Provenance — read this first
HauhauCS released this model as GGUF only. There is no upstream BF16 safetensors
checkpoint to quantize from, so this build was produced by reconstructing one:
Qwen3.8-27B-Uncensored-HauhauCS-Aggressive-Q8_K_P.gguf (29.3 GiB, sha256 4e7735df4d1e...)
mmproj-...-Aggressive-BF16.gguf (vision tower, bf16)
|
+- dequantise + reconstruct -> BF16 HF safetensors (52 GB)
|
+- llm-compressor AWQ -------> W4A16 compressed-tensors (19 GB) <- this repo
This is a quant of a Q8_K_P quant, not of the original weights. The ~8-bit source
error is baked in and compounds with the 4-bit step. If HauhauCS ever publishes BF16
safetensors, a build made from those should be preferred over this one.
The vision tower is the exception: the mmproj GGUF ships bf16, and the tower is excluded
from quantization, so it is bit-identical to upstream.
Why a reconstruction was needed
qwen3_5 is a hybrid architecture — 64 decoder layers, of which 48 are
Qwen3_5GatedDeltaNet linear-attention and 16 are full attention (layer N is
full-attention iff N % 4 == 3) — plus a 27-layer vision tower and an embedded NextN
head. No off-the-shelf GGUF-to-HF converter handles it, so the mapping was written from
scratch and proven total and bijective: 866 GGUF tensors <-> 866 non-vision HF
tensors, plus 334 mmproj -> 333 HF vision tensors.
Three llama.cpp storage conventions had to be inverted. Each one loads and runs happily
if you get it wrong, and produces fluent nonsense:
Table with columns: llama.cpp stores, HF expects, Inverse applied| llama.cpp stores | HF expects | Inverse applied |
|---|
RMSNorm weight with +1 folded in | raw weight | subtract 1.0 (in fp32 — see below) |
ssm_a = -exp(A_log) | A_log | log(-t) |
value heads grouped (n_v, n_k) | (n_k, n_v) | transpose within the head block |
The value-head ordering is the one that hurts. It affects in_proj_qkv, in_proj_z,
out_proj and conv1d on all 48 linear-attention layers. With it wrong the model loads,
serves, and answers every prompt with degenerate repetition.
Dequantization is done in fp32, not bf16: bf16 eps at 1.0 is 0.0078, so a norm weight
of 0.9666 rounds to 0.96875 and subtracting 1.0 yields -0.03125 against a true -0.0334 —
a 6% error on every normalization weight in the model.
Verification
Reconstruction was gated on a numeric check against a different fine-tune of the same
base, so it validates layout and storage convention, not weight identity:
- Correlation sweep — every linear-attention tensor at +0.99998;
A_log/dt_bias
+0.97917, norm.weight +0.99219 (small tensors, at the Q8_0 noise floor). This is the
check that catches permutations; the broken build scored 0.04–0.73 here.
- Norm-offset sweep — all 19 norm families at +/-0.00000, confirming no residual
+1.
Correlation cannot prove the weights are right, only that they are in the right shape
and convention. The behavioural tests below are what establish the model works.
Quantization recipe
Table | |
|---|
| Tool | llm-compressor (AWQModifier + QuantizationModifier) |
| Scheme | W4A16_ASYM, group size 128, duo_scaling=True |
| Format | pack-quantized (compressed-tensors) |
| Targets | Linear |
| Calibration | , 128 samples @ 1024 tokens, seed 42 |
Left in bf16 (ignore): lm_head, the entire 27-layer vision tower, the in_proj_a /
in_proj_b delta-rule scalars on all 48 linear-attention layers, and the MTP head.
If you re-quantize this yourself: llm-compressor never sees
model-mtp.safetensors, so the ignore list it emits omits the MTP module entirely.
You must add re:.*mtp.* and re:mtp\..* to quantization_config.ignore by hand, or
vLLM builds the drafter as W4A16, fails to find weight_packed, silently skips every
MTP tensor and dies with KeyError: 'weight' in qwen3_5_mtp.py.
Validation
All measured on this build, 2xRTX 3090 (TP=2), vLLM nightly, fp8 KV cache, MTP n=3.
