witbrock:

The question is, is there either a way to MANUALLY download models from HF into its cache, or is there a setting that does re-tries from the current file position in such cases?


For next time, you could try cloning the model with git:
git lfs install
git clone https://huggingface.co/distilbert-base-uncased-finetuned-sst-2-english

And then loading it from its directory
(^ that’s the model used by the sentiment-analysis pipeline)