license: apache-2.0
tags:
- executorch
- xnnpack
- pte
- on-device
- mask-generation
MobileSAM — ExecuTorch XNNPACK (encoder + decoder)
Promptable segmentation in two .pte files: run the encoder once per image, the
decoder once per click.
mobilesam_encoder_xnnpack_fp32.pte(28.3 MB) — image (1,3,1024,1024) → image_embed (1,256,64,64)mobilesam_encoder_xnnpack_int8.pte(14.0 MB) — same, dynamically quantized, corr 0.999880mobilesam_decoder_xnnpack_fp32.pte(20.5 MB) — (image_embed, points (1,N,2) fp32 pixel coords in 1024-space, labels (1,N) fp32 1=fg/0=bg) → mask logits (1,3,256,256), iou scores (1,3)mobilesam_decoder_xnnpack_fp16.pte(10.5 MB) — same decoder, corr 0.999825
All four take and return fp32 tensors, so any encoder file pairs with any decoder file. The smallest working pair is 24.5 MB against 48.8 MB for fp32 throughout.
The encoder has no fp16 build: TinyViT does not survive half precision, and not
because of anything the conversion does — plain model.half() in eager already
returns corr -0.37 against the fp32 model. Dynamic int8 is the size lever here
instead, and it holds at corr 0.9999. The decoder has no int8 build for the opposite
reason: it came out at 21.8 MB, larger than its own fp32 file, because a dynamically
quantized transformer leaves the decoder's large constant positional embedding in
fp32 and adds quantization metadata on top.
MobileSAM is SAM with its ViT-H encoder replaced by TinyViT. Same prompt contract as the SAM2.1 and EdgeTAM conversions, with two differences worth knowing: this decoder needs only the image embedding (no high-resolution feature maps), and labels are fp32 rather than int64.
- Source: ChaoningZhang/MobileSAM, weights from dhkim2810/MobileSAM
- License: Apache-2.0 (code) / MIT (weights)
- Preprocess: RGB, SAM norm (mean 123.675/116.28/103.53, std 58.395/57.12/57.375), resize the longest side to 1024 and pad to 1024×1024
- Postprocess: take argmax(iou) of the 3 mask logits, threshold at > 0, upsample 4× (256→1024) back to image space, then crop the padding. The prompt encoder is inside the decoder — pass raw click coordinates.
Verification (Mac arm64, executorch 1.4.0, torch 2.13.0)
Both graphs match torch fp32 eager at corr 1.000000, and the wrappers compose back to the stock modules exactly (max_abs_diff 0.000e+00).
| graph | output | shape | max_abs_diff | corr |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| encoder | image_embed | [1, 256, 64, 64] | 3.815e-06 | 1.000000 |
| decoder | mask logits | [1, 3, 256, 256] | 1.717e-05 | 1.000000 |
| decoder | iou | [1, 3] | 1.192e-07 | 1.000000 |
Median over 10 runs, Mac arm64 single process — a relative reference, not a device number: encoder 130.3 ms (torch eager 138.7 ms), decoder 20.5 ms (eager 11.2 ms). XNNPACK delegate coverage: encoder 89.0%, decoder 80.6%.
Conversion
torch.export → to_edge_transform_and_lower(XnnpackPartitioner) → .pte (conversion script: executorch-models)
Three rewrites were needed, and the reasons generalize to other SAM-family ports:
The constant positional embedding is precomputed. TwoWayTransformer.forward
opens with image_pe.flatten(2).permute(0, 2, 1). That input is constant for a
fixed image size, and leaving the reshape in the graph corrupts the block that
consumes it — layer 0's keys came out at corr 0.78 against eager. Handing the
transformer the already-flat tensor restores corr 1.000000. This reproduces with no
delegate at all, and every operator involved verifies clean in isolation, so it is
worth knowing about rather than rediscovering.
Boolean-mask assignment is rewritten as arithmetic. The prompt encoder writes
point_embedding[labels == -1] = 0.0 and three more masked +=. torch.export turns
each into an index_put behind a nonzero, which is a data-dependent shape. The
equivalent emb * (1 - m) + m * w form has fixed shapes and no runtime guards.
Identity repeat_interleave is dropped. The mask decoder calls
torch.repeat_interleave(x, tokens.shape[0], dim=0) with one point batch — a no-op
whose lowered form the delegate mis-sizes. Note this model uses the functional form,
not the tensor method.