`soup adapters` — git for LoRA

After 6 weeks of running experiments you have 30 adapter folders and no idea which one to ship. soup adapters (v0.57.0) treats LoRA adapters as first-class versioned objects.

Six subcommands:

CommandWhat it does
soup adapters diffPer-layer Frobenius + relative drift + SVD effective rank
soup adapters merge4 strategies: linear / TIES / DARE / SVD
soup adapters blameLeave-one-out layer ablation planner
soup adapters branchName a LoRA config with SHA-pinned hashes
soup adapters checkoutRestore a branch; refuses on drift
soup adapters branchesList everything

All adapter math is pure numpy, no torch. .bin adapters are rejected with an actionable "re-save as safetensors" message.

`soup adapters diff`

bash
soup adapters diff adapter-a/ adapter-b/ --top-k 10 --format markdown

For each layer:

  • Frobenius norm of the delta
  • Relative drift (Frobenius / norm of a)
  • SVD effective rankeffective_rank(s) = exp(H(s²/Σs²)) where H is Shannon entropy. Tells you whether a high-rank adapter actually used its rank.

--top-k ranks layers by drift. --format accepts table / json / markdown and routes through render_report_*.

`soup adapters merge` — 4 strategies

bash
soup adapters merge a/ b/ c/ -o merged/ \
  --strategy ties --weights 0.4,0.3,0.3 --density 0.7 --seed 0

Strategies:

  • `linear` — weighted average. Baseline.
  • `ties` (Yadav et al. 2023) — trim by density → elect majority sign → disjoint average. Tied-sign defaults to +1.
  • `dare` (Yu et al. 2024) — Bernoulli drop with density, rescale by 1/density, deterministic via --seed.
  • `svd` — linear-merge then low-rank SVD reconstruction (--rank).

The frozen MergeReport ships a verdict='UNKNOWN' stub today; live canary-verdict integration via the v0.55 eval gate lands in v0.57.1.

`soup adapters blame` — leave-one-out planner

bash
soup adapters blame adapter/ --dataset eval.jsonl --layer model.layers.* --budget 5m --shards 4

Plans which layer ablations to run within a wall-clock budget. parse_budget accepts 60s / 5m / 2h (bounds [60s, 24h]). _MIN_PER_SHARD_SECONDS = 30 checks feasibility — if the budget can't cover shards × 30s you get an actionable error. Returns a frozen BlamePlan with one BlameShardWork per shard.

Use --plan-only to see the plan without running anything. The live runner ships in v0.57.1.

`soup adapters branch` — named, SHA-pinned configs

bash
soup adapters branch chat-llama-v3 -c soup.yaml --base meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B --dataset data.jsonl

Records a frozen Branch:

text
name              chat-llama-v3
config_path       soup.yaml
config_sha256     a3f1...
dataset_sha256    7c92...
base_model        meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B
created_at        2026-05-15T23:14:02Z
soup_version      0.58.0

Branch-name regex: ^[A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9._\-]{0,127}$. Config files capped at 1 MiB. Pointer file capped at 1,024 entries. Atomic write + POSIX 0o600. SOUP_BRANCHES_DIR env override containment-checked to $HOME / $CWD / $TMPDIR.

`soup adapters checkout` — drift-detecting restore

bash
soup adapters checkout chat-llama-v3 -o restored-soup.yaml

Re-emits the locked config. Refuses to restore on SHA mismatch — if your soup.yaml or your dataset has changed since the branch was made, you get a hard error explaining what drifted. No silent stale restores.

See also

  • [Registry](/docs/registry) — lineage DAG of full training runs
  • [Soup Cans](/docs/soup-cans) — package an adapter + config + data ref into a portable bundle