Table with columns: Test, Result| Test | Result |
|---|
| Coherence (5 checkable facts) | 5/5 |
| Multi-step arithmetic reasoning | pass |
| Vision — 3 shapes + colours from a synthetic image | 3/3 |
| Tool calling — non-streaming | pass |
| Tool calling — streaming | pass, no tag leakage |
| Needle retrieval @ 29,374 prompt tokens | pass (19 s) |
| Needle retrieval @ 117,374 prompt tokens | pass (96 s) |
| Needle retrieval @ 229,200 prompt tokens | pass (231 s) |
Speed
Throughput on this build is workload-dependent by roughly 30%. MTP acceptance is much
higher on predictable text than on varied prose, so tokens/second is a property of the prompt
as much as of the model. No single figure is meaningful without the prompt that produced it.
Pinned measurement, 2026-08-21 — single-user (c=1), thinking disabled, 600-token generations,
temperature 0, with the repetition_penalty: 1.05 default this card recommends:
Table with columns: prompt type, GPU limits 250W/275W, GPU limits 225W/225W| prompt type | GPU limits 250W/275W | GPU limits 225W/225W |
|---|
| expository ("describe how a four-stroke engine works") | 95.9 t/s | 93.3 t/s |
| creative prose ("write an original short story…") | 74.3 t/s | 72.5 t/s |
Run-to-run spread was under ±1 t/s in every cell. Prompt content costs about 30%; the GPU
power limit costs about 2%.
An earlier head-to-head against the Qwen3.8-27B-abliterated W4A16 build, taken in a single
controlled session on the same box with the same harness and settings. The prompt was not
recorded, so read this as a relative result only and not as absolute throughput:
Table with columns: median, best | median | best |
|---|
| This build | 95.6 t/s | 96.3 t/s |
| Qwen3.8-27B-abliterated W4A16 | 84.0 t/s | 93.0 t/s |
MTP acceptance rate 64.9%, mean accepted length 2.95 of 4 — the draft head is genuinely
doing work, which is where the margin over the comparison build comes from.
No standardized benchmarks (MMLU, GSM8K, etc.) were run. The numbers above are
functional and performance checks, not a quality evaluation. Treat quality as unmeasured.
Recommended sampling settings — read this before you file a bug
Do not use greedy decoding (temperature: 0) with this model. It will emit the same
sentence over and over until it hits your token cap and never produce a stop token. This is
the classic Qwen3 + quantization degenerate-repetition mode, not a defect in the weights,
and it is fully reproducible: greedy is deterministic, so the same prompt loops the same way
every time.
generation_config.json in this repo now ships a repetition_penalty of 1.05, which is
enough to prevent it. If your stack ignores generation_config.json, set it yourself:
Table with columns: parameter, thinking mode, notes| parameter | thinking mode | notes |
|---|
repetition_penalty | 1.05 | the important one — do not set below 1.02 |
temperature | 1.0 (repo default) or 0.6 | never 0 |
top_p | 0.95 | |
top_k | 20 | |
Measured on this build, greedy worst case, 6000-token cap:
Table with columns: repetition_penalty, finish reason, sentence uniqueness, max verbatim repeatsrepetition_penalty | finish reason | sentence uniqueness | max verbatim repeats |
|---|
| unset | length — never stopped | 0.85 | 5 |
| 1.02 | stop | 1.00 | 1 |
| 1.05 | stop | 1.00 |
The penalty is not free — it costs about 6% throughput. Interleaved A/B/A/B on the same
box, thinking disabled, 600-token generations, c=1: 68.4 / 67.1 t/s median with the penalty
off versus 64.3 / 63.6 t/s at 1.05. That is the price of not looping; we think it is worth
paying by default, and you can lower it to 1.02 if you would rather have the throughput.
It does not otherwise cost you anything measurable. Checked at 1.05 against penalty-off on
the tasks a repetition penalty is most likely to damage — all identical:
Table with columns: check, penalty off, 1.05| check | penalty off | 1.05 |
|---|
| verbatim reproduction of repetition-heavy JSON | EXACT | EXACT |
| generated FizzBuzz, executed and asserted | PASS | PASS |
| 12 near-identical repeated assignment lines | PASS | PASS |
| needle retrieval @ ~9k tokens | PASS | PASS |
| tool calling, streaming and non-streaming | PASS | PASS |
Do not go much above 1.10 — that is where repeated code syntax and identifiers start being
penalized.
Two traps if you try to fix this yourself
presence_penalty will not work as a server-side default in vLLM. vLLM only carries a
fixed whitelist out of generation config into its default sampling params —
repetition_penalty, temperature, top_k, top_p, min_p, max_new_tokens
(ModelConfig.get_diff_sampling_param). A presence_penalty entry is silently ignored.
presence_penalty and frequency_penalty cannot be defaulted at all over the OpenAI
API, because the OpenAI schema defaults them to 0.0 — clients always send them
explicitly, so your default never applies. repetition_penalty defaults to None on the
request and is filled from the server's defaults, which is why it is the only lever that
survives a client setting its own .
