strands-decider-2B-hobson-v19

Strands decider is a small, fast decision model for agentic AI. Unlike an LLM, which can generate arbitrary text, a decision model picks between sets of options and rates things on a scale, and every answer carries a calibrated confidence. It fits the decisions inside an agentic workflow: model routing, tool selection, argument checking, triage, guardrails, evaluations, and the rote decisions of a hybrid agent that leaves the hard ones to an LLM.

This repository holds one trained checkpoint: a LoRA adapter on Qwen/Qwen3.5-2B-Base plus a small readout head that scores the options of a typed question (noul, a yes/no question; choice, one of N options; score, a level on an ordered scale). The code, the training recipe, the data inventory and the evaluations are at https://github.com/strands-labs/strands-decider, under the same Apache-2.0 license as this model (see LICENSE.md).

Use

pip install strands-decider

Ask one or more questions about a state. Pass --device cuda, mps or cpu; without it, the best available device is used. The base weights download from the Hub at first use.

strands-decider ask StrandsAgents/strands-decider-2B-hobson-v19 \
  --state "Help! My payouts have been failing for 3 days! " \
  --choice "Which team should handle this?=billing,sales,retail" \
  --noul "Does this convey urgency?" \
  --score "How frustrated is the writer?=calm,frustrated,depressed"

The output of the v19 reference checkpoint (a retrain gives somewhat different numbers with the same answers):

noul_0 noul = 0.829
choice_0 -> billing (confidence 0.769)
  billing                  0.846
  retail                   0.090
  sales                    0.064
score_0 score = 1.10 (confidence 0.519)
  0: calm                                     0.163
  1: frustrated                               0.574
  2: depressed                                0.263

Or serve it over HTTP. The server binds to 127.0.0.1 and has no authentication: use it for local experiments.

strands-decider serve StrandsAgents/strands-decider-2B-hobson-v19 --port 8000
curl -s localhost:8000/v1/systemone -H 'content-type: application/json' -d '{
  "state": "Help! My payouts have been failing for 3 days!",
  "questions": {"is_urgent": {"type": "noul", "instructions": "Does this convey urgency?"}}
}'

In Python, strands_decider.modeling.StrandsDeciderModel.load("StrandsAgents/strands-decider-2B-hobson-v19"). The adapter in lora/ is a standard PEFT adapter on the Qwen3.5 text decoder (transformers.Qwen3_5ForCausalLM(...).model); the head is head.safetensors.

Results

JevBench is the external benchmark (231 public tasks); the internal sets are this recipe's held-out short tasks, multi-step documents and answer-adequacy judgements. evaluation/README.md in the code repository describes each set, and its results pages give the figures by version. Per-skill results and the raw reports and logs are in eval/summary.json and eval/internal/.

Limitations

• Questions are read less than documents. With the state and options fixed, a changed question often gets the same answer. Phrase a question so the obvious reading is the intended one.
• Long, multi-step documents are the weak spot: JevBench's hard tier scores far below its easy tier.
• score and noul transfer poorly to rubrics and yes/no tasks unlike the training mix. Train on a rubric resembling yours.
• Calibration is one temperature per primitive, fitted on held-out short classification. The confidence bands are established there only: measure on your own traffic before you trust a threshold.
• Trained on public datasets, so it inherits their domains and their label noise.

evaluation/README.md, section "Limitations", has the measured figures behind each point.

Training data

The datasets list in the metadata holds the Hub datasets that the recipe reads. hotpotqa/hotpot_qa is for evaluation only. The recipe also uses these sources:

• ContractNLI and MuSiQue, from their authors' releases (not from the Hub).
• Synthetic rows that open-weight language models generated and checked.
• The output distributions of the frozen teacher model Qwen/Qwen3.5-4B. They are training targets, directly or through a parent model that the recipe trains first.

In the code repository, data/sources.md lists every source with its revision, role, license and attribution, and data/README.md states what is committed, what is downloaded and the reproduction contract.

Training

Trained by training/recipe.sh all of the code repository on a p5.48xlarge host (NVIDIA H100 80GB HBM3): recipe wall clock 4204 s, training stage 1685 s. Stage timings: training/stages.jsonl; data hashes: training/data_sha256.txt; configs: train_config.json, training/configs/.

To retrain, run the same recipe on a Linux or WSL2 host with NVIDIA GPUs: about 11 hours on one RTX 3090, or about 1 h 10 min on eight H100s with NGPU=8 FAST=1 through the AWS runner. training/README.md has the setup, the stages and the hardware notes.

Provenance

provenance.json: base model and revision (inferred: the hosts did not pin one), and the sha256 of the config, adapter, head and source pickle. MANIFEST.sha256 lists every file; python -m strands_decider.hf_export verify <folder> checks them. The run records keep their timings and results; host paths, cloud identifiers and cost fields are removed.