:8080 --gpus all localai/localai:latest-gpu-nvidia-cuda-12

# NVIDIA Jetson ARM64 (CUDA 12, for AGX Orin and similar)
docker run -ti --name local-ai -p 8080:8080 --gpus all localai/localai:latest-nvidia-l4t-arm64

# NVIDIA Jetson ARM64 (CUDA 13, for DGX Spark)
docker run -ti --name local-ai -p 8080:8080 --gpus all localai/localai:latest-nvidia-l4t-arm64-cuda-13

AMD GPU (ROCm):

docker run -ti --name local-ai -p 8080:8080 --device=/dev/kfd --device=/dev/dri --group-add=video localai/localai:latest-gpu-hipblas

Intel GPU (oneAPI):

docker run -ti --name local-ai -p 8080:8080 --device=/dev/dri/card1 --device=/dev/dri/renderD128 localai/localai:latest-gpu-intel

Vulkan GPU:

docker run -ti --name local-ai -p 8080:8080 localai/localai:latest-gpu-vulkan

Loading models

# From the model gallery (see available models with `local-ai models list` or at https://models.localai.io)
local-ai run llama-3.2-1b-instruct:q4_k_m
# From Huggingface
local-ai run huggingface://TheBloke/phi-2-GGUF/phi-2.Q8_0.gguf
# From the Ollama OCI registry
local-ai run ollama://gemma:2b
# From a YAML config
local-ai run https://gist.githubusercontent.com/.../phi-2.yaml
# From a standard OCI registry (e.g., Docker Hub)
local-ai run oci://localai/phi-2:latest

To test a running LocalAI server from the terminal, open an interactive chat session from another shell. Inside the prompt, /models lists installed models and /model <name> switches between them.

# Terminal 1
local-ai run llama-3.2-1b-instruct:q4_k_m

# Terminal 2
local-ai chat --model llama-3.2-1b-instruct:q4_k_m

Automatic Backend Detection: LocalAI automatically detects your GPU capabilities and downloads the appropriate backend. For advanced options, see GPU Acceleration.

For more details, see the Getting Started guide.

Latest News

For older news and full release notes, see GitHub Releases and the News page.

Features

Supported Backends & Acceleration

LocalAI supports 60+ backends including llama.cpp, vLLM, SGLang, transformers, whisper.cpp, diffusers, MLX, MLX-VLM, and many more. Hardware acceleration is available for NVIDIA (CUDA 12/13), AMD (ROCm), Intel (oneAPI/SYCL), Apple Silicon (Metal), Vulkan, and NVIDIA Jetson (L4T). All backends can be installed on-the-fly from the Backend Gallery.

See the full Backend & Model Compatibility Table and GPU Acceleration guide.

Backends built by us

Most backends wrap a best-in-class upstream engine. A handful of them are native C/C++/GGML engines (no Python at inference) developed and maintained by the LocalAI project itself:

Backend What it does
vllm.cpp From-scratch C++20 port of vLLM for text generation: paged KV cache, continuous batching, prefix caching, safetensors + GGUF loading, engine-enforced structured output, on CPU, CUDA, Metal and Vulkan
parakeet.cpp C++/GGML port of NVIDIA NeMo Parakeet ASR (tdt/ctc/rnnt/hybrid), with cache-aware streaming transcription
moss-transcribe.cpp C++/GGML port of OpenMOSS MOSS-Transcribe-Diarize: joint long-form transcription, speaker diarization and timestamping in a single pass
moss-tts.cpp C++/GGML port of the OpenMOSS MOSS-TTS family: text-to-speech (MOSS-TTS-Local v1.5, 48 kHz stereo) with reference-audio voice cloning, through the MOSS-Audio-Tokenizer neural codec
magpie-tts.cpp C++/GGML port of NVIDIA's Magpie TTS Multilingual 357M: 22.05 kHz mono text-to-speech in 5 voices and 9+ languages, with the NanoCodec neural codec and tokenizer/G2P embedded in a single GGUF
ced.cpp C++/GGML port of the CED audio-tagging models: sound-event classification (527-class AudioSet) over REST and the realtime API for live recognition
voice-detect.cpp Speaker recognition and voice analysis (ECAPA-TDNN, WeSpeaker, ERes2Net, CAM++, wav2vec2 age/gender/emotion), replacing the Python speaker-recognition backend
voxtral-tts.c Voxtral Realtime 4B speech-to-text in pure C
vibevoice.cpp Native port of Microsoft VibeVoice for TTS (voice cloning) and long-form ASR with speaker diarization
rf-detr.cpp Native RF-DETR object detection and instance segmentation
locate-anything.cpp Open-vocabulary object detection and visual grounding (LocateAnything-3B)
depth-anything.cpp Depth Anything 3 monocular metric depth + camera pose estimation
face-detect.cpp Face detection, recognition, demographics and anti-spoofing (SCRFD/ArcFace, YuNet/SFace), replacing the Python insightface backend
free-splatter.cpp Pose-free 3D reconstruction (FreeSplatter): turns a handful of plain photos into 3D Gaussians, no camera poses or GPU required
privacy-filter.cpp Standalone GGML PII/NER token-classification engine powering LocalAI's PII redaction tier
LocalVQE Joint acoustic echo cancellation, noise suppression, and dereverberation
local-store Local-first vector database for embeddings (shipped in-tree)

We also maintain apex-quant, a per-tensor, per-layer quantization recipe for Mixture-of-Experts models that exploits their structural sparsity to produce GGUFs matching or beating Q8_0 quality - and they run out of the box on stock llama.cpp.

Resources

Team

LocalAI is maintained by a small team of humans, together with the wider community of contributors.

A huge thank you to everyone who contributes code, reviews PRs, files issues, and helps users in Discord — LocalAI is a community-driven project and wouldn't exist without you. See the full contributors list.

Citation

If you utilize this repository, data in a downstream project, please consider citing it with:

@misc{localai,
  author = {Ettore Di Giacinto},
  title = {LocalAI: The free, Open source OpenAI alternative},
  year = {2023},
  publisher = {GitHub},
  journal = {GitHub repository},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/go-skynet/LocalAI}},

Sponsors

Do you find LocalAI useful?

Support the project by becoming a backer or sponsor. Your logo will show up here with a link to your website.

A huge thank you to our generous sponsors who support this project covering CI expenses, and our Sponsor list:

Past sponsors


Individual sponsors

A special thanks to individual sponsors, a full list is on GitHub and buymeacoffee. Special shout out to drikster80 for being generous. Thank you everyone!

Star history

LocalAI Star history Chart

License

LocalAI is a community-driven project created by Ettore Di Giacinto and maintained by the LocalAI team.

MIT - Author Ettore Di Giacinto mudler@localai.io

Acknowledgements

LocalAI couldn't have been built without the help of great software already available from the community. Thank you!

Contributors

This is a community project, a special thanks to our contributors!

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