Dynamic weight loading

Checkpoints are often serialized in a format that does not match what a model expects at runtime. Quantization and parallelism frequently require reshaping, splitting, or merging tensors into the expected model format instead of loading weights as-is.

Dynamic weight loading addresses this by applying scheduled, reversible operations to checkpoint tensors as they are loaded. Transformers makes this available through WeightConverter, which maps one or more source keys to target keys by running a list of composable conversion operations. This approach adapts to new weight layouts, and supports loading quantized mixture-of-experts (MoEs) or enabling tensor parallelism and MoEs.

This guide demonstrates how to use the WeightConverter to convert tensors. Your WeightConverter should be added inside _build_checkpoint_conversion_mapping() in the conversion_mapping.py file.

Conversion operations

The WeightConverter class has several operations that are executed when from_pretrained() is called for transforming checkpoint source tensors into model target tensors.

Operations are fully reversible. Saving reverses the conversions and returns the original checkpoint so you can easily work across different frameworks.

Chunk

The Chunk operation is used to split a tensor. For example, if a model expects Q, K, and V as three separate tensors instead of a single tensor.

WeightConverter(
    "self_attn.qkv_proj",
    ["self_attn.q_proj", "self_attn.k_proj", "self_attn.v_proj"],
    operations=[Chunk(dim=0)],
)

Concatenate

The Concatenate operation allows you to fuse separate tensors into a single tensor. For example, if a model expects Q, K, and V as a single tensor instead of separate tensors.

WeightConverter(
    ["self_attn.q_proj", "self_attn.k_proj", "self_attn.v_proj"],
    "self_attn.qkv_proj",
    operations=[Concatenate(dim=0)],
)

MergeModulelist

MergeModulelist merges a list of tensors into a single tensor. For example, you can compose MergeModulelist with Concatenate to stack the experts in a MoE and pack them into one tensor.

WeightConverter(
    ["block_sparse_moe.experts.*.w1.weight", "block_sparse_moe.experts.*.w3.weight",],
    "mlp.experts.gate_up_proj",
    operations=[
        MergeModulelist(dim=0),
        Concatenate(dim=1),
    ],
)

SplitModulelist

SplitModulelist splits a tensor back into a list of tensors. For example, you can split a stack of experts back into individual experts.

WeightConverter(
    "mlp.experts.down_proj",
    "block_sparse_moe.experts.*.w2.weight",
    operations=[SplitModulelist(dim=0)],
)

PermuteForRope

PermuteForRope converts weights from the interleaved format to use the sin/cos format. For example, you can compose Chunk with PermuteForRope to split a fused QKV tensor and apply the sin/cos RoPE permutation to Q and K.

WeightConverter(
    ["model.layers.*.self_attn.qkv_proj.weight"],
    ["model.layers.*.self_attn.q_proj.weight", "model.layers.*.self_attn.k_proj.weight", "model.layers.*.self_attn.v_proj.weight",],
    operations=[
        Chunk(dim=0),
        PermuteForRope(),
    ],
)

Fast and efficient model loading

Loading a model is faster and uses less memory because the loader knows which tensors are required for operations and schedules their materialization lazily.

The loader scans the checkpoint once to discover pattern matches and collect tensors. It stores them as Future objects and submits them to a thread pool for asynchronous loading without blocking the GIL. A parameter starts loading as soon as a thread becomes available to it.

If your system runs other heavy processes, multiple threads may slow down loading instead of accelerating it. In this case, set the environment variable HF_DEACTIVATE_ASYNC_LOAD=1 to load weights sequentially.

The default is 4 threads for asynchronous parameter loading. This provides the best trade-off across loading scenarios and hardware. The work is mostly I/O bound, but depending on accelerator hardware and the dtype required at loading, it can become CPU/GPU-bound if the dtype differs from the serialized one (this requires an additional copy operation).

When converting a weight, the converter waits for all required tensors to materialize if they haven’t loaded yet. For example, the MergeModulelist operation requires all weights in ModuleList to be loaded before merging.

Concatenating tensors requires a temporary copy, so operations like MergeModulelist and Concatenate need 2x the memory of the underlying tensors during conversion. Once merged, only the resulting tensor stays in memory. The theoretical worst-case memory peak is the model size plus the tensors required for the largest MergeModulelist or Concatenate operation.

This worst case only occurs when all other parameters have loaded before the demanding conversion runs. Two scenarios trigger this.

1. All parameters loaded asynchronously before entering the demanding conversion (the thread pool was faster than the conversion queue).
2. The demanding conversion is the last one.

For example, a MoE model using MergeModulelist for experts on each layer, the theoretical worst-case memory peak is model size plus experts on one layer.

These worst-case scenarios are uncommon. The actual memory peak tends to stay close to the model size.

Reusing the dynamic loading building blocks

Dynamic weight loading is not limited to full model checkpoints. The same building blocks let you load any set of weights as long as you can describe how checkpoint keys map to parameters and ensure the target modules exist.

At a high level, the contract looks like this:

1. Prepare the model namespace. Make sure the modules/parameters you want to load are present and named the way your mapping will target them. For adapters, that means calling inject_adapter_in_model(...) so adapter modules exist before loading. For custom heads or extra modules, instantiate them on the model first.
2. Describe how to map weights. Build a conversion/renaming list (for example, in a helper like _build_peft_weight_mapping(...)) using WeightConverter or WeightRenaming. This is where you express how checkpoint keys should be converted, split, merged, or renamed to match your model namespace. You can do mostly 3 things:
   • add operations to the list of converters: these will be applied on all weights except for the ones collected in any of the WeightConverter. These in general should be WeightRenaming operations
   • add operations to the list of operations of each converter: this is what happens for Quantization, where we just add a quantization operation after the list of operations of any WeightConverter.
   • replace / map operations to your custom operations: this is what happens with peft. We replace the Concatenate operation of say mixtral, to be PeftConcatenate. This way, when the adapter checkpoint is read, the weights to be concatenated are collected, and are properly formated for peft
3. Load + finalize + report. Use the core loader to perform the conversion and populate tensors, then finalize and log results. Concretely, this flow is:
   • LoadStateDictConfig(...) + _load_pretrained_model(...) to load and convert.
   • _finalize_load_state_dict(...) to move any missing/mismatched tensors off meta, initialize them, and tie weights.
   • log_state_dict_report(...) to report missing/unexpected/mismatched keys (and conversion errors).

These APIs are expose to allow you to handle custom code, custom weight format, but also make sure you benefit from the highest and most efficient weight loading, sharding and good quality of life of transformers API!