Click the diagram for the full architecture reference, or read the short ARCHITECTURE.md.

---

Start in 5 minutes

SKaiNET is a Kotlin Multiplatform AI framework. New here? Choose the path that matches what you want to try first.

Goal	Start here	Time
Run tensor operations	Quickstart (below)	2–5 min
Build and train a neural net	Hello Neural Net (below)	5 min
Run a local GGUF model	SKaiNET Transformers starter	5 min after model setup
Export a secure MCU bundle	Minerva getting started	10 min without firmware flashing

Working in Java? SKaiNET ships first-class Java support — see the Java getting-started guide.

Note

Looking for LLM inference? Llama, Qwen, Gemma, Apertus, BERT embeddings and GGUF chat models live in SKaiNET-transformers — this repository is the engine underneath it (tensors, NN DSL, compiler, CPU/native backends, GGUF/SafeTensors IO). Depend on the sk.ainet.transformers artifacts, pinned together by the transformers BOM.

Use the version shown in this README as the source of truth for first-run snippets. If another page shows a different version, please open an issue or PR.

---

Quickstart

Add the core dependencies (Gradle Kotlin DSL):

dependencies {
    // Recommended: import the umbrella BOM and drop versions on the engine modules.
    implementation(platform("sk.ainet:skainet-bom:0.62.4"))

    implementation("sk.ainet.core:skainet-lang-core")
    implementation("sk.ainet.core:skainet-backend-cpu")
}

Hello Neural Net

val model = nn {
    input(28 * 28)
    dense(out = 128)
    relu()
    dense(out = 10)
}

Core Tensor Ops

val a = tensor(shape(2, 2)) { float(1f, 2f, 3f, 4f) }
val b = tensor(shape(2, 2)) { float(5f, 6f, 7f, 8f) }

val c = a matMul b
val d = c.relu()

GGUF Model Loading

// Recommended: streaming reader — memory-efficient, supports quantized types
val source = JvmRandomAccessSource.open("model.gguf")
StreamingGGUFReader.open(source).use { reader ->
    println("Tensors: ${reader.tensorCount}")

    // Load specific tensor on demand (no whole-file loading)
    val bytes = reader.loadTensor("token_embd.weight")

    // Or get a TensorStorage descriptor with encoding/placement metadata
    val storage = reader.loadTensorStorage("token_embd.weight")
}

More examples: SKaiNET-examples | SKaiNET-notebook

---

Ecosystem

SKaiNET is a modular ecosystem. While this repository contains the core engine, specialized high-level libraries are maintained in standalone repositories:

Project	Description
SKaiNET-transformers	Pre-built transformer architectures and layers
SKaiNET-examples	Sample projects and integration demos

---

Explore

Goal	Start here
Examples and sample projects	SKaiNET-examples
Interactive notebooks	SKaiNET-notebook
Eager backends & kernels (what runs where)	Backends & kernels map
Design proposals and long-lived API decisions	SKEEP proposals
Memory & storage architecture (storage, views, scopes, planning)	The memory model · Packed weight layout

---

Contributing and Design Proposals

First time here? Three links are all you need:

• 🚀 Getting started as a contributor — the two workflows in one page, and how to claim a task.
• 🟣 Open good first issues — filter further by what you know: skill:android, skill:numerics (no Kotlin), skill:docs, or by size: size:xs.
• 🏷️ Issue taxonomy — what every label and [Lane N · skill] title prefix means.

Small fixes can go straight through the normal contribution flow described in CONTRIBUTING.md and GITFLOW.adoc.

Non-trivial work goes through one of two processes:

• DARC (Document / Assess / Research / Code) for one feature — a new operator, metric, layer, format reader, or kernel strategy. A feature is one parent issue plus skill-labelled sub-issues ("lanes"). See the DARC workflow.
• SKEEP (SKaiNET Evolution and Enhancement Process) for one architectural decision — public APIs, DSL syntax, tensor semantics, compiler/runtime integration, storage behavior, compatibility policy. SKEEP files live under docs/modules/skeep/pages/ with three-digit numbering. See the SKEEP index.

