v2.1 (2026-08-03)
Recalibrated merge. Same training, better weight blending: +1.8 points on
HumanEval-164 over the previous build (74.4 vs 72.6), reproduced across
three independent adapters. If you pulled this model before August 2026,
re-pull for the stronger build.
What it is good at
- It answers. Base Qwen3-4B spends its whole budget inside
<think> on
34% of ordinary prompts and returns nothing. This model answers 34/34 on
the same suite, with 140x less reasoning text and no thinking-mode flag to
manage.
- Agent-shaped reasoning. Trained on genuine multi-step agent sessions,
so plans, tool selection and terminal workflows come out structured
instead of improvised.
- Small enough to keep open. 4B parameters, and the GGUF build is 2.5 GB.
Laptop, old GPU, modest desktop — it runs offline, with your code staying
on your machine.
Evaluation
Measured on identical harnesses, greedy decoding, Q4_K_M builds, thinking
disabled on every row.
Table with columns: Base Qwen3-4B, This model (v2.1) | Base Qwen3-4B | This model (v2.1) |
|---|
| Prompts answered (34-prompt suite) | 27/34 | 34/34 |
| HumanEval-164 | 79.3 | 74.4 |
| Held-out agent-trace loss | 2.846 | 1.876 |
| BFCL simple_python | 95.3 | 92.3 |
| BFCL multiple | 94.5 | 90.0 |
Choosing between this and the base
Take this model for local agent and coding work where you want
structured, reliable answers every time: it fits the agent-session
distribution far better and never silently returns empty.
Take the base model if your workload is maximum-accuracy function
calling in a tool-calling harness, where its few extra points matter more
than reasoning style.
Model details
- Base: Qwen/Qwen3-4B (4B, Apache-2.0)
- Method: QLoRA (nf4, r16, alpha 32) on all-linear targets, completion-only
loss masking, 30% general-instruction replay mix, seed-averaged weights,
merged at scale 0.6 (v2.1 recalibration)
- Data: genuine Claude Fable 5 agent sessions + gpt5.5-terminal
transcripts, deduplicated and decontaminated against the reported benchmarks
- Method report: doi:10.5281/zenodo.21676407
Provenance & licensing
Fine-tuned from Qwen/Qwen3-4B (Apache-2.0). Training data:
Glint-Research/Fable-5-traces
(AGPL-3.0) and
Roman1111111/gpt5.5-terminal
(MIT). Because those traces originate from third-party assistants, the
providers' terms may apply to downstream training and distillation. If you
plan to build on this model commercially, confirm your use aligns with those
terms.
Support the Project
If this model is useful in your work, you can support independent research:
Citation
@misc{aglawe2026agenttrace, author = {Aglawe, Ankit}, title = {Agent-Trace Fine-Tuning of Small Language Models under Constrained Compute}, year = {2026}, publisher = {Zenodo}, doi = {10.5281/zenodo.21676407}, url = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21676407}}
Acknowledgements
The Qwen team for the base model; Glint-Research and Roman1111111 for the
trace datasets; empero-ai for the recipe this series iterates on.