GLM-5.3-Flash-EXL3-Q4

[!WARNING] Not yet run as a full server. The EXL3 kernel path, tensor-parallel CUDA-graph primitive, and held-out BF16-vs-Q4 quality checks passed. A complete serving integration, endpoint health check, model listing, and generated-response test have not been run. Vision and MTP execution are also not validated for this release.

This is a selective 4.0 bpw EXL3 conversion of Z.AI's GLM-5.3-Flash-BF16, pinned to source revision a6c167b62691b2bac901344b65cb651a70f53e43.

It is deliberately not an all-Q4 checkpoint. Only the routed-expert gate/up/down projections in layers 3–44 are EXL3 Q4. The information-carrying backbone remains at source precision: attention, linear-attention/indexers/mHC, routers and correction biases, shared experts, dense layers 0–2, embeddings, LM head, norms, vision, and MTP.

Status at a glance

Quantization layout

The source has 45 language layers: 3 dense layers followed by 42 routed-MoE layers. Each routed layer has 288 experts with top-8 routing and one shared expert.

The final artifact contains 583,090 indexed tensors and is 187.45 GB on disk. Quantized expert tensors account for 153.54 GB; 2,482 retained source-precision tensors account for 33.84 GB. The layout is a custom glm53-selective-exl3-tp4-v1 checkpoint and requires a compatible GLM-5.3 selective-EXL3 loader. Do not assume a stock Transformers loader or a generic EXL3 runtime will load it.

Dione conversion workflow

This release was produced through the Dione conversion workflow: a fail-closed selective-precision map, source-parity pilot, natural-route coverage gate, bounded Hessian/K4 packing pilot, full EXL3 encoding, assembly, and independent quality checks. Dione is credited here as the conversion workflow; it is not a base-model author, training-data source, or serving runtime.

The conversion used ExLlamaV3 at commit 5f3c537ca9d89893d771256f5c43c93656553fbb for the EXL3 path. The release records a 4.0-bpw K4 expert representation with tensor-parallel size 4.

Calibration and routing coverage

Calibration used 600 sealed rows × 2,048 tokens = 1,228,800 tokens. It used the pinned ExLlamaV3 standard-calibration bundle, with rows labelled c4 (102), code (172), multilingual (33), technical (35), wiki (144), and tiny (22), plus 92 synthetic random-token rows. Corpus text and calibration rows are not included in this repository.

The calibration was a conversion aid only; this release does not train or fine-tune the base model. Natural top-8 routing covered every routed expert: 412,876,800 total routes, zero experts with zero hits, and a minimum of 1,655 natural routes for any expert (above the 1,024-route floor).

The pinned calibration row digest is 1cae9bbcd2beb3879a0c459edfca1fd197043ab204b82189c9361de386d0cae1; the calibration-manifest digest is 179db5d74b865df11734c7ab76cdf1fa68818e6135a1cbbc3104c75cc3df230f.

Hardware used

Conversion and validation ran on a local workstation with 4× NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 GPUs (24 GB each; 96 GB total VRAM) and 512 GB DDR4 system memory. No hostnames, usernames, network details, or internal paths are included in this release.

Validation

Held-out evaluation used the Salesforce Wikitext wikitext-2-raw-v1 test split at revision b08601e04326c79dfdd32d625aee71d232d685c3. It scored 65,504 next-token positions in 32 contiguous 2,048-token blocks that were disjoint from calibration rows.

The runtime primitive check exercised real EXL3 gate/up/down kernels on all four tensor-parallel ranks with CUDA graph capture and replay. Each rank completed graph replay with zero replay-vs-eager relative L2 difference in that scoped test. This is deliberately narrower than a complete server claim; see the warning at the top.

Attributions and licenses

• Z.AI — base model: zai-org/GLM-5.3-Flash-BF16, revision above. This derivative follows the source MIT License; the source LICENSE is included here.
• Dione — selective EXL3 conversion and validation workflow for this release.
• ExLlamaV3 / TurboDerp — EXL3 format and conversion implementation used for this release.
• Salesforce Research — held-out quality evaluation via the Wikitext dataset identified above. It was used only for evaluation, not training.
• ExLlamaV3 standard-calibration bundle — calibration source categories listed above. The release exposes counts and digests, not corpus material; use the upstream project for its source and licensing context.
• Brandon M. Music — earlier MIT-licensed GLM EXL3/TR3 rank-sliced lineage and the public release-engineering pattern of reproducibility closure, cold KLD receipts, explicit runtime profiles, and content-addressed provenance. See GLM-5.2-EXL3-TR3-3.0bpw and the separately licensed GLM-5.3 release. No ShapleyMCG code, model weights, calibration corpus, or generated artifact is included or used by this release.

Files and integrity

• layers/ — Q4 routed-expert EXL3 tensors and per-shard metadata.
• retained/ — source-precision backbone tensors and manifest.
• model.safetensors.index.json — maps all 583,090 tensors to files.
• exl3-manifest.json — conversion layout and artifact identity.
• evidence/ and validation/ — public-safe calibration, routing, runtime, and quality records.

Artifact manifest SHA-256: 6887012fa7ffee2e5ac5d533c3081abd9df0a9b9163fc6ed1fa983b94584d38b.

Reproducibility, results, runtime, and provenance

• reproducibility/ records the public-safe source-closure status and verifier.
• results/ indexes the held-out quality receipts and identifies the still-pending independent cold-run closure.
• runtime/ separates scoped kernel/CUDA-graph evidence from the pending full-server and MTP gates.
• PROVENANCE.md defines the content-addressed identity chain.
• RELEASE_STATUS.json is the machine-readable gate ledger for this exact release line.

Intended use

Use this release only with a loader that understands the selective GLM-5.3 EXL3 TP=4 layout and preserves the listed source-precision modules. Treat it as a validated artifact with an unvalidated full serving path until an end-to-end server acceptance run is published.

Release identity

Status: Public checkpoint. Audited weight payload: 217 safetensors files, 187,453,172,472 bytes (weight files only; excludes metadata).

Upstream source: zai-org/GLM-5.3-Flash-BF16, BF16 revision a6c167b62691b2bac901344b65cb651a70f53e43. Artifact/evidence snapshot inspected: 3ca15be4587b33b577df9cce6ec096dd35f482ac. A card update does not constitute a new weight conversion.

Intended use and limitations

Use populated checkpoints for local inference or quantization research with the declared compatible runtime. Results from one bitrate or runtime do not transfer automatically to another. Quantization may change behavior and factual accuracy; controlled smoke tests do not establish broad benchmark quality. A projection or REAP observation record alone does not prove successful refusal removal or a pruned model release.

Related releases

Private links require authorized access. Two suite indexes and three placeholders are included in this inventory; they are not additional trained models.

Evidence files

• evidence/release-calibration-manifest.json
• evidence/route-coverage-manifest.json
• exl3-manifest.json
• validation/quality-report.json
• validation/runtime-status.json

REAP observation provenance

The original 3bpw and Q4 were each observed on two corpora: private calibration material and balanced 12-language Wikipedia. Each sealed lane records 128 sequences × 1,024 tokens (131,072 tokens), across 42 routed layers and 288 experts per layer. These four observation lanes are separate from quantization calibration and do not mean experts have been pruned from the weights above. The private observation dataset holds the manifests and aggregate sidecars.