---

Official Benchmarks

SKaiNET ships an official Phoronix-Test-Suite-compatible benchmark program for the compute engine. See the methodology and replay docs, the release manifest, and the CI workflow. Smoke runs fire on every PR via ubuntu-latest; full publishable runs fire on a self-hosted Linux x86 runner on release.

Quick local replay:

./gradlew :skainet-backends:benchmarks:jvm-cpu-publish:shadowJar
./scripts/run_engine_smoke.sh

---

Architecture goal

SKaiNET is built around one path: a model is defined once in the Kotlin DSL, then either compiled or executed eagerly — without rewriting it.

1. Define the model with the DSL (nn { } / dag { }).
2. Capture it as a tape (traced execution) or a DAG (explicit graph) — a ComputeGraph.
3. Run it one of two ways:
   • Compile — lower the captured ComputeGraph through one of several sibling code-generation backends, each emitting code for a different target from the same graph:
     • StableHLO / MLIR (HloGenerator) → IREE-compilable, for native / edge / accelerator targets and the wider MLIR ecosystem.
     • Arduino / C99 → standalone, statically-allocated C for microcontrollers.
     • Minerva → a secure-MCU bundle (weights + firmware skeleton + fingerprinted manifest).
   • Eager — execute directly on an available backend. On the JVM this is the primary, go-to path.

StableHLO/MLIR is therefore one code-generation backend among siblings — the IREE/native path next to the C99/Arduino and Minerva MCU paths — not a separate pipeline.

flowchart LR
    DSL["Model — Kotlin DSL"] --> Graph["Tape / DAG (ComputeGraph)"]
    Graph --> Eager["Eager backend (JVM, …)"]
    Graph -->|code generation| HLO["StableHLO / MLIR"]
    Graph -->|code generation| C99["Arduino / C99"]
    Graph -->|code generation| Minerva["Minerva"]
    HLO --> Native["IREE → native / edge / accelerator"]
    C99 --> MCU["Microcontroller"]
    Minerva --> SecMCU["Secure-MCU bundle"]

Loading

The same DSL model feeds every path: eager execution for development and JVM deployment, and the code-generation backends — StableHLO/MLIR (→ IREE), Arduino/C99, and Minerva — as sibling alternatives for native, edge, and secure-MCU targets.

---

Important Addition: Minerva Secure MCU Export

SKaiNET now includes a Minerva export backend for secure MCU deployment. It is a sibling to StableHLO and Arduino/C99 export: it starts from a supported ComputeGraph, lowers static MLPs to a Minerva compiler input, invokes libminerva when configured, and packages generated weights, host fixtures, firmware skeletons, and a fingerprinted manifest.json.

Start here:

• Minerva getting started — run the maintained tiny MLP dry sample, then the real libminerva runtime profile.
• Minerva export how-to — configure compiler paths, keys, calibration, CMake/CTest host verification, and troubleshooting.
• How Minerva secure MCU export fits — understand why Minerva is not an Arduino replacement and when to choose StableHLO instead.

Runnable examples:

./gradlew :skainet-compile:skainet-compile-minerva:runMinervaSecureMcuExamples
./gradlew :skainet-compile:skainet-compile-minerva:runMinervaSecureMcuExamples \
  -Pminerva.example=sensor-classifier

---

Features

Kotlin Multiplatform

• Targets: JVM, macOS (Native), JS, WASM (Browser + WasmWasi)
• Single codebase shared across all platforms via Kotlin Multiplatform

Optimized Execution

• ComputeGraphExecutor: Optimized engine with fusion passes and trace-to-DAG bridging.
• SDPA & Gather: High-performance Scaled Dot-Product Attention and indexing operations.
• TurboQuant: Runtime KV-cache compression (~8x at 4-bit) for long-context LLM inference. Presets: safe-lowbit, balanced, experimental-max. See TurboQuantUsage for integration guide.

