darrellbest

Qwen3.5-9B-Heretic

README

License: apache-2.0

Results

Table with columns: Refusals, KL divergence
	Refusals	KL divergence
Original Qwen3.5-9B	100/100	0 (by definition)
This model	5/100	0.0403

Measured by Heretic on the test[:100] splits of mlabonne/harmful_behaviors (refusals) and mlabonne/harmless_alpaca (KL divergence, the drift in ordinary behaviour), with Heretic's default system prompt and refusal markers. The numbers come from an independent re-evaluation of the final exported weights (evaluate_model).

Built on NullpoLab's findings

The ablation parameters are the ones published with NullpoLab/Qwen3.5-9B-Heretic-ARA-Refusals5 (reported there: 5/100 at KL 0.0239 against an 84/100 baseline). With this toolchain the original refuses 100/100 and these parameters give 5/100 at KL 0.0403; they were the best of the published 9B parameter sets tried (the others: NullpoLab's -Refusals9, 8/100 at 0.0432; taresh18's -ara-multiturn, 7/100 at 0.0169). For comparison, trohrbaugh/Qwen3.5-9B-heretic-v2 reports 6/100 at KL 0.0793 with directional ablation.

What this release adds is a complete checkpoint: save_pretrained drops Qwen3.5's 15 multi-token-prediction tensors and rounds the 48 float32 Gated DeltaNet parameters (linear_attn.A_log, linear_attn.norm.weight) down to bf16. Both were restored from the original here (ARA never touches either), so all 775 tensors match the original in name, shape and dtype. The MTP weights live in model-auxiliary.safetensors, listed in the index.

Parameters

ARA, full weight, on attn.o_proj and mlp.down_proj:

Table with columns: Parameter, Value
Parameter	Value
start_layer_index	8
end_layer_index	31
preserve_good_behavior_weight	0.9665
steer_bad_behavior_weight	0.0001
overcorrect_relative_weight	1.1582
neighbor_count	15

Calibration used 400 harmless and 400 harmful prompts (train[:400]).

Checked

Ordinary prompts (facts, a haiku, a two-sentence technical explanation): correct and fluent.
Thinking mode, with Qwen's recommended sampling: 40/40 arithmetic and word problems finished and answered correctly (4 problems x 10 seeds, vLLM), the same as the original's 40/40.
Vision: given an image of a red circle and a blue square, it describes exactly that.

Tooling

A merge of upstream Heretic's master and its ara branch (ARA with master's scorers and thinking-model handling), Heretic upstream 3521f86 + ARA c91d690, transformers 5.17.0, torch 2.11.0+cu130, one RTX PRO 6000.

Use

Exactly like the original, with transformers, vLLM or SGLang. Thinking mode is on by default and can be turned off per request (enable_thinking=False).

Reduced safety guardrails by design. You are responsible for what you do with it.

The family

Table with columns: Repository, Format, Size, Use it with
Repository	Format	Size	Use it with
Qwen3.5-9B-Heretic	bf16 safetensors	19.34 GB	transformers, vLLM, SGLang
Qwen3.5-9B-Heretic-GGUF	GGUF BF16 / Q8_0 / Q4_K_M + vision mmproj	18.41 / 9.79 / 5.78 GB + 0.92 GB	llama.cpp, Ollama
Qwen3.5-9B-Heretic-FP8	FP8 W8A8, compressed-tensors

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Model Details

Model Provider

darrellbest

Model Tree

Base

Qwen/Qwen3.5-9B

Fine-tuned

this model

Input Modalities

TextImageVideo

Output Modalities

Text

Supported Functionality