---
license: apache-2.0
library_name: coremltools
base_model: laion/larger_clap_general
pipeline_tag: feature-extraction
tags:
  - audio
  - audio-embedding
  - clap
  - htsat
  - core-ml
  - onnx
  - apple-silicon
---

# larger-clap-general-coreml

Two artifacts derived from [`laion/larger_clap_general`](https://huggingface.co/laion/larger_clap_general), kept in the same embedding space so they can be used as a pair:

- **`clap_audio_encoder.mlpackage`** — native Core ML build of the audio encoder + projection head. Runs accelerated on Apple GPU via `MLComputeUnits.cpuAndGPU`.
- **`text_model.onnx`** — ONNX build of the text encoder + projection head. Standard ORT-compatible, cross-platform.

Both take their respective inputs and return an L2-normalized 512-d embedding in the joint CLAP space (cosine similarity == dot product).

`larger_clap_general` is trained on **general audio, music and speech** — use the pair for zero-shot audio classification or open-vocabulary retrieval.

## Why this repo exists

- **Audio side**: `ort`'s CoreML execution provider can't accelerate HTSAT — reflect-pad, 5-D reshapes, relative-position-bias gather, and dynamic shapes shred the graph into CPU partitions, so the EP "registers" but every node runs on CPU. Loading the `.mlpackage` directly via Core ML (skipping ORT entirely) runs the full graph on the Apple GPU.
- **Text side**: this `text_model.onnx` is re-exported directly from LAION's PyTorch with no `optimum` graph fusion. Xenova's matching `larger_clap_general` ONNX export of the text encoder is in a *slightly* different numerical subspace than LAION's PyTorch (graph fusions + quantization add up), so pairing Xenova-text with our LAION-derived audio model collapses text→audio cosine to ~0.2. Re-exporting text from the same PyTorch source recovers ~0.7+ on good matches.

## Inputs / Outputs

### Audio (`clap_audio_encoder.mlpackage`)

| | name | shape | dtype | notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Input | `audio` | `[1, 480000]` | float32 | 10 s mono @ 48 kHz, peak-normalized to `[-1, 1]` |
| Output | `embedding` | `[1, 512]` | float32 | L2-normalized; cosine == dot product |

The mel-spectrogram extraction (STFT, Slaney mel filterbank, log) is **baked into the model graph** — you pass raw audio, not features.

### Text (`text_model.onnx`)

| | name | shape | dtype | notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Input | `input_ids` | `[B, T]` | int64 | RoBERTa tokenizer output |
| Input | `attention_mask` | `[B, T]` | int64 | 1 for real tokens, 0 for padding |
| Output | `text_embeds` | `[B, 512]` | float32 | L2-normalized; cosine == dot product |

Both batch and sequence length are dynamic. Use the tokenizer from `Xenova/larger_clap_general` (or any `larger_clap_general` mirror with the standard RoBERTa tokenizer config) — vocab + special tokens are identical across exports.

## Variable-length audio

The graph has a fixed 10 s input shape. For arbitrary-length audio, recommended recipe:

| Duration | Strategy |
|---|---|
| ≤ 10 s | Zero-pad to 480_000 samples, single forward pass. |
| > 10 s | Sliding 10 s windows with 50 % overlap, embed each window, **mean-pool the embeddings, re-L2-normalize.** |

For very long files cap window count to bound runtime — uniformly spacing N windows across `[0, T-10s]` gives full-file coverage without per-window blow-up.

