Tool-calling: Granite’s card includes function-calling examples;
Why gains are modest: Granite-4.0-Micro is already a well-calibrated, strongly aligned 3B instruct model with robust instruction-following and tool-use out of the box. In that regime, headroom on popular benchmarks is limited, and naive tuning often degrades base behaviors (calibration, safety, IF). The combination used here—JEPA-LLM (to stabilize representations), personas SFT (to preserve IF constraints), GRPO with verifiable rewards, and Arcee Fusion—appears to nudge the model to measurable improvements without sacrificing base calibration, but the effect sizes remain small, which is consistent with Granite’s strong baseline. In short: we’re operating near the model’s alignment ceiling; targeted gains are possible, sweeping jumps are unlikely without larger capacity or richer supervision.