---
license: apache-2.0
library_name: litert
pipeline_tag: image-feature-extraction
base_model: timm/vit_pe_core_base_patch16_224.fb
tags:
  - litert
  - tflite
  - on-device
  - android
  - gpu
  - clip
  - perception-encoder
  - image-encoder
  - vit
  - rope
base_model_relation: quantized
---

# Perception Encoder (PE-Core-B16-224) — LiteRT (TFLite) GPU

On-device [LiteRT](https://ai.google.dev/edge/litert) (`.tflite`) conversion of
**Perception Encoder Core** (PE-Core, Meta 2025), the SOTA CLIP-style image tower,
converted from [`timm/vit_pe_core_base_patch16_224.fb`](https://huggingface.co/timm/vit_pe_core_base_patch16_224.fb)
(ViT-B/16, 94M params; original [facebook/PE-Core-B16-224](https://huggingface.co/facebook/PE-Core-B16-224)).

A single forward pass turns one RGB image into a **1024-d L2-normalized image
embedding** for zero-shot classification, retrieval, and similarity — running
**fully on the LiteRT `CompiledModel` GPU accelerator** (ML Drift): **all 1028
ops are GPU-native (`Replacing 1028 out of 1028 node(s) ... LITERT_CL`), no CPU
fallback, no Flex ops.**

## Files

| File | Size | Description |
|------|------|-------------|
| `pe_core_base_224_fp16.tflite` | 187 MB | FP16 single-graph model, GPU full-residency |
| `convert_pecore.py` | — | Reproducible conversion script (timm → tflite) |

## I/O

- **Input**: `[1, 3, 224, 224]` float32, **NCHW**, RGB normalized to **`[-1, 1]`**
  i.e. `(pixel/255 - 0.5) / 0.5` (timm mean/std = `(0.5, 0.5, 0.5)`). Normalization
  is applied by the caller (not baked into the graph).
- **Output**: `[1, 1024]` float32, **L2-normalized** image embedding.

## Usage (Android, LiteRT CompiledModel)

```kotlin
val model = CompiledModel.create(
    context.assets, "pe_core_base_224_fp16.tflite",
    CompiledModel.Options(Accelerator.GPU), null
)
val inputs = model.createInputBuffers()
val outputs = model.createOutputBuffers()
inputs[0].writeFloat(nchwFloatArray)        // [1,3,224,224], RGB scaled to [-1,1]
model.run(inputs, outputs)
val embedding = outputs[0].readFloat()      // [1024], already L2-normalized
```

For zero-shot classification, precompute text-label embeddings with the PE-Core
text tower offline and take the dot product on device.

## Performance

- **~66 ms / image steady-state** on a Pixel 8a (Mali-G615) GPU (best 12.5 ms),
  full GPU residency, FP16.

## Conversion notes

Converted with [litert-torch / ai-edge-torch](https://github.com/google-ai-edge/ai-edge-torch).
Making a RoPE ViT image tower **fully GPU-resident *and* numerically correct** on
the ML Drift GPU delegate required four verbatim (weights-exact, output
corr ≈ 1.0) model-side rewrites — the first three for residency, the last for
on-device numerical correctness:

1. **Fused-qkv → 4D manual attention** — the fused `qkv` reshape emits a 5D
   head-split the GPU delegate rejects; decompose into separate q/k/v projections.
   Self-attention uses `scaled_dot_product_attention`, whose lowering keeps the
   batch-matmul 3D with a materialized transpose (both required for residency).
2. **Interleaved 2D-RoPE → rotate-half** — PE-Core's interleaved rotary uses a
   strided `x[..., ::2]` that lowers to `GATHER_ND` (GPU-banned). Bake an
   even→odd channel permutation into the q/k weights (preserves q·k exactly) and
   apply the rotate-half form with constant cos/sin → clean
   `MUL`/`ADD`/`SLICE`/`CONCAT`.
3. **Attention-pool single-query attention → broadcast-multiply + reduce-sum** —
   the pooling query is a constant latent, so a batch-matmul there is
   `const @ non-const` (rejected at compile, and the reordered `const-RHS` form is
   mis-computed on device); expressing it as `(q·k).sum` + softmax + `(attn·v).sum`
   is exact and GPU-correct.
4. **Overflow-safe LayerNorm** — the delegate computes the LayerNorm variance
   reduction in **fp16 even for an fp32 graph**; deep-ViT "massive activations"
   (|x|~50+) make `sum((x-mean)²)` exceed fp16 max (65504), so the normalization
   is wrong and the error compounds with depth (output correlation collapses to
   ~0.28 over 12 blocks while *still reporting full GPU residency*). Scaling by
   1/32 before squaring (undone after) keeps the running sum in range —
   mathematically identical to `nn.LayerNorm`.

