strata · DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 GSQ (mixed-precision, agentic-calibrated)

A workload-calibrated mixed-precision quantization of deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 (763.2B-parameter MoE — the largest DeepSeek V4.1 Flash variant), built for the strata engine (Xolotl fork). Every routed-expert projection is assigned its own precision tier (Q3_K / Q2_0 / ternary) from activation calibration on an agentic + coding corpus, so the artifact lands at a fixed 153 GiB budget while keeping the sensitive experts at higher precision and pushing the least-sensitive ones to ternary (which strata runs on CPU).

It is not a standard llama.cpp GGUF: the per-expert tier map, the engram memory layers, the expert rank.bin, and the DSpark speculative sidecar are all strata-specific. See Engines below.

What this model is for

• Agentic / coding workloads — the calibration corpus is weighted toward code, SWE-style tool trajectories, and tool-schema usage, so the tier map protects the expert paths those tasks actually exercise.
• Long context — served with a 512K-token context and FP4 KV cache.
• Hybrid VRAM+RAM serving — hot experts live in GPU VRAM, cold experts in a pinned RAM arena; the least-sensitive ternary experts run on CPU. A single 72 GB GPU serves the whole model (cold experts offload to RAM).
• Size = speed — decode is memory-bandwidth-bound, so a smaller artifact moves fewer bytes/token. 153 GiB is the author's budget-neutral all-Q2_0 design point for this model.

Credits & provenance (full chain)

All credit for the model itself goes to the authors below — this artifact is a quantization of their work, with no fine-tuning of our own:

Our approach

The whole pipeline is open source in Xolotl/tools/v41. We ran it end-to-end on the 1017 checkpoint — no fine-tuning, no abliteration, just a workload-calibrated mixed-precision quantization:

1. Fetch — the 1017 base (763.2B, hybrid FP8-dense / NVFP4-expert) via the HF CLI.
2. Corpus — a workload-calibrated calibration set: 32 sequences × 8,192 tokens, weighted toward agentic + coding (agentic_long 10 · code 10 · agent 5 · reasoning 3 · web 2 · chat 1 · multi 1). Datasets: antirez/ds4 imatrix prompts + public SWE-agent trajectories (Nebius SWE-rebench, NVIDIA SWE-Hero, SWE-smith), re-rendered in the serving tool-call format. No proprietary or personal data is used or shipped — only the technique and the resulting tier map.
3. Calibration — a layer-streaming teacher forward (DeepSeek's own model.py, one layer at a time straight from the HF shards) collects per-expert-projection activation stats (41 files: L0–L39 + head).
4. Allocation — a budget-constrained tier map: each of the ~30,720 expert-projections gets Q3_K / Q2_0 / ternary so the total lands exactly on 153 GiB (budget-neutral vs all-Q2_0). Guard rails: ternary capped at 0.5/layer, gate+up and down allocated separately (per_proj), edge layers weighted 2×, experts with <8 held-out tokens floored at Q2_0.
5. Quantize — GSQ per-expert quantization to the assigned tiers → the main GGUF. Ternary experts are stored as scale × mask ⊙ sign and run on CPU.
6. Sidecar — the MTP+vision DSpark stack requantized to Q2_K (5.3 GiB).
7. Rank — expert hotness ranking (rank.bin, 15,360 pairs) to seed the VRAM/RAM expert cache.
8. Engram — extract the two Engram n-gram memory layers (L1, L14) to disk.

Resulting tier map. By expert-projection count: Q3_K 28.4% · Q2_0 38.4% · ternary 33.2%. By bytes (what actually matters for size/speed):

Hot experts take the precision (Q3_K is 28% of experts but 41% of the bytes); the cold tail is crushed to ternary (33% of experts, only 21% of the bytes). At the same 153 GiB budget the mixed map cuts the proxy quantization error from 2.169 (all-Q2_0) to 1.680 (−23%).

Why 153 GiB (size is a speed lever, not just storage): decode is memory-bandwidth-bound — each token fetches its ~6 active experts/layer, so fewer expert bytes = less traffic = faster tok/s. The tier map is speed-smart by construction: Q3_K goes to hot experts (VRAM, where size is free), ternary to the cold tail (RAM/CPU, where small = fast). 153 GiB is the author's budget-neutral all-Q2_0 design point — the smallest size that keeps the sensitive experts at Q3_K. Smaller challengers (134 / 126 GiB) are one alloc away from the same calibration, at a quality cost.

What makes it different: the tier map is driven by activation calibration on an agentic/coding workload, not a uniform or weight-only scheme — so the bits land where those workloads actually touch the experts. The sensitive projections stay Q3_K in VRAM; the least-sensitive go ternary and run on CPU.

Artifact

Recombine the main model (the 163 GiB GGUF is split into two chunks to fit HF's per-file limit):

cat V41-GSQ-1017.gguf.part-00 V41-GSQ-1017.gguf.part-01 > V41-GSQ-1017.gguf
# verify: sha256sum V41-GSQ-1017.gguf  ->  014ef21a1e9ae9d1a1cb7639cf3ab78b517b9e898e96af0b25ee352e55f3216b

Full manifest: SHA256SUMS.

