ok I understand - I thought it was a specific serialization. I untared the .pt file and the unpickling recipe seems to be explicit in serialization.py. Since our end goal is reading from C - I think we can deal with untar/pickle - and from C dump back a lua format if we want to go back to lua/nngraph. In addition, we do need the compute graph structure - so you would need to make a new format just for that hdf5 or other serialization. I will give a shot at the untaring/unpickling from C.