CLM-v0.1-8B for MLX (8bit)

An Apple-Silicon (MLX) port of CLM-v0.1-8B, the Contrastive Language Model from Contrastive-LM/CLM: a frozen Qwen3-8B encoder plus two small projection heads that score states against candidate actions. It answers typed questions (yes/no, choice, score) and ranks candidates with a probability distribution, without generating text.

This is an unofficial community port, not released or reviewed by the CLM authors. It was checked against upstream's reference implementation (the authors' code: vLLM + clm-serve at commit bb42c6c, which we ran on an RTX 4090) on 778 questions; see Parity below.

The encoder itself is a standard MLX-format Qwen3-8B checkpoint, so its weights are usable with general MLX tooling such as mlx-workflow and its Mac app MLXUI for local, on-device inference. Note that the CLM answer/rank behavior (the projection heads and clm_mlx code in this repo) is specific to this port and isn't one of MLXUI's built-in model protocols — using it there would need custom integration on top of the raw encoder.

Requirements

An Apple Silicon Mac (MLX), Python 3.10+, about 8 GB of disk and roughly 9.05 GB of free memory while running (a 16 GB Mac is the practical minimum; measured peak above).

Quickstart

pip install mlx mlx-lm transformers huggingface_hub
hf download mlx-community/CLM-v0.1-8B-MLX-8bit --local-dir clm-mlx && cd clm-mlx

Run Python from inside the downloaded folder (the clm_mlx package ships in it):

from clm_mlx.engine import Engine
eng = Engine("encoder", "heads")
out = eng.answer(
    "Customer: my invoice was charged twice and nobody answers the phone!",
    {
        "urgency": {"type": "noul", "instructions": "Is this urgent?"},
        "department": {"type": "choice", "instructions": "Which team should handle this?",
                        "criteria": {"billing": "Charges, invoices, refunds", "technical": "Bugs and outages"}},
        "frustration": {"type": "score", "instructions": "How frustrated is the customer?",
                         "criteria": ["Calm", "Frustrated", "Very angry"]},
    },
)
print(out["answers"]["department"]["choice"], out["answers"]["department"]["probabilities"])
print(eng.rank("", ["The Moon's gravitational pull.", "Photosynthesis in plants."], "What causes tides on Earth?"))

Questions and answers use upstream's wire format (noul / choice / score); see the upstream API reference. Option projections are cached, so repeated questions over new states only pay for the state.

Parity with the upstream server

Reference: upstream's code, run by us on an RTX 4090 (vLLM 0.30.0, bfloat16), 882 texts (2048-token limit included), 778 typed questions. The yardstick is how much the upstream server disagrees with itself: its live answers compared with answers recomputed from its own vectors for the same inputs.

Verdict: within upstream noise (top-option agreement at least upstream's own minus 1 point, and p95 difference at most 1.5× upstream's). The port is somewhat noisier than upstream is with itself (p95, median and max above), while agreeing on the top option as often. 8 questions changed their top option; the upstream server's own top probability on those was 0.35–0.54 (near-ties). The full report is in parity.json.

Notes and limitations

• Encoder only: lm_head is removed, so this checkpoint cannot generate text.
• Inputs over 2048 tokens keep the first 2048, matching the upstream server. Upstream trained the heads on the last tokens of long states; Engine(..., truncation="tail") does that instead.
• Quantization adds a small amount of noise on top of upstream's own; decisions the upstream model is unsure about (near 50/50) can flip.

Credits and licence

• CLM method, heads and reference implementation: Kwok, Kang, Suresh, Saad-Falcon, Pavone, Ré, Mirhoseini, Contrastive Language Models: A System One Model for Fast and Generalizable Decision-Making (2026), contrastive-lm.notion.site. Heads: Contrastive-LM/CLM-v0.1-8B, Apache-2.0.
• Encoder: Qwen/Qwen3-8B, Apache-2.0.
• This port (MLX conversion, clm_mlx code, parity harness): Apache-2.0.

@misc{kwok2026contrastivelanguagemodels,
  title={Contrastive Language Models: A System One Model for Fast and Generalizable Decision-Making},
  author={Jacky Kwok and Hangoo Kang and Tarun Suresh and Jon Saad-Falcon and Marco Pavone and Christopher Ré and Azalia Mirhoseini},
  year={2026}, note={Notion Blog}, url={https://contrastive-lm.notion.site}
}