GitHub - Vadale/R-ebirth: Make R a first-class environment for AI and data-science research — the rebirth package (Rust core embedding a patched llama.cpp).

R-ebirth aims to make R a first-class environment for scientific research on data and AI — mechanistic interpretability ("AI neuroscience"), machine learning including topic modelling, and the life sciences — while staying simple for researchers. It is delivered as relm: an R package with a Rust native core that embeds a patched llama.cpp, exposing local LLMs (loading, generation, embeddings, activation tracing, steering, and ablation) as base-R-idiom functions returning plain data.frames and matrixes.

Topic modelling with no Python: llm_embed() → UMAP → HDBSCAN → the model names each cluster. One of two runnable demos — see the package README.

Using the package? Start with the package README (quickstart, examples, the two demos) and docs/getting-started.md (install options — binaries or from source — a first run, and troubleshooting). This page is the repository/developer overview.

Status: v0.1.0 (text-only) The first public release is here. relm loads local GGUF models and exposes, as base-R objects:

llm() model loading, llm_tokens() tokenization; llm_generate() text generation, llm_logits() next-token distributions; llm_embed() text embeddings; llm_trace() activation tracing, llm_steer() steering, llm_ablate() ablation — the mechanistic-interpretability core; llm_download() checksum-verified fetch of pinned models.

Every numerical feature is validated value-for-value against an independent reference (harness B). Vision (image inputs) is the next release (v0.2.0); v0.1.0 is text-only. The full plan is in ROADMAP.md. Repository layout rebirth/ the R package (R/, src/ + src/rust/ extendr crate, tests/, vignettes/) rust/ Cargo workspace: rebirth-ffi (R <-> Rust boundary), rebirth-llm (engine) rebirth/src/llama.cpp/ pinned, patched llama.cpp (vendored; see its VENDORING.md)

tests/llm-golden/ Harness B numerical goldens tests/demos/ the two reference demos (anatomy lab; topics without Python)

Planning documents (the single source of truth) CLAUDE.md, SOLO-PHASE-PLAN.md, ROADMAP.md, API-GRAMMAR.md, ARCHITECTURE.md, DECISIONS.md, and THESIS-PLAN.md. If anything else disagrees with these files, the files win. Building from source (developers) End users install prebuilt binaries from r-universe (no toolchain required). Building from source requires R (>= 4.5), a C toolchain, a Rust toolchain (rustup; the pinned channel is in rust-toolchain.toml), and CMake (>= 3.28) for the vendored engine. # native workspace cd rust && cargo test && cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings

# R package R CMD build rebirth && R CMD check relm_0.1.0.tar.gz License Dual-licensed MIT OR Apache-2.0 — see LICENSE.md. The vendored llama.cpp is MIT (see NOTICE). The name is protected: modified redistributions must rename (see TRADEMARK.md).