Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A checkpoint file named 'model_step_120000.safetensors' with corresponding optimiser state.
- Is an instance
A research release of 36 intermediate checkpoints from a single 70B training run for studying emergence.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A model card without any saved weights.
- Not an instance
A configuration file with no learned parameters.
Editorial commentary
Checkpoints are the unit of model exchange and evaluation. A 'released' model is one or more checkpoints; intermediate training checkpoints support analysis of capability emergence; resume-from-checkpoint enables training continuation. Best-practice checkpoint metadata includes step, dataset position, training loss, and hash of the deterministic random state.
References
- Hugging Face safetensors specification; PyTorch torch.save documentation.
Also known as
weights checkpoint · training checkpoint
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="Model checkpoint"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/model-checkpoint" />{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"name": "Model checkpoint",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/model-checkpoint",
"description": "A saved snapshot of a model's parameters (and optionally optimiser state) at a specific point in training, identified by a step number or version tag and serialised to a file format such as safetensors or .pt.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/ai-and-ml-research-outputs/",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/model-checkpoint",
"sameAs": [
"weights checkpoint",
"training checkpoint"
],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
}