Why your client probably will not save you
Coding agents commonly pin temperature: 0 for determinism and send no penalty at all. Two
checked as of 2026-08-21: one sends no temperature when thinking is enabled but hardcodes
temperature: 0 on its sub-agent and skill paths; the other sends no temperature and no
penalty of any kind, ever. In both cases every request rides entirely on the server defaults.
Optional: chat_template_medium.jinja
This model's stock chat template defaults reasoning_effort to xhigh, which spends the
whole budget thinking and returns an empty answer on a large fraction of requests. The
default chat_template.jinja in this repo is unmodified upstream — we did not silently
change the behaviour of a redistributed artifact.
For convenience an opt-in copy is included as chat_template_medium.jinja, byte-identical
except for one line, which defaults reasoning_effort to medium instead:
-{%- set resolved_reasoning_effort = reasoning_effort|default('xhigh') %}
+{%- set resolved_reasoning_effort = reasoning_effort|default('medium') %}
Use it with --chat-template chat_template_medium.jinja, or keep the stock template and pin
the value per-request with --default-chat-template-kwargs as shown below. Both work; the
flag merges per-key, so clients sending their own chat_template_kwargs stay covered.
Serving with vLLM
vllm serve /path/to/this/repo \
--served-model-name qwen3.8-27b-hauhau-aggressive \
--tensor-parallel-size 2 \
--max-model-len 262144 \
--gpu-memory-utilization 0.95 \
--max-num-seqs 4 \
--max-num-batched-tokens 4096 \
--kv-cache-dtype fp8 \
--reasoning-parser qwen3 \
--enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder \
--enable-prefix-caching --enable-chunked-prefill \
--compilation-config '{"cudagraph_mode": "PIECEWISE"}' \
--speculative-config '{"method":"mtp","num_speculative_tokens":3}' \
--default-chat-template-kwargs '{"enable_thinking": true, "reasoning_effort": "medium"}'
Notes from getting this stable on 2x3090:
- Pin
reasoning_effort to medium. The Qwen3.8 chat template defaults to xhigh,
which spends the entire budget thinking and returns an empty answer. Measured on this
build over 4 hard prompts: at xhigh, 2 of 4 produced no answer at all (~5,400
words of reasoning, then finish_reason=length); at medium, 0 of 4 failed, averaging
~529 words of thinking and ~954 words of answer. The flag merges per-key, so clients
sending their own chat_template_kwargs are still covered.
cudagraph_mode: PIECEWISE, not FULL — FULL replay segfaults with MTP
(vllm#40756) at identical c=1 throughput.
- On 3090s without working P2P, set
NCCL_P2P_DISABLE=1 and --disable-custom-all-reduce.
- Without
it the tag is emitted as prose content and the subsequent SSE chunks go
silent — it looks exactly like the model failing at tool use, but it is a parser bug
(vLLM-side), not the weights. The "streaming tool calling: PASS, no tag leakage" result in
the validation table above was produced with that patch applied.
Files
Table with columns: File, Size| File | Size |
|---|
model.safetensors | 18.7 GB |
model-mtp.safetensors | 849 MB (bf16 NextN draft head) |
HauhauCS FastMTP is not used here — that is a llama.cpp-only draft sidecar needing
his runtime patch. This repo carries the native embedded NextN head (blk.64 -> mtp.*),
which the reconstruction preserves and vLLM consumes directly.
Provenance / credit
- Fine-tune: HauhauCS — all model quality and the
uncensored behaviour are theirs.
- Base architecture: Qwen team,
qwen3_5.
- This repo contributes only the GGUF-to-HF reconstruction and the AWQ quantization.
As of 2026-08-18 no AWQ/W4A16 build of any HauhauCS Aggressive model appears on the Hub
(searched model ids across 90 derivative repos; GGUF, NVFP4 and MLX builds exist).
Limitations
- Quantized from Q8_K_P, not from original BF16 weights — see Provenance.
- Verification establishes correct tensor layout and working behaviour, not weight-level
fidelity to the upstream fine-tune.
- No standardized quality benchmarks were run.
- This is an uncensored model. It will answer requests that safety-tuned models
refuse. You are responsible for how you use it.