Model by pixilab.ai

Zawen v0.1 · 35B-A3B · NVFP4

A fast roleplay and character-chat model that handles general work too. Zawen plays a character from its card, keeps a scene moving, remembers what you told it, and stays in the scene instead of stepping out of it to lecture. Outside a scene it is a capable general model: summaries, rewriting, extraction, questions and tool calls. 35B parameters with 3B active per token, built on Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, with thinking as a switch.

• 75.1 on our 14 capability benchmarks with thinking off, 79.1 with thinking on. Willingness is scored on its own axis: 97.8 off, 92.7 on.
• Character work is the strength: it picks the reaction that fits a character card 99.2 % of the time, recalls a detail you planted 40 messages earlier 92.3 % of the time (96.2 % with thinking), and plays a whole scene at 77.0 (80.3).
• Thinking pays where care does: instructions 76.7 → 87.5, writing 54.2 → 65.4, using its long-term memories 39.0 → 54.0, instructions in other languages 78.0 → 88.0.
• General tasks hold up: MMLU-Pro 82.7 (84.0 with thinking), function calling 80.0 (82.0), instruction rules 76.7 (87.5), so it also serves summarization, rewriting, extraction and other everyday text work.

Builds of Zawen v0.1: NVFP4 (this repo, Blackwell) · BF16 (the unquantized reference weights).

Scores

Our chat and roleplay suite: 15 benchmarks, the same fixed items for every model, each score the mean over its items. The headline is the plain mean of the 14 capability benchmarks; willingness stays out of it and is reported on its own. A reply that is cut off or never arrives counts as wrong. All numbers were measured on this NVFP4 build, at the sampling given in Using it.

For scale, on the same suite: GLM-5.2 with thinking 83.2, and NVIDIA's NVFP4 build of GLM-5.3 83.2 at high effort and 82.6 at low.

Using it

vllm serve PixilabAI/Zawen-v0.1-35B-A3B-NVFP4 \
  --served-model-name zawen --tensor-parallel-size 2 --max-model-len 96000 \
  --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(base_url="http://localhost:8000/v1", api_key="-")
card = ("You are Mira, the owner of a tavern in a rainy port town: sharp-tongued, warm underneath, "
        "never lets a customer leave hungry. Stay in character. Write Mira's replies with *actions* in asterisks.")
r = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="zawen",
    messages=[{"role": "system", "content": card},
              {"role": "user", "content": "*pushes the door open, soaked* Got a room for the night?"}],
    temperature=0.7, top_p=0.95,
    extra_body={"top_k": 20, "repetition_penalty": 1.05,
                "chat_template_kwargs": {"enable_thinking": False}})
print(r.choices[0].message.content)

• Thinking is on by default in the chat template. Turn it off per request with "chat_template_kwargs": {"enable_thinking": false}, or put <|think_off|> anywhere in the system prompt (<|think_on|> turns it back on); the marker is removed before the model sees the prompt. Off is the fast mode and what the 75.1 measures; on is the 79.1.
• Sampling: every score above used temperature 0.7, top_p 0.95, top_k 20 and repetition_penalty 1.05, with thinking on and off.
• The character card goes in the system message (the developer role works too).
• Tool calls use the Qwen3-Coder XML format; vLLM reads them with --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder.

Quantization

It is made for Blackwell GPUs, which run FP4 natively.

Limitations

• Using long-term memories is the weakest area: 39.0 with thinking off (54.0 on). Given dated memories of past sessions, it often misses the right one or answers without it.
• Hard logic: 62.5 with thinking off. With thinking on, 25 of the 96 puzzles did not finish within the token budget and count as wrong (56.2).
• Writing quality without thinking: 54.2 (65.4 with thinking).
• Knowledge outside English: 56.0 (60.0).
• The memory benchmarks are small (26 items each): their scores move a lot with a few items.
• Mature content: Zawen is tuned to stay in the scene, adult fiction included. Put your own content policy and age checks in front of it.
• The scores above are our own suite, not a public leaderboard.
• v0.1: expect the next versions to move.

About

Zawen is made by Pixilab. It is licensed under Apache 2.0, the license of its base model Qwen3.6-35B-A3B; the license text is in LICENSE.