Caleta: An Evidence-Oriented Trust Layer for Reproducible Local Large Language Model Inference

Joan-Marc Fisa

Local large language model (LLM) inference is often described as private, verified, or reproducible without separating the technical claims behind those terms. This paper presents Caleta, an Apache-2.0 process supervisor and evidence layer around llama.cpp rather than a new inference engine. Caleta combines versioned manifests, exact-size and SHA-256 verification, controlled backend construction, a restricted OpenAI-compatible proxy, prompt-free execution records, benchmark reports, and a small conformance suite. Its contribution is the composition of these mechanisms into explicit contracts that distinguish integrity from authenticated provenance and privacy controls from operating-system isolation. We evaluate the implementation through static checks, 22 unit tests, deterministic end-to-end tests on Ubuntu, macOS, and Windows, and a pinned real-model experiment on Windows CPU using Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct Q4_K_M and llama.cpp b11981. The real experiment validates artifact verification, startup, model listing, non-streaming and server-sent-event chat, and conformance. Three independent benchmark invocations produced fifteen successful warm requests with no failures. In this single…