🧬 The Darwin Family
Darwin is VIDRAFT's measurement-driven reasoning model family —
roughly 20 official models, 400+ community derivatives, and a standing place among the
top open models on GPQA.
🧬 Darwin — transplanting the experts that work
A large MoE model is made of hundreds of experts.
Darwin V9 selects the experts that perform best across several high-performing models,
transplants them onto a base backbone, and fuses them with trust-weighted evolutionary merging.
Nothing is trained from scratch — proven capability is grafted on.
That is why the same method holds across every model size.
Table with columns: Model, Scale, GPQA Diamond| Model | Scale | GPQA Diamond |
|---|
| Darwin-9B-NEG | 9B | 84.3 |
| Darwin-27B-Opus | 27B dense | 86.9 |
| Darwin-36B-Opus | 36B MoE | 88.4 |
| Darwin-28B-Opus | 28B | 88.89 |
| Darwin-28B-REASON | 28B + DELPHI | 89.39 |
| Darwin-398B-JGOS | 397B MoE (bf16) | 90.9 |
| Darwin-397B-ZTC | 397B MoE (FP8) | 93.43 |
Lineage
Table with columns: Role| Role | | |
|---|
| Base | Qwen/Qwen3.5-397B-A17B | 397B MoE backbone, ~17B active — Apache-2.0 |
| Darwin V9 | expert transplant + trust-weighted evolutionary merging | this is where the model becomes Darwin |
| Precision | compressed-tensors W8A8 FP8 | 418.7 GB |
| ZTC | zero-token confidence readout | ships in ztc/ |
- Darwin V9 — evolutionary FFN/expert transplant and trust-weighted merging onto large MoE backbones
- FINAL Bench — VIDRAFT's evaluation framework
- Four-layer Pre-AGI roadmap — Darwin → AETHER → PROMETHEUS → HEPHAESTUS
🏛️ ZTC — it knows before it answers
Until now there were two ways to find out whether a model is about to be wrong.
Both of them only work after the answer already exists.
Table with columns: Existing approach, Limitation| Existing approach | Limitation |
|---|
| Ask the model in words | Costs extra tokens, adds latency, and models are badly overconfident |
| Attach an external judge model | Two models to operate · re-reads the entire answer · degrades on long outputs · 🔴 arrives too late — the answer is already produced |
ZTC is a third path. It reads the model's own internal state once, before generation begins.
Table with columns: External judge model, ZTC | External judge model | ZTC |
|---|
| When | After the answer | Before it starts |
| Extra model | Required (two to operate) | None (one) |
| Extra generated tokens | Re-processes prompt + answer | 0 |
| Added latency | A second inference pass | 0.52 ms — 0.003 % of generation cost |
| Long answers, long trajectories | Degrades as length grows | |
📊 Measured — on this model
① It judges its own answers (PubMedQA, 539 items, 146 incorrect)
Table with columns: AUROC | AUROC |
|---|
| Self-reported confidence (asked in words) | 0.7646 |
| ZTC (internal-state readout) | 0.8801 |
| Gain | +0.1155 |
Permutation null control: z = 13.31 — shuffle the labels and the signal disappears.
② It judges other models' answers (Korean KMMLU, 400 items — law, math, biology, history)
Table with columns: Judge, AUROC| Judge | AUROC |
|---|
| Darwin-397B-ZTC | 0.8228 (z = 9.66) |
| Qwen3.5-27B | 0.8171 |
| Qwen3.5-9B | 0.7297 |
| Qwen3.5-4B | 0.7284 |
| Open-source 4B judge model | 0.6844 |
Single domain, random folds. The ladder under the harder leaderboard protocol reads
0.7272 / 0.7289 / 0.6506 / 0.6360 — see the section below.
Same 400 items, same conditions: +0.138 over the open-source judge model.
📊 Independent leaderboard — 2,018 items, leave-one-domain-out
The Typed Decision Leaderboard scores answer verifiers from several vendors on one identical
item set with identical labels: https://huggingface.co/spaces/mayafree/typed-decision-leaderboard
Table with columns: System, AUC| System | AUC |
|---|
| Darwin-397B-ZTC | 0.7272 |
| JEV (TypeSafe AI) | 0.7350 |
| ZTC-Judge-27B | 0.7289 |
| GPT-5.2 asked directly | 0.7148 |
| open-jev 4B | 0.6844 |
| Answer length and formatting only | 0.6223 |
Revised 2026-09-21. Earlier revisions of this card reported 0.7364 for Darwin-397B-ZTC
and 0.7282 for ZTC-Judge-27B. Those figures were produced by a run whose standardisation
statistics were computed over all five domains, including the held-out one, which leaks a small
amount of the evaluation domain into every figure. Re-run with the statistics fitted inside the
training domains only, the figures are 0.7272 and 0.7289. Cite the current values.
| Patronus Lynx 8B | 0.5179 |
| The answering model's own stated confidence | 0.5000 |
First place — and the gap to second is 0.0014, with a 95% interval of −0.019 to +0.032.