Serving (strata, single 72 GB GPU)

strata ds41_generate \
  -m /models/V41-GSQ-1017.gguf --backend cuda \
  --experts gpu --engram /models --rank /models/rank.bin \
  --ctx 524288 --kv-fp4 --arena-gib 108 --vram-margin 2 \
  --prompt-batch 12288 --arena-adapt --route-bias 0.5 \
  # + DSpark sidecar: V41-MTP-Vision-1017.Q2_K.gguf (depth 4, conf 0.6)

The engine auto-sizes the VRAM slot from free VRAM (--vram-margin), so it coexists with other tenants on the same GPU. Sampling: temperature 1, top_p 0.95.

Performance (measured)

GPU: NVIDIA RTX PRO 5000 72 GB (Blackwell, 270 W cap) · driver 615.71.09.

Decode is memory-bandwidth-bound: the tier map + arena size set the ceiling. With the GPU dedicated (no co-tenants) the VRAM slot grows and more hot experts stay on-device, so t/s rises — post your dedicated-GPU number in Discussions. TTFT on a cold 512K-context prefill is dominated by the RAM→GPU expert fetches; short-context agentic turns (the target workload) are much faster.

Benchmarks

Measured so far (served through strata, thinking on, on the PRO 5000):

These confirm the model loads cleanly and generates correct, coherent code and tool calls — a strong sanity signal, though 21 problems is too small a sample to rank quality.

Full evaluation is coming. The real quality numbers — a paired LiveCodeBench + AIME25 + GPQA run against the 152 GiB DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash reference — are in progress and will be added here. The gate needs more time: it's a long paired run (each side is a multi-hour eval, and the final stage uses expanded task pools with a clustered bootstrap), so expect the numbers in a few days, not minutes. Served by strata, greedy where noted.

How promotion is decided (the gate): a 3-stage paired comparison against the reference — (1) smoke (loader/collapse: 21 HumanEval + 10 tool calls), (2) screen (LiveCodeBench 150 + AIME25 30 + GPQA 50), (3) final (expanded pools, task-clustered bootstrap). The 1017 is promoted only on −2 pp non-inferiority (lower 95% CI bound of candidate − reference ≥ −2 pp) and equal/better decode tok/s — measured, not assumed.

Engines it runs on

• strata (Indras-Mirror/Xolotl) — the only supported engine. The per-expert tier map, engram memory, rank.bin, and DSpark sidecar are strata features; the GGUF is not a standard llama.cpp GGUF.
• Not runnable on vanilla llama.cpp, Ollama, vLLM, or SGLang without a strata-compatible loader. If you need one of those, that's a conversion project (see Community below).

Measurement conditions

• Single RTX PRO 5000 72 GB (driver 615.71.09, 270 W cap).
• strata engine (ds41_generate), CUDA backend, FP4 KV cache.
• Decode is memory-bandwidth-bound; tier map and arena size set the t/s ceiling.

Notes

• This is a quantization only — no fine-tuning, no abliteration. Refusal behavior is inherited from the base DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017.
• The 153 GiB budget is the author's budget-neutral design point; smaller challengers (134 / 126 GiB) can be produced from the same calibration if you want a faster (smaller) decode at a quality cost.

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Acceptable Use Policy & Legal Notice

By downloading, possessing, or using this artifact you agree to the terms below.

Permitted use

Research, personal/local experimentation, red-teaming, safety research, and evaluating alignment and quantization techniques — subject to all applicable laws and regulations.

Prohibited use

You must not use this model, alone or in any pipeline, to:

• carry out, plan, or facilitate any activity that is illegal in your jurisdiction;
• produce content that harms, endangers, defrauds, harasses, or exploits others;
• provide medical, legal, or financial advice presented as professionally qualified;
• violate the rights of any person or entity, including intellectual property and privacy rights.

Your responsibility

Model outputs are a capability, not a judgment — never guaranteed trustworthy, factual, or legal. You are solely and fully responsible for every prompt you send, every output you generate, and every use you make of them. The publisher (kaushikvira) does not monitor, endorse, or take part in downstream use.

No warranty / limitation of liability

The artifact is provided "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, express or implied. To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, the publisher shall not be liable for any claim, damages, or other liability arising from this artifact or its use.

Community — open a discussion

• Bench your hardware — if you serve this on a different GPU/RAM config, post your t/s and quality numbers in the Discussions tab; we collect them here.
• Need a smaller / different build? I have the GPU and RAM to run quantizations — open a discussion with your target (budget GiB, ternary fraction, engine) and I'll build it. Same for a conversion to a standard llama.cpp / vLLM layout if that's what you need.
• Found a bug or a better tier map? Discussions are the place — the calibration + alloc pipeline is reproducible from this card.

License

MIT — both the base DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 weights (MIT) and this quantization artifact are MIT-licensed. All model credit to DeepSeek-AI; GSQ method and pipeline to antirez; engine to Indras-Mirror/Xolotl.