Neural Network DSL

• Sequential: nn { input(); dense(); relu(); dense() }
• DAG / Graph: arbitrary wiring with dag { } for ResNet-style skip connections and multi-scale detector heads
• Layers: Dense, Conv1d/2d/3d, MaxPool, AvgPool, BatchNorm, Dropout, LeakyReLU, ELU
• KAN (Kolmogorov–Arnold Networks) layer (experimental)
• Autograd engine with reverse-mode gradients, SGD and Adam/AdamW optimizers

Data and I/O

• Built-in loaders: MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10, Iris
• URI-backed data sources: file://, https://, hf+https://, and hf://...
• Dataset operations: deterministic shuffle/split, stratified split, filter/map/transform views, batch flows, and epoch flows
• Raw dataset parsers: CSV, TSV, JSON arrays/objects, JSON Lines (.jsonl, .ndjson)
• Type-safe transform DSLs: image/tensor transforms plus suspendable raw data pipelines
• Formats: GGUF, ONNX, SafeTensors, JSON, Image (JPEG, PNG)

val raw = JvmDataSourceResolver().rawDataset {
    from("hf://datasets/org/repo@main/train.jsonl")
    format(DataFormat.JSON_LINES)
    cachePolicy(CachePolicy.Use)
}

val withoutLabel = dataPipeline<RawDataset>()
    .stage(
        dataTransformer(
            name = "drop-label",
            outputSchema = { schema -> DataSchema(schema.columns - "label") }
        ) { dataset ->
            val columns = dataset.schema.columns - "label"
            dataset.copy(
                schema = DataSchema(columns),
                rows = dataset.rows.map { row ->
                    RawDataRow(row.values.filterKeys { key -> key in columns })
                }
            )
        }
    )
    .execute(raw)

• Start with the data sources getting started guide

Edge AI: Arduino / C99 Export

• Export trained models to standalone, optimized C99 with static memory allocation
• Ready-to-use Arduino library output

Edge AI: Minerva Secure MCU Export

• Export supported static MLP graphs to Minerva project bundles for secure MCU inference
• Emits compiler NPZ input, libminerva weights, a fingerprinted manifest, host harness, firmware example, and host verification results
• Start with the Minerva getting started guide

Compiler: MLIR / StableHLO

• Lower Kotlin DSL to MLIR StableHLO dialect
• Optimization passes: constant folding, operation fusion, dead code elimination
• Valid IREE-compilable output with streaming API and public HloGenerator

Choosing an Export Path

• Use StableHLO when you want portable MLIR/IREE-compatible graphs for native, accelerator, or ecosystem compiler flows.
• Use Arduino / C99 export / Minerva export when you want standalone generated C with static memory allocation or external secure runtime.

---

What's New in 0.62.4

An arm64 release. On macOS the JVM's dense FP32 products — A · B on heap or segment-backed operands and x · Wᵀ on a resident dense weight — now go to Accelerate's SGEMM by default, which runs on the matrix units of Apple silicon and threads itself; JvmBlas had never reached a BLAS before (the framework lookup and the heap downcall both failed silently), and -Dskainet.cpu.blas.enabled=false restores the bundled kernels. Elsewhere the default stays off and skainet.cpu.blas.library names an OpenBLAS or reference BLAS to use. The native dense FP32 kernels get register tiles on AArch64 (Apple silicon, Android arm64, Linux arm64): an 8 × 8 tile of lane-indexed FMAs over a packed panel of B for A · B and a four-by-three tile for x · Wᵀ, bit-identical across slices, threads and whole calls, exercised on Apple silicon by the macOS CI leg. Both are unmeasured on arm64 in this release; the pull requests (#1449, #1450) say how to run the bench.

Carried from 0.62.3

A load-time and kernel release. StreamingGGUFReader decodes the GGUF metadata from 64 KB blocks instead of one source read per value, and TextFrontEnds.fromGguf builds a SentencePiece tokenizer in one pass over the vocabulary instead of three to four copies of it; fields, the public API and the token ids stay the same. On a Gemma-3 tokenizer GGUF a file-source parse drops from 1.0 s to 21–45 ms on the JVM and from 23.3 s to 1.2 s on a 32-bit ARM Android device, where read + build on the first load in a process goes from 8.4–11.2 s to 6.0–6.4 s. The native dense FP32 A · B kernel gets an AVX2/FMA register-tiled lane on x86-64 (63 × 1024 × 1024: 21 → 281 GFLOP/s), and no longer overwrites the parts of a sub-block caller's output buffer outside the block.

