On-device LiteRT / TFLite conversion of the image encoder of SAM 2.1 Hiera-Tiny (Meta, Apache-2.0), running fully on the mobile GPU via the LiteRT CompiledModel API (ML Drift / LITERT_CL delegate). The whole graph is GPU-resident — no CPU/XNNPACK fallback ops.

This is the heavy backbone of the Segment Anything 2 image path: it turns an RGB image into the multi-scale feature pyramid that a (small) prompt-encoder + mask-decoder then query per click/box.


Task	Image encoder for promptable segmentation (SAM 2 image path)
Backbone	Hiera-Tiny (hierarchical ViT, window + global attention) + FPN neck
Input	`[1, 3, 1024, 1024]` NCHW float32, ImageNet-normalized
Outputs	3 FPN feature maps: `[1,256,256,256]`, `[1,256,128,128]`, `[1,256,64,64]`
Precision / size	FP16, 80 MB
Device	Pixel 8a, LiteRT GPU (`Accelerator.GPU`), ~7 ms / image
Residency	`Replacing 862 out of 862 node(s) with delegate (LITERT_CL)` (full, single partition)

Preprocessing (must match)

resize to 1024x1024 (bilinear)  ->  x/255  ->  (x - mean) / std
mean = [0.485, 0.456, 0.406], std = [0.229, 0.224, 0.225]   # ImageNet, RGB, NCHW

GPU-clean conversion (what was re-authored)

Converted with litert-torch. SAM 2's Hiera encoder is not GPU-clean out of the box; these exact, weights-faithful rewrites were applied (model-side only — no converter patch):

window_partition / window_unpartition: the 6-D view+permute window reshape rejected by the GPU delegate (>4-D) is re-expressed as a sequence of ≤4-D reshape/transpose ops (numerically exact, verified vs the original).
Sam2MultiScaleAttention: the 5-D fused-QKV reshape is decomposed into separate q/k/v, and attention runs as a 3-D batched SDPA ([B*heads, N, d]). A 4-D SDPA makes the delegate emit a [C,C]->[nW,ws,C,C] BROADCAST_TO on every windowed block; the 3-D form removes all 9.
Windowed positional embedding: the bicubic-interpolate + tile of the constant pos_embed is baked to a buffer (add only) — removes a runtime interpolate of a constant.
Neck: the (constant, shape-only) sine FPN position encodings are dropped from the graph (compute them host-side) — removes the remaining BROADCAST_TO ops.
Overflow-safe LayerNorm (scale-before-square) as an fp16 safety margin for the deep stages.

Net: banned ops = NONE, >4-D tensors = 0, full GPU residency.

Fidelity (honest)

Eager re-authoring is numerically exact (cos = 1.000, mae = 0). On-device GPU output vs the CPU reference, per FPN level:

Output	cosine
FPN-0 `256x256` (high-res, drives mask detail)	0.99998
FPN-1 `128x128`	0.99994
FPN-2 `64x64` (coarse image embedding)	0.99253

The deepest 64×64 feature drifts slightly on the GPU. This is not LayerNorm overflow (scale-before-square LayerNorm doesn't change it, and the CPU fp16 model matches PyTorch fp32 at corr 0.999999) — it is the mobile GPU computing the deep-stage global attention (64×64 = 4096 tokens) in true fp16, where the CPU path upcasts to fp32. The high-resolution features that carry mask boundaries are near-exact, so mask quality is preserved in practice.

Usage (Android / LiteRT CompiledModel)

kotlin

val model = CompiledModel.create(context.assets, "sam2_tiny_image_encoder_fp16.tflite",
    CompiledModel.Options(Accelerator.GPU), null)
// input: [1,3,1024,1024] NCHW, ImageNet-normalized
// outputs: 3 FPN feature maps -> feed to the SAM 2 prompt encoder + mask decoder

Training data & PII

SAM 2 was trained by Meta on SA-1B (licensed photos) and SA-V (licensed videos) with model-in-the-loop mask annotation. No new training was performed for this conversion — it is a weights-faithful format change of the public facebook/sam2.1-hiera-tiny checkpoint. Because the source data is real-world imagery, it may incidentally contain people, faces, vehicles, signage and other PII; no PII was deliberately collected and this conversion adds none. Apply your own content/PII filtering as appropriate. See the SAM 2 release and paper for full dataset details.

License

Apache-2.0, inherited from the upstream SAM 2.1. This is a format conversion; all credit to the original authors (Meta AI).

Want a different model on-device? Open a request — free, open weights only; the export and its measured numbers get published publicly.

mlboydaisuke/SAM2.1-Hiera-Tiny-Image-Encoder-LiteRT

SAM 2.1 (Hiera-Tiny) image encoder — LiteRT GPU