At a glance

Repetition-loop attractors

[!WARNING] This is a REAP keep192 checkpoint — 192 of 384 routed experts per layer were removed (50%, uniform across all 60 MoE layers). It recovers most short-form quality but has a repetition-loop pathology on open-ended / long-form generation: the model starts coherent, then collapses into an endless single-token or short-phrase loop and never terminates.

Observed: on a simple open prompt ("tell me about cats and cat allergens") generations degenerated into loops such as saliva saliva saliva…, allergen allergen…, hairs hairs…, and felis-felis-felis…. The attractor token is prompt-dependent — any unbounded prose can trigger one.

• Thinking off → the loop appears directly in the answer.
• Thinking on → the model never closes the reasoning block; it fills the entire context window with un-terminated reasoning and returns empty content.

Sampling does not reliably fix it. Still looping on long-form with temperature=0 + repetition_penalty=1.12 (clean on short structured tasks only), temperature=0.7 + repetition_penalty=1.05, temperature=0.6 with presence/frequency penalties, and repetition_penalty up to 1.15.

Reliable for (validated): structured JSON, tool/function calling, code, math, short Q&A, and agentic/terminal tasks — i.e. bounded outputs. Vision, thinking, tool-calling, and speculative decoding all work in these modes.

Mitigations: keep outputs bounded (sane max_tokens), prefer structured/agentic use, default repetition_penalty≈1.12, temperature=0, and stop generation if a loop starts. The root fix is restoring some pruned experts from the full nvidia/Kimi-K2.6-NVFP4 — a memory/context tradeoff not applied here.

Pruning

The prune plan was generated with the official REAP survivor semantics:

python
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experts_to_prune = torch.topk(saliency, n_experts_to_prune, largest=False)
retained_expert_indices = [i for i in range(num_experts) if i not in experts_to_prune]

Source REAP repo: cerebrasresearch/reap at commit 1970473c51ca3caeb98c10392f15b3a08a672974.

Kimi-K2.6's NVFP4 multimodal wrapper is not directly supported by the upstream REAP model registry, so the final safetensor rewrite preserves the official selection/order semantics while using a Kimi-specific NVFP4 shard rewriter. Vision tensors, multimodal projector tensors, tokenizer files, processor files, and chat template files were preserved.

Serving settings

Recommended: vLLM with Eagle3 speculative decoding and the flashinfer_cutlass NVFP4 MoE kernel — the fastest path validated on 4× RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell. Ready-to-run: scripts/serve-vllm.sh.

Measured single-stream (275W power cap, unchanged): decode ~71 tok/s aggregate (up to ~80 on code/structured), prefill ~2070 tok/s, warm TTFT ~130 ms. Decode is power-bound at 275W (clocks throttle 3090 → ~2840 MHz under load), so the speed comes from a cheaper MoE kernel + speculation, not more power. First boot runs flashinfer autotune (~9 min); a persistent JIT-cache volume makes warm boots ~2.5 min.

Sampling: use repetition_penalty=1.12 — not 1.05, which reproduces deterministic loops on short structured outputs — and temperature=0 for structured/agentic work. This does not prevent loops on open-ended generation; see Repetition-loop attractors.

Do not use MAX_NUM_BATCHED_TOKENS=4096 for the 256k server. That setting produced deterministic exclamation-mark loops in the 96k-160k context band. Raising it to 8192 fixed the band without changing the checkpoint.

Validation

Endpoint probes passed with the settings above:

The runtime vision smoke used a generated image containing K2-192, SUM=166, a red square, and a blue square. The model recovered the text, number, and colored shapes correctly.

The decode degeneracy sweep generated medium-length outputs at short context, 128k, 200k, and 250k. The passing rerun had no repeated-character loop, repeated n-gram loop, duplicate-line loop, Unicode replacement character, or length finish. The 200k code case stopped naturally after 1038 completion tokens. Note: this sweep covers bounded / structured outputs; open-ended free-form generation still degenerates into repetition loops — see Repetition-loop attractors.

The executable coding canary asks for Python solutions and runs them in a subprocess. The passing rerun solved six tasks: two-sum indices, interval merge, record parsing, topological sort with cycle detection, Unicode slugify with Polish character mappings, and an LRU cache.

The Unicode/reasoning canary generated terminal-style Unicode charts, chart rendering code, comparative religion text, comparative philosophy text, and a 128k-token mixed-Unicode JSON response. It found no Unicode replacement characters, mojibake markers, illegal control characters, or true repetition loops. It did surface three copy-fidelity issues that are retained in the trace dataset: Warsaw became Warszaw/Warszawa, Check_Spark_192 became Check_SSpark_192, and Arabic توحيد was emitted as توحید with a Persian/Urdu yeh codepoint.

The near-limit long-context probe passed at 259,943 prompt tokens against the served 262,144-token context limit.

Gate repair was audited by comparing every pruned gate weight and e_score_correction_bias row against the original source checkpoint row chosen by the keep192 REAP plan. All 60 layers matched exactly with max absolute difference 0.0, and the config is repaired to n_routed_experts=192, num_experts_per_tok=8, n_group=1, and topk_group=1.

Trace rows and pruning artifacts are stored in:

• 0xSero/kimi-k2-6-nvfp4-reap-keep192-endpoint-benchmark-traces-v1

License & citation

License inherited from the base model.

bibtex
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@misc{lasby2025reap,
  title  = {REAP the Experts: Why Pruning Prevails for One-Shot MoE Compression},
  author = {Mike Lasby and Ivan Lazarevich and Nish Sinnadurai and Sean Lie and Yani Ioannou and Vithursan Thangarasa},
  year   = {2025},
  eprint = {2510.13999},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv}
}

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