Carried from 0.62.2

A performance release for the JVM native lane. The dense FP32 x · Wᵀ kernel — what every resident dense weight resolves to once skainet-backend-native-cpu is on the classpath — now splits its work across the context Schedule (SKEEP-005) instead of a fixed four-thread C pool, and on x86-64 hosts with AVX2 and FMA runs a runtime-selected eight-lane register-tiled lane; threaded, sliced and single calls stay bit-identical. A single 63 × 1024 × 1024 call goes from 29.6 to 131.7 GFLOP/s on a six-core laptop, and a ModernBERT-large encoder request in the LayaMoE example from 13.0 s to 6.4 s with unchanged answers. The text front-end indexes added tokens by first character and length, so a Gemma chat turn encodes in 36 µs instead of 2.0 ms. CoroutineSchedule.forRange never hands a body an empty range any more.

Carried from 0.62.1

A fix release on top of 0.62.0: the native FFM bindings of the Q8_0, Q4_0, Q5_0 and Q5_1 kernels copied a zero-filled staging buffer back from index 0, so a product served row by row — any quantize-at-load encoder on the JVM with skainet-backend-native-cpu on the classpath — kept only its last row. Single-row decode steps were never affected. A regression test now covers every packed format for one, seven and fifty rows. Also: the YOLOv8 model code moves out of core into its cartridge blueprint (skainet-model-yolo is gone; Letterbox, BoundingBox and nonMaxSuppression stay in skainet-data-media), the StableHLO softmax axis and logSoftmax lowering are fixed, and the docs gain Flexibility at every compile stage and the SKEEP-008 draft on precision and encoding conversion.

Carried from 0.62.0

JVM ↔ Kotlin/Wasm parity: the browser tier runs the same kernels as the JVM, keeps its activations in the sidecar, and reads models the way the JVM does — with every remaining difference documented.

• Every kernel on the wasm tier — explicit SIMD128 bodies for every matmul format (K-quants, Q5_0/Q5_1, dense FP32/BF16/FP16), the ternary BitNet kernels, elementwise, activation and reduction kernels, fused softmax, normalisation and banded attention, and convolutions as im2col + GEMM, all threaded over the sidecar's row pool. Chains of ops stay resident in the sidecar's linear memory (Storage.OffHeap in a browser) and come back to the Kotlin heap only when something outside needs them.
• Both directions — the JVM binds the same C kernels through FFM: the direct x · Wᵀ kernel (no transposed weight copy), fused softmax, layer and RMS normalisation, and SDPA with key lengths, windows and grouped-query heads. One C source per kernel serves every native build.
• Browser IO — Blob sources address Long positions (shards over 2 GB), copy in bulk, and serve blocking reads inside a Web Worker; sharded SafeTensors load from Blobs; PlannerProfile.BROWSER; MemoryProbe reports the JavaScript heap, linear memory and the sidecar's resident bytes; skainet-data-source resolves HTTP and Hugging Face URIs over fetch on Kotlin/JS and Kotlin/Wasm.
• One benchmark table — the engine-* scenarios of the JVM publish harness run with identical shapes in wasm-bench, and the kernel support matrix names what each tier serves and why the rest is N/A. The operator coverage matrix is generated from backend data, with StableHLO, backward and NN-layer columns and a CI leg that rejects unmarked stubs.
• JVM decode allocation — four fixes from the BitNet 2B4T profile: the ternary GEMV on the shared row pool (+19 % decode), intrinsified Vector API elementwise paths, a dense split fast path and bulk copies from mapped tensors.

See CHANGELOG.md for full release notes, including every prior release.

