ANE Training is an experimental research project that demonstrates how to train neural networks directly on Apple’s Neural Engine by leveraging reverse-engineered private APIs that are normally inaccessible to developers. The repository implements a from-scratch transformer training pipeline capable of running both forward and backward passes on ANE hardware without relying on CoreML, Metal, or GPU acceleration. It explores the internal software stack of the Apple Neural Engine by interfacing with private classes such as _ANEClient and compiling custom compute graphs in the MIL format. The project includes performance benchmarks and kernel breakdowns that show how different components of the training loop are distributed between the ANE and CPU. It is primarily intended as a research and educational proof of concept rather than a production library, highlighting what is technically possible with undocumented hardware access.
Features
- Direct neural network training on Apple Neural Engine
- Reverse-engineered private API access
- Transformer forward and backward pass implementation
- Custom MIL graph compilation pipeline
- Performance benchmarking and kernel analysis
- Hybrid ANE and CPU training workflow