Qwen3.5-0.8B — edited by an LLM, no training (weight-space programming)

This is the model from "Sparks of Weight Space Programming" (Experiment 8) — the one the blog post did not release. A frontier LLM ("Astra") read Qwen3.5-0.8B's weights, diagnosed a repetition/loop pathology, and hand-edited 131,072 weights (64 MLP output columns in each of layers 15 and 19, down_proj) to fix it. No gradient descent, no training, no fine-tuning — a direct weight edit.

The base model loops until the token limit on almost every math problem. The edited one doesn't.

🎮 Try it live: akhaliq/weight-space-programming-demo — type a problem, watch the base model loop while the edited one solves it.

Verified results (this checkpoint)

Evaluated with the post's exact protocol: vLLM, thinking on, temperature 0.6, top_p 0.95, top_k 20, presence_penalty 1.5, max 32,768 new tokens, seed 0, last \boxed{} graded with math-verify 0.9.0.

	MATH-500 accuracy	answers cut at 32k tokens
Base Qwen3.5-0.8B	5.0% (25-problem smoke) — post: 7.9	95% (smoke) — post: 93.0
This model	51.0% — post: 48.1	31.6% — post: 33.1

Edited model: full MATH-500, all 500 problems × 4 samples = 2,000 generations (43.4M generated tokens, 51 min on an H200). Raw scores, per-problem results and sample generations: eval/.

Why you can trust the weights

The author published Astra's edit as a bit-exact diff (RikiyaT/lm_understand-logs, exp8_math/runs/p50c/edit/). This checkpoint was rebuilt with the author's own apply_edit.py, which sha256-verifies every rebuilt tensor against the checkpoint that was actually evaluated. Both tensors passed. Base: Qwen/Qwen3.5-0.8B @ 2fc06364715b967f1860aea9cf38778875588b17; only model.language_model.layers.15.mlp.down_proj.weight and ...layers.19... differ from the public release.

Reproduction

Reproduced end-to-end by an AI assistant (ML Intern) running on Hugging Face Jobs, 2026-11-02: the edit was rebuilt and hash-verified on CPU, the edited checkpoint pushed here, and the benchmark verification run on an NVIDIA H200 with vLLM 0.33.0 / transformers 5.20.2 / math-verify 0.9.0, following the post's own code/evaluate.py protocol (thinking on, think35 sampling, last-\boxed{} grading). One deliberate substitution: the experiment evaluated a text-only export of the model; this checkpoint is the full multimodal release — the language-model tensors are identical (hash-verified) and the vision tower is unused by text prompts.

Usage

from vllm import LLM, SamplingParams
from transformers import AutoTokenizer

ckpt = "akhaliq/Qwen3.5-0.8B-weight-space-programming"
tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(ckpt)
llm = LLM(model=ckpt, dtype="bfloat16", max_model_len=34816)

prompt = tok.apply_chat_template(
    [{"role": "user", "content": "What is $2^{10} + 24$?\nPlease reason step by step, and put your final answer within \\boxed{}."}],
    tokenize=False, add_generation_prompt=True, enable_thinking=True)
sp = SamplingParams(n=1, temperature=0.6, top_p=0.95, top_k=20, presence_penalty=1.5,
                    max_tokens=32768, seed=0)
print(llm.generate([prompt], sp)[0].outputs[0].text)

Provenance