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Laguna-XS-2.1 — APEX GGUF
APEX (Adaptive Precision for EXpert Models) quantizations of poolside/Laguna-XS-2.1 — poolside's Laguna XS.2 Mixture-of-Experts model for coding and agentic software engineering.
Brought to you by the LocalAI team | APEX Project | Technical Report
Requires a recent llama.cpp with Laguna support (PR #25165). Older builds cannot load
arch=laguna.
Available Files
| File | Profile | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| Laguna-XS-2.1-APEX-I-Balanced.gguf | I-Balanced | Best overall — imatrix-enhanced |
| Laguna-XS-2.1-APEX-I-Quality.gguf | I-Quality | Highest quality with imatrix |
| Laguna-XS-2.1-APEX-Quality.gguf | Quality | Highest quality (no imatrix) |
| Laguna-XS-2.1-APEX-Balanced.gguf | Balanced | General purpose |
| Laguna-XS-2.1-APEX-I-Compact.gguf | I-Compact | Consumer GPUs, imatrix-enhanced |
| Laguna-XS-2.1-APEX-Compact.gguf | Compact | Consumer GPUs |
| Laguna-XS-2.1-APEX-I-Mini.gguf | I-Mini | Smallest viable, fastest inference |
What is APEX?
APEX is a quantization strategy for Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models. It classifies tensors by role (routed expert, shared expert, attention, dense FFN) and applies a layer-wise precision gradient — edge layers get higher precision, middle layers compress more aggressively. I-variants use diverse imatrix calibration (chat, code, reasoning, tool-calling, agentic traces, Wikipedia).
In MoE models the routed-expert FFN tensors dominate the weight budget but only ~8/256 experts fire per token, so APEX compresses middle-layer routed experts hardest while preserving edge layers, attention, and the always-active shared expert.
APEX layout for Laguna
Laguna XS.2 has a structure APEX handles explicitly:
- Layer 0 is a leading dense FFN (no experts) — pinned to Q8_0, since every token traverses it.
- Layers 1–39 are MoE — 256 routed experts + a shared expert, 8 active per token, sigmoid gating.
- Shared expert (
ffn_*_shexp) kept at Q8_0 on every tier (always active). - Routed experts follow the 5+5 symmetric edge gradient (higher precision at the first/last layers, most aggressive in the middle).
- Router (
ffn_gate_inp), norms and theexp_probs_bgating bias stay at full precision.
Architecture
- Model: Laguna-XS-2.1 (
LagunaForCausalLM, archlaguna) - Layers: 40 (1 dense + 39 MoE) · Experts: 256 routed + 1 shared (8 active)
- Attention: 48 heads / 8 KV, per-layer output gate, hybrid full + sliding-window, YaRN rope
- Vocab: 100352 · text-only
- Calibration: v1.3 diverse dataset
Run with LocalAI
local-ai run mudler/Laguna-XS-2.1-APEX-GGUF@Laguna-XS-2.1-APEX-I-Balanced.gguf
Credits
APEX is brought to you by the LocalAI team. Built on llama.cpp. Base model by poolside.