numsu

AREX-2-27B-INT8-W8A16

README

License: apache-2.0

Model summary

AREX-2 is a 27B-parameter, Qwen3.8-compatible multimodal model for long-horizon agent tasks. The upstream checkpoint declares a native context length of 262,144 tokens. Refer to the upstream model card for architecture, capabilities, evaluation protocols, and usage guidance.

Dual RTX 3090 deployment

Validation scope: the checkpoint loaded and passed a short text-chat smoke test in the pinned vLLM 0.29.0 deployment image on 2×RTX 3090, and completed the synthetic serving matrix below. No task-quality or multimodal evaluation was run; the native 262,144-token limit was not tested.

Table with columns: Runtime property, Tested profile
Runtime property	Tested profile
GPUs	2×RTX 3090 (Ampere `sm_86`)
Tensor parallelism	2
Activation dtype	BF16
KV cache	FP8 E4M3
CPU KV offload	28 GiB, using the deployment's vLLM backport
Maximum model length	262,144 configured; tested up to 128,003 prompt tokens + 1,024 generated tokens
Maximum active sequences	1
Optional speculation	External DFlash2 W4A16 drafter; not included in this repository

Memory and capacity

Table with columns: Metric, Result
Metric	Result
Indexed tensor payload	30.77 GB / 28.65 GiB
vLLM GPU memory after short probes	22,688 MiB used and 1,490 MiB free per GPU
Long-context capacity	128K prompt requests benchmarked; the configured 262,144-token limit was not tested

GPU memory is the observed full serving-process allocation, not model weights alone. The longest benchmark request had 128,003 prompt tokens and 1,024 generated tokens; this does not establish capacity at the configured 262,144-token limit.

Measured serving performance

The matrix used synthetic, salted prompts at approximately 1K, 8K, 32K, 64K, and 128K tokens, with exact 512- or 1,024-token greedy completions. There were two cold-prefix runs per cell; TTFT is time to first streamed token, and prompt usage comes from the server. The table reports medians; the decode column also shows the two-run range. DFlash2 remained enabled (7 draft tokens, 15-token verify ceiling, lookup and chains on), with the production KV-cache and CPU-offload profile.

Table with columns: Prompt tokens, New tokens, Median TTFT (s), Prefill (tok/s), Decode median (tok/s; min–max)
Prompt tokens	New tokens	Median TTFT (s)	Prefill (tok/s)	Decode median (tok/s; min–max)
1,027	512	0.74	1389	64.6 (58.4–70.7)
1,028	1,024	0.73	1405	243.1 (236.6–249.7)
8,194	512	6.22	1317	65.1 (62.6–67.6)

Quantization fidelity

This export uses data-free, symmetric round-to-nearest (RTN) quantization. No calibration dataset, perplexity comparison, logit/KLD evaluation, or task-quality evaluation has been run for this derivative. The source model's scores should not be interpreted as results for this checkpoint.

Checkpoint profile

Table with columns: Property, Value
Property	Value
Base checkpoint	`BAAI/AREX-2`, revision `d4e3502f92d9e889031c2d04e387ab2eb3520268`
Quantization	Symmetric INT8 W8A16, group size 128, RTN; no calibration
Quantized modules	400 two-dimensional Linear weights
Runtime format	`compressed-tensors` / `pack-quantized`
Kernel dispatch	`CompressedTensorsWNA16` → `MarlinLinearKernel` in the tested runtime

The quantization ignore rules are inherited from the validated W8A16 profile. The AREX-2 source checkpoint contains no MTP tensors; any speculative-decoding drafter must be supplied separately.

Quantization design

Table with columns: Component, Treatment
Component	Treatment
400 eligible two-dimensional Linear weights	Symmetric INT8, group size 128, round-to-nearest
Vision tower, embeddings, output head, recurrent GDN gates	Retained at source precision
Other non-Linear and excluded tensors	Retained at source precision

The export uses the same exact eligible-module and ignore profile as the local W8A16 reference. It does not fine-tune or calibrate the model.

Why W8A16

W8A16 stores the selected Linear weights in 8-bit integers with group-wise scales while keeping activations at 16-bit precision. This repository is intended as a smaller serving checkpoint for compatible vLLM deployments. No claim is made that INT8 is faster or higher-quality than BF16, FP8, or other quantization formats for AREX-2; benchmark on the intended hardware and workload.

Operational notes

Table with columns: Question, Guidance
Question	Guidance
Which runtime is validated?	The pinned vLLM 0.29.0 deployment image used for the profile above. Other versions and kernels need separate validation.
Can llama.cpp load this checkpoint?	No. It uses the vLLM `compressed-tensors` format, not GGUF.
Is vision validated?	The source-precision vision weights are retained, but the smoke test was text-only; multimodal quality and memory use are unmeasured.
Is 262K serving validated?	No. The source model's context setting is retained, but long-context capacity and quality were not tested.
Is DFlash2 included?	No. The deployment smoke used an external drafter; this model repository contains only AREX-2 checkpoint assets.

Files and provenance

The repository contains the sharded SafeTensors checkpoint, model.safetensors.index.json, model/tokenizer configuration, and the upstream Apache-2.0 LICENSE. Quantized tensors are represented by packed weights, per-group scales, and original weight shapes in the index.

Acknowledgements and license

This repository repackages numerical weights derived from BAAI/AREX-2. It does not claim authorship of the base model, architecture, training data, or upstream evaluations. The upstream Apache-2.0 license is included; retain the source attribution and follow the upstream terms.

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Model Details

Model Provider

numsu

Model Tree

Base

BAAI/AREX-2

Quantized

this model

Input Modalities

TextImageVideo

Output Modalities

Text

Supported Functionality