Package the CPU-side core as winnow-core, and lock what the GPU half needs

[lgoyal6]

What this changes

The compression core is the part of this repo an outside consumer can actually use: the AttentionRAG selection logic, the two-compressor token merge, and the model-artifact guard. None of it needs a GPU, a Modal account or an API key, but until now the only way to get it was to clone the repo and hope the imports resolved.

pyproject.toml builds it as winnow-core, exporting the attentionrag package plus the token_merge and model_guard top-level modules.

dependencies is deliberately empty. attentionrag.core is the paper's selection logic behind a Backend protocol, token_merge is pure string and span arithmetic, and model_guard's validation path uses only pickletools, hashlib, json and zipfile. That is what makes this half installable and testable without a GPU.

Verified, not assumed

Run on this machine before opening the PR:

step	result
python -m build	winnow_core-0.1.0-py3-none-any.whl
pip install <wheel> in a clean venv	pip freeze lists winnow-core and nothing else
cd /tmp && python -m attentionrag.test_core	10/10 core tests passed
import token_merge, model_guard, attentionrag from /tmp	all resolve from site-packages

The /tmp working directory matters: it proves the install works off the wheel rather than off the checkout sitting in the current directory.

The [hf] extra is pinned, not floated

The guard's whole point is that "the same model name" must not mean different bytes tomorrow, and the same argument applies to the loader. numpy is held at 2.4.6 rather than the newest release because safetensors needs numpy to convert torch tensors and numpy 2.5.x publishes no cp311 wheel, which is the interpreter the Modal images use.

requirements-hf.lock is the pip freeze of that extra in a clean 3.11 venv and records the command to reproduce it, so the resolved set is a fact rather than a wish. requirements.txt is the separate Modal/FastAPI client freeze for the local proxy in server.py.

One deliberate correction

The Homepage URL read https://github.com/winnow, which is not this repository and does not resolve. It now points at https://github.com/TC960/winnow. Flagging it because it is the one line here that is not simply the working tree as it stood.

Commit split

The em dash to hyphen sweep in README.md and .gitignore is a separate first commit, so the packaging diff is readable rather than a page of punctuation.

Tests

.agent-work/ is excluded from discovery: worktrees under it hold duplicate copies of these same test files.

file	result
test_token_merge.py	14/14
test_model_guard.py	21/21
attentionrag/test_core.py	10/10
experiments/test_data.py	rc=0, 0 tests (fixture module)
total	45 passing, 0 failing

Unchanged from the baseline. Packaging adds no runnable test of its own; the wheel build and clean-venv install above are its evidence.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code