esmc-300m-gguf

ESM-C 300M — GGUF (esmc.cpp)

GGUF conversions of ESM Cambrian (ESM-C) 300M, an encoder-only protein language model, for fast, low-memory per-residue and per-sequence embeddings on CPU and Apple Metal — with no Python or PyTorch needed at inference time.

• Runtime: esmc.cpp (C/C++ on ggml / llama.cpp)
• Upstream model: EvolutionaryScale/esmc-300m-2024-12
• Task: feature extraction (protein embeddings)

[!IMPORTANT] These files use a custom GGUF architecture (general.architecture = "esmc") and are not loadable by stock llama.cpp / llama-cli. Use the esmc.cpp runtime (the esmc-embed tool) shown below.

Which file should I download?

If unsure, start with esmc-300m-Q8_0.gguf (near-identical to PyTorch at ~half the size). Use Q4_K_M for the smallest deployment with good quality, or F16 when you want the closest possible match to the reference.

Quick start

1. Build the esmc.cpp runtime

git clone --recursive https://github.com/AnanyaP-WDW/esmc.cpp
cd esmc.cpp
cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release && cmake --build build -j8

2. Download a model

pip install -U huggingface_hub
huggingface-cli download AnanyaPathak/esmc-300m-gguf esmc-300m-Q8_0.gguf --local-dir ./models

3. Embed a protein sequence

# Mean-pooled sequence embedding -> one vector per sequence ([n_embd])
./build/esmc-embed -m ./models/esmc-300m-Q8_0.gguf \
    -s "MKTVRQERLKSIVRILERSKEPVSGAQLAEELSVSRQVIVQDIAYLRSLGY" \
    --pool mean --output embedding.npy

# Per-residue embeddings -> matrix ([n_tokens, n_embd])
./build/esmc-embed -m ./models/esmc-300m-Q8_0.gguf \
    -s "MKTVRQERLKSIVRILERSKEPVSGAQLAEELSVSRQVIVQDIAYLRSLGY" \
    --pool none --output residues.npy

# Force CPU (skip the Metal/GPU backend)
./build/esmc-embed -m ./models/esmc-300m-Q8_0.gguf -s "..." --pool mean --no-metal

Outputs are NumPy .npy arrays. Mean pooling strips the <cls>/<eos> tokens.

4. Load the embedding in Python

import numpy as np

emb = np.load("embedding.npy")   # mean pool: shape (960,)
res = np.load("residues.npy")    # per-residue: shape (n_tokens, 960)
print(emb.shape, res.shape)

Benchmarks (300M)

Measured on an Apple M4 Max (36 GB) against the official PyTorch ESM-C 300M. Full methodology and per-sequence data are in the esmc.cpp repository.

Numerical fidelity vs PyTorch (per-residue cosine, 100 Swiss-Prot sequences)

F16 and Q8_0 clear per-sequence mean cosine > 0.999; Q4_K_M / Q4_K_S clear the per-sequence > 0.99 gate (aggregate ~0.994-0.995 after the FFN LayerNorm bias fix).

Throughput (seq/s, best esmc.cpp config)

Peak memory (long sequences, 36 GB budget)

• Lowest peak RAM: pytorch/pytorch_mps/f32 at 304 MiB (long sequences).
• Highest peak RAM: esmc.cpp/cpu/f32 at 2614 MiB.
• All 12/12 measured configurations fit within a 36 GB machine.

Downstream variant-effect preservation (ProteinGym, 10 assays x 1000 variants)

Variants are scored by the cosine between mean-pooled mutant and wild-type embeddings; deltas are versus the PyTorch reference (preservation probe).

Model details

• Architecture: encoder-only transformer; 30 layers, d_model 960, 15 heads (head dim 64), SwiGLU FFN (width 2560), pre-LayerNorm, RoPE-NeoX (theta 10000), query/key LayerNorm, no biases, context length 2048.
• Tokenizer: 33-token amino-acid alphabet; <cls> prepended and <eos> appended (direct character lookup, no subword splitting).
• Provenance: converted from the upstream safetensors checkpoint to GGUF (fused QKV and SwiGLU projections split); quantized variants use ggml block quantization. Weight values are otherwise unchanged from the upstream release.

Verify downloads

shasum -a 256 models/*.gguf   # compare against the sha256 column above

Reproduce

The full replication guide (convert, quantize, validate, benchmark) is in the esmc.cpp README. The lab manual documents every experiment (EXP-001 through EXP-022) with commands, raw results, and run logs.

License

Built with ESM.

These GGUF files are Derivative Works of the ESM-C 300M Open Model and are distributed under the EvolutionaryScale Cambrian Open License Agreement (the permissive license that governs ESM-C 300M), subject to the Acceptable Use Policy. The ESMC 300M Model is licensed under the EvolutionaryScale Cambrian Open License Agreement.

Citation

If you use these models, please cite the esmc.cpp runtime. If you use esmc.cpp or the GGUF model files in your work, please cite the esmc.cpp paper:

@article{pathak2026esmc,
  title={esmc.cpp: A Zero-Dependency, Metal-Accelerated C/C++ Runtime for ESM Cambrian Protein Embeddings},
  author={Pathak, Anagh and Pathak, Ananya},
  journal={OpenReview},
  year={2026},
  url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=0GarVDrEAi},
  note={CAISc 2026, Track 2: Open-Ended Problems, non-archival submission}
}

You may also acknowledge the ESM Cambrian work by EvolutionaryScale and link the esmc.cpp runtime.