---

Roadmap

• Q1 2026: Comprehensive documentation ✅
• Q2 2026: TurboQuant KV-cache compression ✅ (shipped in 0.18.0); Qwen/LLaMA tokenizers ✅ (shipped in 0.20.0)
• Q3 2026: Missing ML features: metrics, optimizers, and training utilities.
• Q4 2026: On-Device AI, small LLMs improvements

---

Contributing & Community

We love contributions! Whether it's a new operator, documentation, or a bug fix:

1. Read Getting started as a contributor (five minutes), then the Contribution Guide when you need the procedure.
2. Pick an open good first issue — every one names the file to copy the pattern from and the exact Gradle task to run. Comment on it to claim it.
3. Open a discussion or issue on GitHub; the issue chooser has templates for DARC features, lane tasks and SKEEP proposals.

Browse the full codebase documentation on DeepWiki.

Contributors (0.62.4)

• Michal Harakal (@michalharakal) — the Accelerate/BLAS routing of the JVM's dense FP32 products, the AArch64 register tiles for the native dense FP32 kernels with their tests, and the release

Contributors (0.62.3)

• Michal Harakal (@michalharakal) — the buffered GGUF metadata reader, the one-pass tokenizer build, the AVX2/FMA dense FP32 SGEMM lane with their tests and measurements, and the release

Contributors (0.62.2)

• Michal Harakal (@michalharakal) — the schedule-driven and AVX2/FMA dense FP32 lanes with their tests and measurements, the CoroutineSchedule fix, the added-token index, and the release

Contributors (0.62.1)

• Michal Harakal (@michalharakal) — the native packed-kernel binding fix and its regression test, the YOLO move-out, the compile-flexibility explanation, the SKEEP-008 draft, and the release

Contributors (0.62.0)

• Michal Harakal (@michalharakal) — the JVM ↔ wasm parity series: SIMD128 bodies for every sidecar kernel, the ternary and direct x · Wᵀ kernels, resident activations with the elementwise, fused and convolution kernels on both tiers, the browser IO parity, skainet-data-source on JS and wasm, the operator coverage matrix, the BitNet decode allocation fixes, and the release
• Edwin (@EdinEd) — the ClassificationSupport helpers extracted from Accuracy, preparing the precision, recall and F1 metrics (#1222)

Contributors (0.61.0)

• Michal Harakal (@michalharakal) — SKEEP-007: the Tier 0 dispatch-order and dense-path fixes, quantize-at-load for the SafeTensors and GGUF loaders with the Q8_0 quantizer and skainet-quantize, the skainet-backend-wasm-simd sidecar kernel pack, the scheduled SKEEP-006 removal, and the release

Contributors (0.60.0)

• Michal Harakal (@michalharakal) — key-padding lengths and window metadata for scaledDotProductAttention across the CPU kernel, recorder, executor and StableHLO lowering, the n-ary composite seam with the skainet.sdpa composite, the SKEEP-006 deprecation step, and the release

Contributors (0.59.0)

• Michal Harakal (@michalharakal) — exact GELU and erf across the CPU kernels, graph executor and backward rules, the lowering-metadata path with composite emission and the legalization pass, and the release

Contributors (0.58.0)

• Michal Harakal (@michalharakal) — SKEEP-006: the front-end and model-identity modules, the tokenizer move with Metaspace BPE, Unigram and WordPiece, the golden corpus, and the release

Contributors (0.57.0)

• Michal Harakal (@michalharakal) — masked grouped-query attention in the StableHLO export, the kotlinx-io API fix, the Kotlin 2.4.20 upgrade, and the publish dry run

Contributors (0.56.0)

• Michal Harakal (@michalharakal) — grouped-query-native scaledDotProductAttention and its StableHLO lowering, structural schedule defaults, and schedule-aware graph execution contexts (SKEEP-005 phase 2)

Contributors (0.53.0)

• Michal Harakal (@michalharakal) — the billion-parameter export arc: allocation-free void tracing, aliased constant extraction, strict StableHLO conversion, the array-free BufferHandle.Floats path, and the sharded SafeTensors loader

Contributors (0.52.0)