Verified **on a Pixel 8a GPU**: zero banned ops, zero >4D tensors, full residency,
and TFLite(GPU)-vs-PyTorch output correlation = 1.0 (the on-device GPU result —
not just the host CPU result — matches the reference).

## Training data & PII

PE-Core was pretrained by Meta on a large-scale **web-crawled image–text dataset**
(billions of image–caption pairs, CLIP-style contrastive objective). No new
training was performed for this conversion — it is a weights-exact format change
of the public `timm`/`facebook` checkpoint. Because the source data is
web-scraped, it may incidentally contain people, faces, text, and other PII;
no PII was deliberately collected, and this conversion adds none. Users deploying
the encoder should apply their own content/PII filtering as appropriate. See the
original [PE model card](https://huggingface.co/facebook/PE-Core-B16-224) and
[paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.13181) for full dataset details.

## Performance

Measured on a **Pixel 8a** (Tensor G3, Android 16) with the standard TFLite [`benchmark_model`](https://ai.google.dev/edge/litert/models/measurement) tool — 10 warm-up runs then 50 timed runs, reported as the tool's mean.

| Runtime | Backend | Graph on GPU | Latency |
|---|---|---|---|
| TFLite `benchmark_model` (`TfLiteGpuDelegateV2`) | GPU (OpenCL) | 80 / 1102 | did not run |
| TFLite `benchmark_model` | CPU (XNNPACK, 4 threads) | — | 624.3 ms |

**Any on-device figure recorded when this model shipped came from a different runtime.** It was taken through LiteRT's own `CompiledModel` accelerator (logcat reports it as `LITERT_CL`), which is the path the Kotlin sample app and the LiteRT API use, and it appears elsewhere on this card. The rows above are the classic TFLite OpenCL delegate, measured with a tool anyone can download and re-run. The two are not comparable, so read the rows above as a reproducible floor rather than as this model's speed on LiteRT.

Note that the GPU does not take the whole graph here (80 / 1102); the remainder runs on the CPU and the split costs a per-partition round trip.

## Snapdragon NPU (Hexagon)

The NPU is **2.20x faster** than the GPU (7.42 ms against 16.34 ms) and loads 10.39x faster (194 ms against 2010 ms).

| backend | compiled | inference (median / min) | load |
|---|---|---:|---:|
| NPU (Hexagon v81) | on-device JIT | 7.42 ms / 7.33 ms | 194 ms |
| GPU (Adreno) | — | 16.34 ms / 16.07 ms | 2010 ms |

Measured on a **Samsung Galaxy S26** (Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 / SM8850, Hexagon v81, Android 16) with LiteRT `CompiledModel` 2.2.0, one accelerator per process, 5 warm-up runs then N=50 timed runs, median reported. Every run held thermal status `NONE` throughout. Headroom 0.60–0.61, where 1.0 is the throttling threshold.

**The NPU rows ran the published file unchanged.** LiteRT compiled it for the Hexagon on the device at first load. That first compile took 8.2 s here. The `load` column above is the cached load every later run pays. Recipe and the runtime libraries it needs: [NPU guide](https://github.com/john-rocky/hf-to-litertlm/blob/main/docs/android-npu.md).

GPU wiring: [GPU guide](https://github.com/john-rocky/hf-to-litertlm/blob/main/docs/android-gpu.md).

## License & attribution

- **Apache-2.0** (original [PE-Core](https://huggingface.co/facebook/PE-Core-B16-224) /
  [timm checkpoint](https://huggingface.co/timm/vit_pe_core_base_patch16_224.fb)).
- This is a format conversion; all credit to the original authors (Meta / FAIR).