Retain the unsuperseded macOS RAM-detection contribution from PR #13 while making every optional probe fail closed. The shared MPS device, loader, cache, and dtype work is already present on current main and is intentionally not duplicated.
Cover legacy console fallbacks, platform temp paths, local UI disk probing, and lazy analysis exports. Bind the new local UI test to the executable source-to-test risk map.
Salvage the still-relevant functional work from PR #48: add non-UTF-8 console fallbacks, use platform temporary directories, make pipeline log output encoding-safe, and defer heavyweight analysis imports. The obsolete contributed CI workflow and already-corrected remote URL are intentionally excluded.
Add a --gpu-memory-utilization flag (0.0-1.0, default 0.85) that controls
the fraction of GPU VRAM available for model loading. Plumbed from CLI
through AbliterationPipeline to load_model's max_memory calculation.
Useful on dedicated GPU setups where the default 15% reserve is wasteful
and causes unnecessary CPU offloading on models that would otherwise fit.
Four bugs prevented bitsandbytes 4-bit quantized models from completing
ablation studies on GPUs with 16GB VRAM:
1. runner.py: quantization parameter was never passed from StudyConfig
to load_model(), so the loader had no idea quantization was enabled.
2. loader.py (max_memory): GPU memory budget was calculated against the
unquantized model size, causing accelerate to offload layers to meta
device even though the quantized model fits comfortably.
Now divides estimate by 4 (4-bit) or 2 (8-bit) before deciding.
3. evaluator.py: empty strings in wikitext dataset caused zero-length
tensors that crashed the forward pass with a reshape error.
Now filters empty/whitespace-only texts and skips empty batches.
4. loader.py (snapshot/restore): snapshot skip decision used unquantized
size estimate, and restore used strict=True which rejects bitsandbytes
metadata keys (.absmax, .quant_map, .quant_state). Now uses quantized
estimate and strict=False.
Tested on RTX 5060 Ti (16GB) with Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct in 4-bit.
Quick Scan (layer_removal + ffn_ablation) completes all 56 specs.
Joseph Magly