• Michal Harakal (@michalharakal) — the Gemma 4 engine-gap arc: self-healing kernel dispatch and the ViewKernelPack SPI, dense FP32 for mapped/off-heap storage, the decode-shaped FP32 kernel work, Android-native targets across the downstream chain, and the ternary packs joining the self-healing SPI

Contributors (0.51.0)

• Michal Harakal (@michalharakal) — off-heap ternary storage, zero-copy mmap for SEQUENTIAL I2_S, the AOT GGUF converter and its IREE-facing counterpart in SKaiNET-IREE-tools, and the scoped dense-FP32 activation matmul-chooser fix

Contributors (0.49.0)

• Michal Harakal (@michalharakal) — the SKEEP-003 memory & storage architecture end to end: M0/M1/M2 milestones, the weight-form and placement-resolution arcs, scope-recycled execution, multi-format footprint analysis, the compile-lane carriage arc, the BitNet/ternary kernel track, and the release docs
• Ajith Goveas (@AjithGoveas) — Iris dataset provider (#1044, #1101), now powering the Android classifier tutorial

Contributors (0.40.1)

• Michal Harakal (@michalharakal) — packed-quant transpose() block-grid correctness fix, all three kernel tiers (#968, #969)

Contributors (0.40.0)

• Michal Harakal (@michalharakal) — off-heap/mmap tensor storage on Android (#921), GGUF DEQUANTIZE_TO_FP32 over-allocation fix (#782), native Q5_0/Q5_1 packed matmul kernels (#708), Apple arm64 runtime FEAT_DotProd dispatch (#958), Apple iOS/macOS Kotlin/Native kernel targets (#959)

Contributors (0.39.1)

• Michal Harakal (@michalharakal) — primitive FP32 fast paths for the eager CPU ops (#949), README pointer to SKaiNET-transformers (#923)

Contributors (0.39.0)

• Michal Harakal (@michalharakal) — Android JNI NEON kernel backend with runtime dotprod dispatch (#943, #945), Android createRandomAccessSource streaming loads (#922), cinterop klib archive embedding (#942), Q4_0 NEON kernel (#939), GGUF loader fail-fast (#919), tensor-storage correctness fixes (#927, #928, #929, #930, #931), AAR release publishing (#947)

Contributors (0.38.0)

• Michal Harakal (@michalharakal) — dynamic tensor dimensions for streaming KV-cache decode (#891), shared narrow-float BF16/FP16 layer (#886), zero-copy transpose for input-major narrow weights (#895), native FP16 matmul kernel (#896), read-once weight tiling in the native narrow kernels (#897)
• @MacOS — least-privilege permissions on the build workflow (#899), MathJax npm install pinned by version (#889)

Contributors (0.37.0)

• Michal Harakal (@michalharakal) — Lstm layer (#824), Dropout masking (#867), LR schedules (#866), optional/open Linear (#870, #875), SDPA scale fix (#880), autograd fixes (#877), argMax DAG spec (#878), tokenizer + gather fixes (#879), Android native IO targets (#836, #842, #845)
• @MacOS — OpenSSF Scorecard workflow and badge (#814), commit-hash pinning across all CI workflows and reproducible docs Docker image (#816, #821, #827, #830–#838, #846, #848, #868)

Contributors (0.36.0)

• @MacOS — REUSE compliance CI workflow and status badge (#806, #807)

Contributors (0.14.0)

• Dhia Chemingui (@dhiaspaner) — Android KMP plugin migration (#385, #386)

---

Citing

If you use SKaiNET in your research, please cite it. Citation metadata lives in CITATION.cff (GitHub's Cite this repository button exports BibTeX and APA from it). Ready-to-paste BibTeX:

@misc{skainet,
  author       = {Harakal, Michal and {SKaiNET-developers contributors}},
  title        = {{SKaiNET}: A {Kotlin} Multiplatform {AI} Framework},
  year         = {2026},
  note         = {Version 0.62.4. MIT License},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/SKaiNET-developers/SKaiNET}}
}

Please include the version you used (each release is tagged).

License

MIT — see LICENCE.