huggingface loading_error ai_generated true

OSError: Error no file named model.safetensors found in directory or unable to load safetensors file

ID: huggingface/safetensors-load-error

Also available as: JSON · Markdown
85%Fix Rate
88%Confidence
3Evidence
2023-01-01First Seen

Version Compatibility

VersionStatusIntroducedDeprecatedNotes
any active — — —
4 active — — —

Root Cause

Failed to load model weights in safetensors format. File missing, corrupted download, or format incompatibility.

generic

Workarounds

  1. 90% success Force re-download by clearing the cache 
    rm -rf ~/.cache/huggingface/hub/models--org--model/  # then re-download

    Sources: https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/

  2. 85% success Fall back to PyTorch .bin format if safetensors unavailable 
    model = AutoModel.from_pretrained('model', use_safetensors=False)  # loads pytorch_model.bin instead
  3. 80% success Verify file integrity with sha256 checksum 
    sha256sum model.safetensors  # compare with checksum on the model card or Hub API

Dead Ends

Common approaches that don't work:

  1. Convert pickle checkpoint to safetensors manually 72% fail

    Manual conversion can introduce errors with custom architectures. Use the official conversion tool or download the correct format.

  2. Ignore safetensors and always use use_safetensors=False 78% fail

    Pickle files have arbitrary code execution risk. Safetensors is the safe default; fix the load issue instead.