Under the board's own rule an interval containing zero yields no rank, so this model and JEV are
not statistically separable. That is stated here for the same reason it is stated there.
Per domain, against the surface baseline in the same domain:
Table with columns: Domain, Baseline, Darwin-397B-ZTC, ZTC-Judge-27B| Domain | Baseline | Darwin-397B-ZTC | ZTC-Judge-27B |
|---|
| Professional exams (law · math · biology) | 0.7138 | 0.8660 | 0.8462 |
| Biology & medicine | 0.5908 | 0.7433 | 0.7154 |
| Disaster & safety procedures | 0.5949 | 0.7319 | 0.6961 |
| Scientific reasoning | 0.7272 | 0.6287 |
🔴 On scientific reasoning the 27B model beats this one by 0.11. A model fourteen times smaller
wins that column. It is printed rather than dropped, because the ladder only means something if the
places it inverts are visible.
Self-readout. Given only the question, this model answers on its own and the same forward pass
tells whether it was right: 0.7572 (3 domains, 1,595 items). Verifiers that see only text from
outside a model cannot do this at all.
Protocol. Every figure comes from a domain the probe never saw; hyper-parameters are selected
inside the training domains only; scores are computed per domain and then size-weighted. Pooling all
items into a single AUC inflates the result, because score scales differ between domains.
Known limitation — the answering-model mixture matters
- Sensitive to which model wrote the answer. The probe is fitted on answers from four models.
Adding 1,772 answers from a single additional model shifted the mixture and lowered the
size-weighted score from 0.7278 to 0.7177 — professional exams rose to 0.8575 while every other
domain fell. Treat "works on any model's output" as a design goal, not a measured guarantee: if
your generator differs sharply from the training mixture, measure before relying on the number.
🔎 Two measurements, two protocols — do not mix them
Table with columns: Section above (PubMedQA / KMMLU), Leaderboard | Section above (PubMedQA / KMMLU) | Leaderboard |
|---|
| Items | 539 self-judged · 400 other-judged | 2,018, five domains |
| Split | random folds | held-out domain |
| Result | 0.8801 · 0.8228 | 0.7272 |
Leave-one-domain-out is far harsher than random folds, which is why the numbers differ. Quote
0.7272 when comparing against other systems; the higher figures describe an easier protocol.
📦 The probe ships with this model
Table with columns: File| File | |
|---|
ztc/ztc_probe_darwin397b.npz | 45 KB — the confidence readout for this model |
ztc/usage.py | minimal, runnable example |
z = np.load("ztc/ztc_probe_darwin397b.npz")s = ((h - z["mu"]) / z["sd"]) @ z["w"] # h = last-token hidden state, 4096-dimp = 1 / (1 + np.exp(-(z["cal_A"] * (s - z["s_mean"]) / z["s_std"] + z["cal_B"])))
One matrix product. No second model, no extra tokens, no network call.
The probe is specific to this model's hidden space (4096-dim) and does not transfer to others.
🤖 Why this is decisive for agents — after-the-fact report vs. pre-action stop
In an agent loop the expensive thing is not tokens. It is actions.
Files get edited, APIs get called, payments go through, mail leaves the building.
External judge : [generate] → [tool runs] → [cost, time, side effects] → [judge] → "that was wrong"ZTC : [read state, 0.52 ms] → stop here if risky → the action never happens
In front of an irreversible action, an after-the-fact verdict is an incident report.
Patterns
Table with columns: Pattern, Behaviour| Pattern | Behaviour |
|---|
| Tool-call gating | Low confidence → do not call the tool, ask a human instead |
| Model routing | Send only the low-confidence queries to a larger model or external API |
| Retry budgeting | Spend multi-sample decoding only on the steps that wobble |
| Long-trajectory monitoring | Agent trajectories run to tens of thousands of tokens — length-independent, so it can stay on at every step |
| Selective prediction | Withhold a risky answer and return "I don't know" |
Gate deployment, measured
Table with columns: Metric, Before, After| Metric | Before | After |
|---|
| Gate accuracy | 71.3 % | 93.3 % |
| Incorrect answers blocked | 40.7 % | 74.1 % |
| Expensive-path calls | 42 % | 17 % |
At effectively zero cost it can stay on for every request.
