strands-decider-2B-hobson-v21

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.

v21 is v19's recipe plus checked question paraphrases and distillation from Qwen/Qwen3.5-4B where it agrees with the gold label. It is the released seed of six, picked by a rule written before the seeds were ranked ("How this checkpoint was chosen", below).

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-v21 \
  --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 this checkpoint (--device cuda; other devices differ in the last digits):

noul_0 noul = 0.875
choice_0 -> billing (confidence 0.837)
  billing                  0.891
  sales                    0.055
  retail                   0.054
score_0 score = 1.07 (confidence 0.603)
  0: calm                                     0.140
  1: frustrated                               0.649
  2: depressed                                0.211

Images: pip install "strands-decider[vision]" (transformers 5.18 or later; the image path is on the code repository's main and in releases after 0.1.0), then serve --vision or ask --image FILE. See "Images" below and docs/vision.md in the code repository.

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-v21 --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-v21"). 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/.

How this checkpoint was chosen

Six seeds of the same config trained on one host (8x H100). Each passes the validity gates (231 JevBench tasks attempted, strict schema 1.000, easy tier 48/48, one epoch, every stage exit code 0). The rule, written before the seeds were ranked: for each of five measures (JevBench tasks right, MuSiQue, ContractNLI, BoardgameQA, HotpotQA), take the six-seed mean and SD; a seed's distance is the root of the sum of its squared z-scores; release the seed with the smallest distance. Seed 5 has distance 1.48 (next: seed 3, 1.93). So this is a representative seed, not the best one on the public tasks. Training-time results:

Against v19: on one other host, six seeds of v19's recipe averaged 172.8 JevBench tasks (Brier 0.341) and six of this config 172.3 (Brier 0.331). Same accuracy, lower Brier score. The published v19 is a single run (167/231 at window 3072, 168 at 4096), so do not read the difference between the two single runs as a gain.

Release checks

These files, through the code repository's main (not the training harness), on an NVIDIA L40S (text) and an L4 (images), against the training-time run on H100:

Every accuracy is within one item of its training-time figure. JevBench ECE, binned over 231 tasks, moves with small probability changes between GPUs.

Images

With --vision the vision tower of Qwen3.5-2B-Base is kept and the adapter and head are used unchanged; nothing was trained on images. Same evaluations as docs/vision.md in the code repository (NaturalBench, first 300 groups, 1,200 questions; POPE adversarial, first 600 items), both checkpoints on the same L4:

The same accuracy. On POPE v21 is better calibrated; on NaturalBench the ECE difference is not resolved. v21 is more confident than v19 throughout (mean confidence +0.04 to +0.07).

Without the image both fall to chance, so the answers come from the image. Text training does not teach the model to say "I cannot tell": with the image removed, it still answers at a mean confidence of 0.722 on NaturalBench and 0.792 on POPE, ECE 0.222 and 0.292. This is worse than v19 (0.652 and 0.725, ECE 0.152 and 0.225; paired 95% CI of the ECE difference +0.054 to +0.087 and +0.065 to +0.070). Do not use its confidence to detect a missing, blank or unreadable image: check for the image before you ask.

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 train calibrate eval of the code repository with TRAIN_CONFIG=configs/experiments/v21b.yaml and seed 5 (training/configs/v21b-s5.yaml), on a p5.48xlarge host (8x NVIDIA H100 80GB, NGPU=8): training stage 1,686 s, one epoch of 3,738 steps. Stage timings: training/stages.jsonl; data hashes: training/data_sha256.txt; config: train_config.json.

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

strands_decider_config.json is the trained checkpoint's, less one key, full_weight_targets: [], that the training code wrote and released versions of strands-decider do not read (empty means LoRA only, so the model is the same). provenance.json: base model and revision (inferred: the hosts did not pin one; the loader pins it from this file), 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.