Maia-3: human-like chess play and analysis engine

models/code/paper/website

Maia-3 is a family of chess transformer models for predicting human moves across skill levels. This repository contains the inference code needed to run the released Maia-3 weights as a UCI chess engine.

Maia3 is built on Chessformer, our novel transformer architecture for chess modeling. Read the paper here: Chessformer: A Unified Architecture for Chess Modeling

If you use Maia-3 in your work, please cite our paper:

@inproceedings{monroe2026chessformer,
title={Chessformer: A Unified Architecture for Chess Modeling},
author={Daniel Monroe and George Eilender and Philip Chalmers and Zhenwei Tang and Ashton Anderson},
booktitle={The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
year={2026},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=2ltBRzEHyd}
}

Install

git clone https://github.com/CSSLab/maia3.git
cd maia3
python -m pip install .

For development, install in editable mode:

python -m pip install -e .

You can also run directly from the repo without installing:

python -m maia3.uci --help

Quick Start

Run the 5M Maia3 model as a UCI engine:

maia3-5m

The first run downloads the checkpoint from Hugging Face and caches it locally. After that, the same command reuses the cached file.

You can pre-download the default 5M model before opening a chess GUI:

maia3-cache

You can also pass the Hugging Face model URL directly:

maia3-uci --model https://huggingface.co/UofTCSSLab/Maia3-79M

List built-in aliases:

maia3-uci --list-models

Models

The built-in aliases and preset commands apply the correct architecture settings automatically.

Model	Best for	Hugging Face repo	Command
5M	First try, CPU, chess GUIs	UofTCSSLab/Maia3-5M	maia3-5m
23M	Better accuracy	UofTCSSLab/Maia3-23M	maia3-23m
79M	Best accuracy	UofTCSSLab/Maia3-79M	maia3-79m
3M ablation	Paper ablation	UofTCSSLab/Maia3-ablate-3M	maia3-3m-ablation

Short aliases also work:

maia3-uci --model 3m
maia3-uci --model 5m
maia3-uci --model 23m
maia3-uci --model 79m

maia3-3m is kept as a compatibility alias for maia3-3m-ablation.

Cache a larger model before opening a GUI:

maia3-cache --model maia3-79m

If a Hugging Face repository contains more than one checkpoint file, choose one:

maia3-uci --model UofTCSSLab/Maia3-79M --checkpoint-filename maia3-79m.pt

To use a local checkpoint while still applying a built-in config:

maia3-uci --model maia3-79m --checkpoint-path /path/to/maia3-79m.pt

Pass local files with --checkpoint-path, not --model, so Maia3 knows whether to use a built-in architecture preset or your custom architecture flags.

To use a fully custom checkpoint, pass the checkpoint and the matching architecture flags:

maia3-uci --checkpoint-path /path/to/custom.pt \
  --history 8 --use-padding \
  --dim-vit 256 --head-hid-dim 256 --num-heads 8 \
  --gab-per-square-dim 0 --gab-gen-size 64 --gab-intermediate-dim 64

UCI Options

The engine reads UCI commands from stdin and writes responses to stdout. Any UCI-aware chess GUI or wrapper can drive it.

For manual testing, use the standard UCI position forms: position startpos moves e2e4 or position fen <six-field FEN>.

User-facing options:

• Elo: set both player and opponent Elo.
• SelfElo: set the side-to-move Elo.
• OppoElo: set the opponent Elo.
• Temperature: move sampling temperature. 0 means argmax.
• TopP: nucleus sampling threshold. 1.0 disables top-p filtering.
• MultiPV: number of likely human moves to show as UCI info lines.

Use With Nibbler or Another Chess GUI

Maia3 can be added to any GUI that supports UCI engines, including Nibbler.

Recommended first setup:

python -m pip install .
maia3-cache --model maia3-5m

Then add a new UCI engine in your GUI:

Setting	Value
Engine executable	maia3-5m
Arguments	none

If you use one of the preset executables (maia3-5m, maia3-23m, or maia3-79m), leave the arguments field empty. Do not add --model or point Nibbler at a .pt checkpoint file.

If you see an error about local checkpoint files needing --checkpoint-path, the GUI is passing an executable or checkpoint path as an argument. Clear the arguments field and keep only the preset executable selected.

If your GUI asks for a full path to the executable, find it with:

which maia3-5m

On Windows:

where maia3-5m

You can use the larger models the same way by selecting maia3-23m or maia3-79m as the engine executable. Pre-caching is recommended because some GUIs time out if an engine downloads a checkpoint during startup.

Maia3 starts the UCI handshake before loading the model, then loads the checkpoint on isready or go. During analysis it emits standard MultiPV info lines with WDL values from Maia3's value head, then returns bestmove. Those WDL values are human-game outcome predictions for the candidate line, not Stockfish-style search evaluations. The centipawn field is a GUI compatibility score derived from the WDL head, not a searched engine evaluation.

Launch with reconstructed move history:

maia3-uci --model maia3-79m --use-uci-history

Launch on CPU:

maia3-uci --model maia3-5m --device cpu --no-use-amp

By default, Maia3 only loads tensor state-dict checkpoints. If you need to load an old pickled checkpoint from a source you trust, add --trust-checkpoint.

Example via python-chess

import chess
import chess.engine

eng = chess.engine.SimpleEngine.popen_uci([
    "maia3-uci",
    "--model", "maia3-5m",
    "--use-uci-history",
    "--elo", "1500",
])

board = chess.Board()
print(eng.play(board, limit=chess.engine.Limit(nodes=1)).move)
eng.close()

If the maia3-uci script is not on your PATH, use Python module execution:

import sys

cmd = [sys.executable, "-m", "maia3.uci", "--model", "maia3-5m"]

Legacy Entry Point

The old command still works from the repository root:

python code/uci.py --model maia3-5m

New integrations should prefer maia3-uci or python -m maia3.uci.