Use cases — hallucination detection · uncertainty quantification · confidence calibration ·
selective prediction · routing risky queries upstream · pre-action gating for agents
🏆 GPQA Diamond 93.43 %
Table with columns: Model, GPQA Diamond| Model | GPQA Diamond |
|---|
| Darwin-397B-ZTC | 93.43 |
| GPT5.2 | 92.4 |
| Gemini-3 Pro | 91.9 |
| Qwen3.5-397B-A17B | 88.4 |
| Claude 4.5 Opus | 87.0 |
GPQA Diamond, all 198 items · greedy · single sample · no test-time engine
Comparison figures: Qwen3.5-397B-A17B official model card.
API — drop-in for an existing JEV integration
The endpoint takes the same request shape and returns the same response shape, so switching an
existing integration is a URL change.
POST /v1/evaluateAuthorization: Bearer <token> {"model": "vidraft/ztc", "state": {"question": "...", "answer": "..."}, "questions": {"correct": {"type": "boolean", "instructions": "Is the ANSWER factually correct?"}}}
{"model": "vidraft/ztc-judge-397b", "answers": {"correct": { "probability": 0.1043, "verdict": "review", "score": -0.72, "position": 0.268, "band": "low", "action": "hold_or_escalate", "measured": { "band_accuracy": 0.485, "base_accuracy": 0.748, "if_lowest_20pct_dropped": 0.814, "escalate_gain_at_20pct_budget": 0.0134, "do_not": "resample_same_model", "why_not": "measured: fixes 6.7% of wrong answers, breaks 13.1% of right ones"}}}, "usage": {"generated_tokens": 0}}
type accepts boolean and noul. Existing clients read answers.<key>.probability and ignore
the rest; the additional fields are there for clients that want to act on the score rather than
merely record it. 0.19 s per call, zero generated tokens.
What probability means
The raw score is unbounded. The shipped calibration maps it to P(answer is correct), fitted
leave-one-domain-out — the mapping never sees the domain it is applied to.
Table with columns: Expected calibration error | Expected calibration error |
|---|
| ZTC-Judge-27B (after calibration) | 0.0245 |
| JEV, as shipped | 0.0381 |
| JEV, after the same calibration | 0.0261 |
| Laya-Multilingual, as shipped | 0.4985 |
| Laya-Typed-Decisions, as shipped | 0.2641 |
Measured on the same 2,018 items. ZTC and JEV are effectively tied on calibration; the difference
of 0.0016 is not meaningful. Figures published elsewhere for these systems were measured on other
test sets and do not reproduce here.
🔴 Calibration is uneven across domains: 0.0225 on biology & medicine, but 0.2941 on scientific
reasoning and 0.2381 on general reasoning. Treat the probability as reliable in the first case and
as a ranking signal only in the other two.
What to do when the score is low
The score alone is not actionable, so the response carries the measured consequence of each choice.
Table with columns: Band, Share, Actual accuracy of answers in this band, Recommended| Band | Share | Actual accuracy of answers in this band | Recommended |
|---|
low | 20% | 48.5% | hold, or escalate to a stronger model |
mid | 40% | 73.2% | escalate if budget allows |
high | 40% | 89.6% | accept |
Three things that work, measured on 2,018 items:
Table with columns: Action, Effect| Action | Effect |
|---|
| Drop the lowest-scoring 20% | accuracy of what remains: 74.8% → 81.4% |
| Escalate the lowest 20% to a stronger model | +1.34 pp end-to-end |
| Send the lowest 20% to human review | catches 47.2% of all errors — 2.4× random |
Generate several candidates and let the verifier pick
When the score is low, the most effective next step is not to escalate — it is to produce more
candidate answers and select between them. Measured on 346 questions with five candidates each
(1,730 candidates), all scored through this endpoint:
Table with columns: Policy, Accuracy, Output tokens, vs. one attempt| Policy | Accuracy | Output tokens | vs. one attempt |
|---|
| One attempt | 49.13% | 72 | — |
| Majority vote over 3 | 46.82% | 212 | −2.31 pp |
| Majority vote over 5 | 46.53% | 353 | −2.60 pp |
| Pick best of 5 with this model | 51.45% | 353 | |
The same five candidates swing by 5 points depending on how one is chosen. Majority voting is
worse than not resampling at all: when a model prefers a wrong answer, more samples make that wrong
consensus more certain. A verifier that ranks the candidates is what turns extra samples into
accuracy.
