Qwen3.8 Perian GGUF

Behavioral release candidate — not promoted. The checkpoint-5001448 files are structurally corrected and load successfully, but the saved Hermes long-context regression still enters a planning/action loop. The same failure reproduced in UD-IQ4_XS with embedded MTP-3 and in UD-Q6_K_XL with MTP disabled, so this is a target-adapter behavior issue rather than an IQ4 or MTP corruption. A continuation training pass and the 1K/2K/4K/8K action-boundary gate are pending. Do not treat this candidate as the loop fix.

Qwen3.8 Perian is a compressed and post-trained Qwen3.8 Flash-Next lineage. It combines depth pruning, routed-expert width reduction, and a document-disjoint, activation-informed reduction of the PLE n-gram table with a rank-32 QLoRA.

Current checkpoint

All files in the quant folders below derive from the same merged checkpoint. The resumable unfused source is:

• repository: jakeatx/ream-288-rank32-3m-adapter
• path: targeted-long-r2-fullctx-v2/checkpoints/5001448
• supervised tokens seen in this continuation: 5,001,448
• rendered tokens seen: 13,697,751

The next corrective pass must resume this unfused checkpoint with adapter, optimizer, and RNG state intact. It must not restart from the fused BF16 model.

Embedded MTP by default

Every checkpoint-5001448 GGUF contains the 512-expert Qwen3.8 Flash-Next MTP block inside the model file set. No separate MTP sidecar is required. The included launchers enable embedded MTP depth 3 by default.

chmod +x start-mtp.sh run-mtp-server.sh
./start-mtp.sh UD-IQ4_XS

Or launch an already-downloaded model/first shard:

./run-mtp-server.sh /path/to/model-or-first-shard.gguf

The production launcher uses the fork's 245,760-token context configuration, MTP-3, Q8 KV for the draft path, and the checked-in atx_65536.txt vocabulary map. It does not silently force a 32K context.

The embedded shared MTP block has not yet received a separate REAP/REAM retune against the 288-expert target trunk. That is a speed/acceptance optimization; it is separate from the target-adapter loop described above.

Available artifacts

UD-Q4_K_XL and UD-Q3_K_XL remain pending. Their exact tensor recipes are already present under recipes/checkpoint-5001448/.

Quantization policy

The dynamic tensor maps reproduce the Unsloth Qwen3.8 profile at exact-tensor level after reducing the target trunk to 32 layers. The embedded MTP block uses matching attention-layer grades. Its MTP-only norms remain F32 and projections remain Q8_0. The large per_layer_token_embd.weight n-gram table is protected at IQ4_NL for 3/4-bit variants and Q8_0 for 5-bit and higher variants.

The custom llama.cpp/llamAmpere runtime must support the qwen4exp architecture, compact PLE remap, flat I32 ple_compact_remap.weight, and the embedded shared-target MTP block. See GGUF_RELEASE.md for the release contract.

Known behavioral failure and promotion gate

The saved Hermes failure prompt is 21,801 tokens. At checkpoint 5001448:

• UD-IQ4_XS + embedded MTP-3 generated 4,096 tokens, repeated the planning intent, and never issued the required tool call.
• UD-Q6_K_XL with MTP disabled reproduced the same behavior.

Repetition penalty 1.05 is not a sufficient fix because the prose changes while the intent cycles. Promotion requires the exact saved prompt to remain loop-free at 1K/2K/4K/8K prefixes, emit a valid Hermes XML tool call by 2K, leave no prose after the tool call, and pass at penalties 1.0 and 1.05.