## Usage

### Swift (Core ML)
```swift
import CoreML

let config = MLModelConfiguration()
config.computeUnits = .cpuAndGPU
let model = try MLModel(contentsOf: compiledURL, configuration: config)

let audio = try MLMultiArray(shape: [1, 480_000], dataType: .float32)
// copy your normalized waveform into audio.dataPointer ...

let provider = try MLDictionaryFeatureProvider(dictionary: ["audio": audio])
let out = try model.prediction(from: provider)
let embedding = out.featureValue(for: "embedding")!.multiArrayValue!
```

### Rust (objc2-core-ml)
The `objc2`/`objc2-core-ml` crates give direct Rust bindings to Core ML. Sketch:

```rust
use objc2_core_ml::{MLModel, MLModelConfiguration, MLMultiArray, MLMultiArrayDataType,
                    MLDictionaryFeatureProvider, MLFeatureValue, MLComputeUnits};

// Core ML wants a compiled .mlmodelc — compile the .mlpackage once,
// then load with cpuAndGPU compute units.
let compiled = unsafe { MLModel::compileModelAtURL_error(&mlpackage_url) }?;
let config = unsafe { MLModelConfiguration::new() };
unsafe { config.setComputeUnits(MLComputeUnits::CPUAndGPU) };
let model = unsafe { MLModel::modelWithContentsOfURL_configuration_error(&compiled, &config) }?;

// Build [1, 480000] float32 input, copy waveform via dataPointer,
// wrap in MLFeatureValue + MLDictionaryFeatureProvider, run prediction.
```

### Python (audio via coremltools, text via onnxruntime)
```python
import coremltools as ct
import numpy as np
import onnxruntime as ort
from transformers import AutoTokenizer

# --- audio: Core ML ---
audio_model = ct.models.MLModel("clap_audio_encoder.mlpackage")
waveform = np.zeros((1, 480_000), dtype=np.float32)
audio_emb = audio_model.predict({"audio": waveform})["embedding"]  # (1, 512)

# --- text: ONNX ---
tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("Xenova/larger_clap_general")
text_sess = ort.InferenceSession("text_model.onnx", providers=["CPUExecutionProvider"])
encoded = tok("a dog barking", return_tensors="np", padding=True)
text_emb = text_sess.run(["text_embeds"], {
    "input_ids": encoded["input_ids"].astype(np.int64),
    "attention_mask": encoded["attention_mask"].astype(np.int64),
})[0]  # (1, 512)

# Joint-embedding similarity:
similarity = float(np.dot(audio_emb.flatten(), text_emb.flatten()))
```

## How it was built

### Audio (`clap_audio_encoder.mlpackage`)

`coremltools` 8 + `torch.export` from `laion/larger_clap_general`'s PyTorch weights, then `convert_to="mlprogram"` + int8 linear weight quantization. The conversion is non-trivial — `ct.convert` rejects the model out of the box. Patches applied:

1. **`F.interpolate(mode='bicubic')` → `'bilinear'`** — CoreML's MIL backend lacks bicubic upsampling. Used by HTSAT's positional-embedding resize. Accuracy delta is negligible.
2. **`torch.jit.is_tracing()` → `True`** — forces HF's CLAP code onto the static-shape path during conversion.
3. **`ClapAudioLayer.set_shift_and_window_size` → no-op** — the dynamic window adjustment hits a "data-dependent guard" error in `torch.export`. For our fixed `[1, 1, 1001, 64]` input the `__init__` values are already correct, so neutralizing is safe.
4. **Custom STFT** — `torch.stft`'s op signature drifts across torch versions and the coremltools handler unpacks the wrong arity; implemented as strided conv1d with pre-baked cos/sin Hann bases instead.
5. **Custom `fmod` MIL lowering** — HTSAT's relative-position arithmetic uses float modulo; coremltools has no built-in handler. Registered as `x - trunc(x/y) * y`.
6. **`slice_scatter` override** — HTSAT's attention-mask builder generates empty-slice `slice_scatter` calls at deeper Swin stages (e.g. `slice(0, -window_size)` evaluates to `slice(0, 0)`). The built-in handler's shape check rejects these; registered override that no-ops empty slices and reduces non-empty ones to `slice_by_index + concat`.

