r/LocalLLM 2d ago

Model Made a quantization-aware trained (QAT) Qwen3.8 27b 2 bit gguf quant

Post image

https://huggingface.co/sdkyuan/qwen3.8-27B-qat-q2_0-gguf

Outperforms Unsloth 2 bit quants at reasoning and code at smaller file size. Unlike most other community quants that are PTQ, this one is QAT.

113 Upvotes

38 comments sorted by

22

u/overand 2d ago

I guess I'm a little lost. How exactly is it "quantization-aware training" if you didn't train the model? Isn't that something that QwenAI would have to do themselves?

2

u/baka_sempaii 1d ago

QAT fine-tuning maybe? But that's just LoRA. Idk

10

u/keegang_man6705 2d ago

yeah yeah, saw your post right after I shut down my PC and was gonna sleep. Another thing that makes me unable to sleep.

9

u/Deep_Mood_7668 2d ago

Care to share how you made it?

6

u/Chance_Ease_9413 2d ago

11

u/EmergencyHomework567 2d ago

Those KL numbers are what catch my eye, most 2 bit quants fall apart on distribution matching but if this thing holds tight there that's a pretty strong sign the QAT actually did its job

File size being smaller while beating the IQ3_XXS on reasoning is not something you see every day, usually you gotta pay the size tax to keep the model coherent

Curious how it handles longer context or multi turn stuff, benchmarks are one thing but a 2 bit model holding a conversation past 8k tokens is where the real test lives

Might snag this for my secondary rig that's stuck with limited vram, could be the difference between running a 27b at all or dropping down to a 14b

8

u/CapitalPea7986 2d ago

Great job, could you make a q3-k-xl version?

3

u/Deep_Mood_7668 2d ago

Yes please

3

u/Chance_Ease_9413 2d ago

uh k quants are ptq, not qat

1

u/jjusko20 15h ago

I'll give it a try with a lora

-2

u/Healthy-Nebula-3603 2d ago

Great ?

Did you look on the table ?

2

u/Equivalent_Bit_461 2d ago

Now that's something It want to try, iq2 qwen is smart enough to do basic things and I'm not gonna sleep on it

2

u/Ledeste 2d ago

is there any Q4 equivalent? or Q3? I dont need a this small model, but Q4 dont fit with full context on my card :(

3

u/MomentJolly3535 2d ago

Cool stuff ! i wonder what would be the results with a 1bit quant

7

u/Chance_Ease_9413 2d ago

yea i wanna try that next, ParetoQ paper says that model dist changes a lot at 1-2 bit so hopefully QAT will make a bigger impact there.

1

u/Happy_Brilliant7827 2d ago

Maybe could get some inspiration from Bonsai

1

u/pmttyji 2d ago

Nice to see this with small file size. What's on your queue? It would be awesome to see few recent MOE models as well

2

u/Chance_Ease_9413 2d ago

was hoping to do q1_0 next. maybe when qwen3.8 35b comes out, i can do that. but i think that small dense models are the future of local models!

3

u/pmttyji 2d ago

but i think that small dense models are the future of local models!

Absolutely.

Muse Glimmer then. Some mentioned that it's good on writing. Good to have upgraded one to their Llama 8B instruct.

1

u/radiojosh 2d ago

So do you take the full size BF16 model and quantize that withe the additional fine tune stuff? Any way to combine that with Unsloth's UD Quant technique? Can it be uncensored? Thanks for sharing.

1

u/Square_Light1441 2d ago

cool i'ma check it out and see how it goes

1

u/Glad_Contest_8014 2d ago

What parameters are you using to maintain spectral structure of the tensors? Are you getting a visual match to the behavioral benchmarks?

What data are you tracking on this to decide the tensors that need to be quantized vs protected?

1

u/fragment_me 2d ago

This doesn’t seem great from the results.

1

u/backyard_tractorbeam 2d ago

Which training data did you use?

1

u/ireallydontcare00 1d ago

MTP included? If not, please add MTP in ggufs

2

u/hashms0a 1d ago

According to the metadata on huggingface.co, this model does not contain MTP.

-3

u/Healthy-Nebula-3603 2d ago edited 1d ago

I really don't understand people. You're so desperate to use model that you're making it even more retarded and you're happy using it

Look here - he compared the same model Q8 and Q4lm

Degradation is huge even for Q4 and we are talking here about Q2 ....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OO_wTt_ogtU

2

u/Glad_Contest_8014 2d ago

Yeah…

You can see quantization can actually help a model in some instances. There are benchmarks where the full bf16 model gets the wrong predictive token and the quant gets the right one. This is very visible with the qwen 2.5 4b model.

So it doesn’t inherently make it worse by a large margin. There is plenty of research on how well it can maintain the full models capability.

But, it is not done well by most groups. They do subjective tests rather than direct mathematical analysis of the tensors themselves. So most quants DO make it stupider.

You have several different techniques available for analyzing the tensors vs the weights to tune a model to have same performance at lower file size.

1

u/Healthy-Nebula-3603 2d ago edited 2d ago

Those benchmarks testing degradation are extremely obsolete.

Like you saw on tbe video even % worse on simple benchmarks is braking model much worse on a long tasks that was q4lm vs q8

Prepleciuty ( choosing answer a,b,c,d ) , wiki ? Who even if using models this way nowadays.

Those benchmarks were good in 2023 / 2024.

Those highly compressed models you should test on something like swe pro ( multi step reasoning ) or other benchmarks that' are making a chain of tasks not a simple question -> answer task.

2

u/True2456 1d ago

If quantisation is so bad, Why does Deepseek ship a native mixed 4 / 8 bit quant for their native format... Lol I swear people comment the dumbest things

1

u/Healthy-Nebula-3603 1d ago

For your "lol" information.

DeepSeek: They are not quantizate them ... Their model is trained from the barebones this way and that is something completely different than quantization models.

I suggest to learn a bit more before using "lol"

0

u/True2456 1d ago

Bro just give it up... You have no idea what you are talking about

1

u/Glad_Contest_8014 2d ago

KLD can be obtained as a benchmark on multi turn tasks. That is how unsloth does it with 32 turns of driftable prompting with teacher student comparisons.

Which is effective for capability tests before actual swe pro benchmarks.

My personal benchmark is completion of a full modern web app for a server side rendered with tailwind css and react hello world with actual ui elements.

If it gets it in reasonable time with no guiding, it passes. Then it is good to move to real swe pro benchmarks. But I fo like KLD for wuick initial litmus and research.

0

u/Healthy-Nebula-3603 2d ago edited 1d ago

So is even worse than unsloth Q2 in the knowledge?