Spend the budget only where it is needed. Generating extra candidates only for low-scoring
first attempts captures most of the gain at a fraction of the cost:
Table with columns: Triggered on, Accuracy, Output tokens, vs. one attempt| Triggered on | Accuracy | Output tokens | vs. one attempt |
|---|
| 10% of items | 49.71% | 80 | +0.58 pp |
| 30% of items | 50.87% | 132 | +1.73 pp |
| 100% of items | 51.45% | 353 | +2.31 pp |
At a 30% trigger rate you get three quarters of the benefit for 1.8× the tokens, where always
generating costs 4.9× for 1.3× the benefit.
Scope: one generator (GPT-4o-mini), one item set, five candidates. The oracle row shows the
headroom that remains — a correct candidate is present far more often than any policy recovers it.
One thing that does not work:
🔴 Do not take a majority vote over resamples. Measured: five resamples with majority voting score 46.53% where a single attempt scores 49.13%. More candidates make a wrong consensus more certain unless something picks between them — see the table above.
Escalation pays for itself through precision, not recall. Re-answering repairs about 38% of wrong
answers and damages about 30% of right ones, so a gate is only worth its budget if it mostly calls
answers that are actually wrong.
⚙️ Specifications
Table with columns: Item, Value| Item | Value |
|---|
| Architecture | Qwen3_5MoeForConditionalGeneration |
| Parameters | 397 B total / 17 B active (512 experts, 10 routed + 1 shared per token) |
| Layers · hidden | 60 · 4096 |
| Attention | Hybrid (45 linear + 15 full attention layers) |
| Precision | FP8 (compressed-tensors W8A8) |
| Size on disk | 418.7 GB |
| Context | 262,144 tokens |
| License |
🚀 Quickstart
Serving with vLLM (4 × H100 80GB)
vllm serve FINAL-Bench/Darwin-397B-ZTC \ --served-model-name darwin-397b \ --tensor-parallel-size 1 --pipeline-parallel-size 4 \ --gpu-memory-utilization 0.92 --max-model-len 262144 \ --cpu-offload-gb 20 --enforce-eager --trust-remote-code \ --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice \ --port 8000
SGLang
python -m sglang.launch_server --model-path FINAL-Bench/Darwin-397B-ZTC \ --port 8000 --tp-size 8 --context-length 262144
Chat Completions (OpenAI-compatible)
from openai import OpenAIc = OpenAI(base_url="http://localhost:8000/v1", api_key="EMPTY") r = c.chat.completions.create( model="darwin-397b", messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Why is the Riemann hypothesis hard?"}], temperature=0.0, max_tokens=8192,)m = r.choices[0].messageprint(m.reasoning_content) # thinking traceprint(m.content) # final answer
tools = [{ "type": "function", "function": { "name": "get_weather", "description": "Get the current weather for a city", "parameters": {"type": "object", "properties": {"city": {"type": "string"}}, "required": ["city"]}, },}] r = c.chat.completions.create( model="darwin-397b", tools=tools, messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "What's the weather in Paris?"}],)print(r.choices[0].message.tool_calls)
🤖 Agents and coding CLIs
The endpoint is OpenAI-compatible, so existing tooling connects unchanged.
opencode — ~/.config/opencode/opencode.json
{ "$schema": "https://opencode.ai/config.json", "provider": { "darwin": { "npm": "@ai-sdk/openai-compatible", "name": "Darwin (local)", "options": { "baseURL": "http://localhost:8000/v1", "apiKey": "EMPTY" }, "models": { "darwin-397b": { "name": "Darwin-397B-ZTC" } } } }}
Any OpenAI-compatible client (Cline, Continue, Aider, …)
export OPENAI_BASE_URL=http://localhost:8000/v1export OPENAI_API_KEY=EMPTYexport OPENAI_MODEL=darwin-397b
🎯 Intended use
- Graduate-level STEM reasoning (GPQA, science qualifying exams)
- Mathematics and long multi-step chains of thought
- Code generation and debugging
- 🤖 Agent workflows — ZTC blocks irreversible tool calls before they run
- Bilingual Korean + English reasoning (Chinese and Japanese supported)
- Work where a wrong answer is expensive — ZTC filters risky answers before they ship
🔗 Links
📚 Citation
@misc{darwin397b_ztc_2026, title = {Darwin-397B-ZTC: FP8 Mixture-of-Experts with Zero-Token Confidence}, year = {2026}, url = {https://vidraft.net}, note = {Base: Qwen/Qwen3.5-397B-A17B}}