Ahead of Time (AOT) Compilation

Generally: Compilation that occurs before the program is executed.

Specifically to ML (PyTorch):
- When a model is AOT compiled (using torch.jit.script(or trace) or torch.export), the entire program is translated from python into an intermediate representation that is independent of it. That is, you don't need a python interpreter to run that IR.
- Note: torchscript is AOT in the sense that it requires to capture the whole graph before runtime but it performs further optimizations just-in-time.