Sunbird/Sunflower-14B-W8AB

Model Overview

This is a quantized version of Sunbird/Sunflower-14B using the W8A8 quantization scheme. This model has been optimized for efficient inference while maintaining model quality.

🌻 Sunflower-14B is a multilingual language model developed by Sunbird AI for Ugandan languages. Built on the Qwen 3-14B architecture, the model supports translation and text generation across 31 Ugandan languages plus English. The model achieves the highest translation accuracy among evaluated models in 24 of 31 language pairs.

• Developed by: Sunbird AI
• Model type: Causal language model
• Languages: 31 Ugandan languages + English (see language codes above)

Quantization Details

• Quantization Method: 8-bit integer quantization for both weights and activations
• Base Model: Sunbird/Sunflower-14B
• Quantization Framework: llmcompressor (vLLM)
• Memory Efficiency: ~50% reduction in model size
• Performance: Fast inference with INT8 tensor cores

Model Details

Model Description

This quantized model maintains the capabilities of the base 14B parameter model while offering significant improvements in memory usage and inference speed.

• Developed by: Sunbird AI
• Model type: Quantized Large Language Model
• Language(s): Multilingual (with focus on East African languages)
• License: Apache 2.0
• Quantized from model: Sunbird/Sunflower-14B
• Quantization scheme: W8A8

Model Sources

• Base Repository: Sunbird/Sunflower-14B
• Quantization Tool: llmcompressor

Usage

Installation

First, install the required dependencies:

pip install vllm llmcompressor

Inference with vLLM

from vllm import LLM
from vllm.sampling_params import SamplingParams

# Load the quantized model
model = LLM("Sunbird/Sunflower-14B-W8AB", enforce_eager=True)

# Define sampling parameters
sampling_params = SamplingParams(
    temperature=0.7,
    top_p=0.9,
    max_tokens=1000
)

# Method 1: Using chat template (recommended)
messages = [
    {"role": "system", "content": "You are a helpful assistant."},
    {"role": "user", "content": "Translate to Luganda: Uganda is a landlocked country in East Africa."}
]

# Apply chat template to format the messages
formatted_prompt = model.get_tokenizer().apply_chat_template(
    messages, 
    tokenize=False, 
    add_generation_prompt=True
)

# Generate response
outputs = model.generate([formatted_prompt], sampling_params)
print(outputs[0].outputs[0].text)

# Method 2: Direct text generation
prompt = "Explain the importance of biodiversity:"
outputs = model.generate([prompt], sampling_params)
print(outputs[0].outputs[0].text)

Hardware Requirements

Recommended:

• GPU: NVIDIA GPU with Compute Capability 7.0+ (V100, A100, H100, or RTX 30xx/40xx series)
• VRAM: 12-16GB (quantized from 28GB for FP16)
• System RAM: 32GB+

Minimum:

• GPU: NVIDIA GPU with 8GB VRAM
• System RAM: 16GB+

Performance

Memory Efficiency

This quantized model provides significant memory savings compared to the original FP16 model:

• Original Model Size (FP16): ~28GB
• Quantized Model Size (W8AB): ~14GB
• Memory Reduction: ~50% reduction in model size

Inference Speed

Fast inference with INT8 tensor cores. The quantized model typically shows:

• Faster token generation compared to FP16
• Lower latency for first token
• Higher throughput for batch inference

Note: Actual performance may vary based on hardware, batch size, and sequence length.

Quantization Process

This model was quantized using the llmcompressor library from vLLM. Here's how you can reproduce the quantization:

from llmcompressor import oneshot
from llmcompressor.transformers import oneshot
from llmcompressor.modifiers.quantization import QuantizationModifier

# Quantization recipe for W8A8
recipe = 
quant_scheme: W8A8
quant_modifiers:
  QuantizationModifier:
    scheme: W8A8

Apply quantization

oneshot(
    model="Sunbird/Sunflower-14B",
    recipe=recipe,
    output_dir="Sunbird/Sunflower-14B-W8AB",
)

Limitations and Considerations

Quantization Trade-offs

While quantization provides significant benefits in memory and speed, users should be aware of:

1. Slight Quality Degradation: Some tasks may show minor performance differences compared to the full-precision model
2. Hardware Requirements: Optimal performance requires compatible NVIDIA GPUs
3. Framework Dependency: Currently optimized for vLLM inference

Recommended Use Cases

Best suited for:

• Production deployments requiring efficient inference
• Real-time applications needing low latency
• Scenarios with limited GPU memory
• Batch processing workloads

Consider full-precision model for:

• Tasks requiring maximum accuracy
• Research experiments with fine-tuning
• Scenarios where memory is not a constraint

Citation

If you use this model, please cite both the base model and the quantization work:

BibTeX:

@misc{Sunbird_Sunflower_14B_W8AB,
    title={{Sunflower-14B W8AB Quantized Model}},
    author={{Sunbird AI}},
    year={{2025}},
    publisher={{HuggingFace}},
    howpublished={{\url{https://huggingface.co/Sunbird/Sunflower-14B-W8AB}}}
}

APA:

Sunbird AI. (2025). Sunflower-14B W8AB Quantized Model. HuggingFace. https://huggingface.co/Sunbird/Sunflower-14B-W8AB

Model Card Contact

For questions or feedback about this quantized model:

• Repository Issues: GitHub Issues
• Email: info@sunbird.ai
• Base Model: Sunbird/Sunflower-14B

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Model card generated on 2025-10-09