A full conversion script that applies all six patches is included in this repo: [`convert-clap-to-coreml.py`](./convert-clap-to-coreml.py). Run with `pip install coremltools>=8,<9 torch>=2.6,<2.10 transformers>=4.40 numpy>=1.24,<2` then `python convert-clap-to-coreml.py --output clap_audio_encoder.mlpackage`. Validation (cosine vs PyTorch reference) runs automatically.

### Text (`text_model.onnx`)

Plain `torch.onnx.export` from the same PyTorch source — no `optimum`, no graph fusion, no quantization. RoBERTa exports cleanly so no per-op patches are needed. Recent `torch.onnx.export` writes weights to a sidecar `.onnx.data` file by default; the conversion script consolidates them back into a single ~500 MB `.onnx` so distribution is one file. Opset 17.

Companion script: [`convert-clap-text-to-onnx.py`](./convert-clap-text-to-onnx.py). Same dependencies as the audio script plus `pip install onnx onnxruntime`.

## Validation

### Audio
Cosine similarity vs the PyTorch reference, on random `[1, 480000]` peak-normalized inputs:

| Trial | Cosine |
|---|---|
| 1 | 0.999393 |
| 2 | 0.998725 |
| 3 | 0.998992 |

Drift is dominated by int8 weight quantization. For full fp32 weights, re-run the audio conversion with `--quantize none` (~3× larger file, ~1.0 cosine).

### Text
Cosine similarity vs the PyTorch reference, on five sample queries:

| Query | Cosine |
|---|---|
| `"a dog barking"` | 1.000000 |
| `"808 kick drum"` | 1.000000 |
| `"lo-fi piano loop with vinyl crackle"` | 1.000000 |
| `"ambient pad with reverb"` | 1.000000 |
| `"voice saying hello"` | 1.000000 |

No quantization on the text side → bit-exact (within fp32 noise) against PyTorch.

## Performance

Apple M-series, `MLComputeUnits.cpuAndGPU`:

| | Latency per 10 s window |
|---|---|
| Cold start (first forward pass) | ~5 s (Core ML graph compile + GPU upload) |
| Steady state | ~30 ms |

Compared to running the original `.onnx` via `ort` on Apple Silicon CPU, that's a roughly 10× speedup for the steady state. ANE was not attempted (`MLComputeUnits.all`) — `CPUAndGPU` was the sweet spot during testing; the strictest backend often rejects whole-graph compilation for transformer audio models.

## Limitations

- **No `logit_scale`.** The original CLAP model's learnable temperature isn't included here — projection heads only. For zero-shot classification you can either ignore it (cosine alone usually ranks correctly) or pull it from the original `laion/larger_clap_general` checkpoint.
- **Fixed audio input shape.** Audio shorter than 10 s must be zero-padded; longer requires the sliding-window recipe above.
- **int8 audio quantization.** ~99.9 % cosine is sufficient for retrieval / search use cases; if you're using these embeddings as inputs to downstream training, re-run audio conversion with `--quantize none`.

## Credits

- [LAION](https://laion.ai) for [`larger_clap_general`](https://huggingface.co/laion/larger_clap_general).
- [gridshiftstudio/clap-music-coreml](https://huggingface.co/gridshiftstudio/clap-music-coreml) for the first public proof that this conversion is viable + the two key patches.

## Citation

If you use this model in your work, please cite the original CLAP paper ([arXiv:2211.06687](https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.06687)):

```bibtex
@misc{https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2211.06687,
  doi = {10.48550/ARXIV.2211.06687},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.06687},
  author = {Wu, Yusong and Chen, Ke and Zhang, Tianyu and Hui, Yuchen and Berg-Kirkpatrick, Taylor and Dubnov, Shlomo},
  title = {Large-scale Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining with Feature Fusion and Keyword-to-Caption Augmentation},
  publisher = {arXiv},
  year = {2022},
  copyright = {Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International}
}
```

## License

This artifact inherits the source model's license: **Apache 2.0**.