Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct-LiteRT

Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct — LiteRT-LM (blockwise int4)

Built with Llama. meta-llama/Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct converted to the LiteRT-LM (.litertlm) format for on-device inference with Google's LiteRT-LM runtime (the engine behind the official litert-community/* models).

2026-09-21: chat template updated to accept the 0.18 content-parts form (string form unchanged); weights, tokenizer and executor metadata byte-identical.

Usage

Run with the LiteRT-LM runtime:

# build litert-lm from https://github.com/google-ai-edge/litert-lm, then:
litert_lm_main \
  --model_path model.litertlm \
  --backend gpu \
  --input_prompt "Explain on-device AI in one sentence."

The .litertlm bundle carries the tokenizer and the prompt template (Llama-3's native <|start_header_id|>role<|end_header_id|> format, start token <|begin_of_text|>, stop tokens <|eot_id|> / <|end_of_text|>), so no separate tokenizer files are needed.

Run on Android

Update (July 2026): Google AI Edge Gallery v1.0.16+ can import litert-lm models directly from Hugging Face inside the app (tap +) — no computer or adb needed. The manual steps below are only required on older builds or for sideloading a local file.

The easiest way to try this model on a phone is the official Google AI Edge Gallery app — it runs .litertlm models fully on-device and can import your own:

1. Install a recent Gallery (package com.google.ai.edge.gallery, APK from the repo's releases — 1.0.15+ supports .litertlm). Older 1.0.x builds (package com.google.aiedge.gallery) only accept the legacy MediaPipe .task format and reject .litertlm.
2. Download model.litertlm from this repo and push it to the device:

   adb push model.litertlm /sdcard/Download/
   

3. In the app, tap the + button (bottom-right), pick the file, and choose the GPU backend (CPU also works).
4. Chat. Nothing else to configure — the .litertlm bundle already carries the tokenizer and prompt template, so the model uses its native Llama-3 chat format automatically.

See the Gallery Importing Local Models guide for details. To embed the model in your own Android app instead, use the LiteRT-LM Kotlin API (Gradle artifact com.google.ai.edge.litertlm:litertlm-android, getting started).

Run on desktop (LiteRT-LM CLI)

The same .litertlm bundle runs on macOS / Linux / Windows with the official LiteRT-LM CLI — including as a local OpenAI-compatible API server:

pip install litert-lm
litert-lm import --from-huggingface-repo mlboydaisuke/Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct-LiteRT model.litertlm llama-3.2-3b-instruct-litert
litert-lm run llama-3.2-3b-instruct-litert     # interactive chat in the terminal
litert-lm serve           # local OpenAI-compatible API server

Quality — GSM8K parity

Measured on GSM8K (n=100, greedy, 0-shot chain-of-thought asking for #### <n>, identical prompt and answer-extraction for every row). The 4-bit MLX build is the known-good 4-bit control:

LiteRT int4 is at parity: −5 pt vs bf16 and equal to the MLX 4-bit control (73.3% vs 73.3% on the common subset¹). The model also passes the local quality gate 8/8 (no degeneracy). bf16's 78.0% matches Llama's published 8-shot GSM8K (~77.7%), confirming the harness is calibrated. This is a direct-answering instruct model (no <think> block); it terminates cleanly at <|eot_id|>.

¹ The MLX control hit a reproducible Metal out-of-memory abort at one question on the test machine, so bf16 / LiteRT-int4 / MLX are compared on the common 45-question subset (77.8 / 73.3 / 73.3); the LiteRT-int4 headline (73.0%) is the full n=100.

Conversion

Converted with the official litert-torch converter (upstream main), no custom graph code. Llama-3.2-3B is a standard LlamaForCausalLM architecture, so it rides the existing converter and runtime directly. The recipe is blockwise int4 (INT4 weights, block size 32, symmetric) with embeddings kept at INT8 and KV cache 4096. Blockwise (not the tool's default channelwise) int4 is what preserves reasoning accuracy.

from litert_torch.generative.export_hf.export import export
export(
    model="meta-llama/Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct",
    output_dir="out",
    quantization_recipe="llama_int4_block32.json",  # blockwise-32 int4, int8 embeddings
    cache_length=4096,
    externalize_embedder=True,  # embedding → its own section (see iOS note)
)

externalize_embedder=True (required for iOS). This 28-layer 3B's weights are a single ~2.4 GB TFLite section, which exceeds the ~2 GiB single-section mmap limit on iOS — engine creation fails with "Failed to map section: Cannot allocate memory". Externalizing the (tied) embedding into its own section drops the main weights section below 2 GiB (and dedups the tied matrix, ~2.4 GB → 2.1 GB total), so the model loads on iPhone. Verified on iPhone 17 Pro (loads in 8.8 s, ~18.5 tok/s, coherent). This is the generic equivalent of Gemma's per-layer-embedding mmap. (Mac/desktop load >2 GB sections fine, so this only matters for iOS.)

A block-128 variant is also available (slightly smaller, ~+5% decode on Apple GPU, quality gate 7/8) for latency-sensitive deployments.

2026-08-29 — default system prompt restored (weights unchanged)

The upstream chat template emits a default system turn whenever the caller sends no system message — for this model: Cutting Knowledge Date: December 2023 Today Date: <today>. The converter's template probe renders the template with a system message already present, so that block was never seen and never reached the bundle: with no system message the model was running without the default system turn it was tuned with. The chat template in model.litertlm now emits the block exactly once when no system message is given. In model.litertlm, the block is not emitted when you pass a system message; the upstream template also wraps a caller's system message in its own preamble, and this file passes it through unchanged, exactly as it did before. The restored block adds 25 prefill tokens to a conversation that sends no system message, so time-to-first-token grows by that much; per-token speed is unchanged.

Metadata-only change: every section of the bundle except the LlmMetadata block is byte-identical to the previous file (verified by sha256 per section), so the weights, the graph and the tokenizer are unchanged and the speed and memory numbers on this card still describe exactly this file per token — only the file's own sha256 differs. What changed is the input: with no system message, the prompt now renders byte-identical to the upstream chat template's output, verified on the LiteRT-LM runtime. A system message you pass yourself renders as before. Greedy decoding can turn on a single token, so an individual answer can differ from the previous file. Unless a row says otherwise, the accuracy figures on this card were measured on the previous file and have not been re-measured on this one. If you downloaded before 2026-08-29, re-download.

License

Llama 3.2 Community License, inherited from the base model meta-llama/Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct. Built with Llama. See https://www.llama.com/llama3_2/license/

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Want a different model on-device? Open a request — free, open weights only; the export and its measured numbers get published publicly.

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