llama.cpp/examples/debug
Daniel Bevenius 87f4744a80
examples : disable cb_eval callback for --save-logits (#21553)
This commit updates the debug example to not create the
base_callback_data.

The motivation for this is when using `--save-logits`, which is used by
examples/model-conversion scripts, we often don't care about the tensor
outputs and they just add noise to the output. This changes is quiet by
default we can always remove --save-logits to get the tensor outputs
when debugging.
2026-04-08 14:10:33 +02:00
..
CMakeLists.txt examples : add debug utility/example (#18464) 2026-01-07 10:42:19 +01:00
README.md chore : correct typos [no ci] (#20041) 2026-03-05 08:50:21 +01:00
debug.cpp examples : disable cb_eval callback for --save-logits (#21553) 2026-04-08 14:10:33 +02:00

README.md

llama.cpp/examples/debug

This is a utility intended to help debug a model by registering a callback that logs GGML operations and tensor data. It can also store the generated logits or embeddings as well as the prompt and token ids for comparison with the original model.

Usage

llama-debug \
  --hf-repo ggml-org/models \
  --hf-file phi-2/ggml-model-q4_0.gguf \
  --model phi-2-q4_0.gguf \
  --prompt hello \
  --save-logits \
  --verbose

The tensor data is logged as debug and required the --verbose flag. The reason for this is that while useful for a model with many layers there can be a lot of output. You can filter the tensor names using the --tensor-filter option.

A recommended approach is to first run without --verbose and see if the generated logits/embeddings are close to the original model. If they are not, then it might be required to inspect tensor by tensor and in that case it is useful to enable the --verbose flag along with --tensor-filter to focus on specific tensors.

Options

This example supports all standard llama.cpp options and also accepts the following options:

$ llama-debug --help
...

----- example-specific params -----

--save-logits                           save final logits to files for verification (default: false)
--logits-output-dir PATH                directory for saving logits output files (default: data)
--tensor-filter REGEX                   filter tensor names for debug output (regex pattern, can be specified multiple times)

Output Files

When --save-logits is enabled, the following files are created in the output directory:

  • llamacpp-<model>[-embeddings].bin - Binary output (logits or embeddings)
  • llamacpp-<model>[-embeddings].txt - Text output (logits or embeddings, one per line)
  • llamacpp-<model>[-embeddings]-prompt.txt - Prompt text and token IDs
  • llamacpp-<model>[-embeddings]-tokens.bin - Binary token IDs for programmatic comparison

These files can be compared against the original model's output to verify the converted model.