Distil-Qwen3-1.7B-Customer-Support-Deferral (GGUF)
GGUF build of distil-labs/distil-qwen3-1.7b-customer-support-deferral, for serving with llama.cpp.
A fine-tuned Qwen3-1.7B model for multi-turn airline customer support that runs as the
small tier of a two-model cascade: it handles most support turns itself and defers
genuinely-hard turns to a larger model by emitting a defer_to_larger_model tool call.
Every assistant action is a single tool call, including talking to the customer via
respond_to_user, so a thin orchestrator can drive it.
Results
Evaluated on a held-out set of airline customer-support turns, scored by an independent GLM-5 judge (score = fraction of responses rated correct).
| System | Quality | Frontier-model calls |
|---|---|---|
| Frontier model alone (GLM-5) | 0.80 | 100% |
| This model + escalation (local) | ~0.75 | ~4% |
| Untrained Qwen3-1.7B | 0.42 | 0% |
Fine-tuning lifts the local 1.7B from 0.42 to ~0.75 (closing roughly 85% of the gap to its frontier-scale teacher), while running ~96% of turns locally and escalating only the hardest ~4% to the larger model. The escalation is a cost/safety mechanism, not a quality boost over the small model alone.
Usage (llama.cpp)
hf download distil-labs/distil-qwen3-1.7b-customer-support-deferral-gguf \
distil-qwen3-1.7b-customer-support-deferral.gguf --local-dir models
llama-server \
--model models/distil-qwen3-1.7b-customer-support-deferral.gguf \
--port 8000 \
--jinja
Then query the OpenAI-compatible API at http://127.0.0.1:8000/v1. The airline policy (system
prompt) and the 16 tool schemas ship with the demo app as job_description.json.
Demo App
This model powers the Flexible Customer Support Bot demo, a terminal cascade where this local SLM handles most airline-support turns and defers hard turns to a larger, OpenAI-compatible model.
File
| File | Format | Notes |
|---|---|---|
distil-qwen3-1.7b-customer-support-deferral.gguf |
BF16 | Full-precision build (16 bpw). Quantize with llama-quantize if you need a smaller footprint. |
Links
License
Released under the Apache 2.0 license. See the transformers model card for base-model and teacher-model license terms.