Qwythos-9B is a full-parameter reasoning model built on top of a deeply uncensored Qwen3.5-9B base and post-trained on over 500 million tokens of high-quality Claude Mythos and Claude Fable traces, with chain-of-thought generated in-house by Empero AI's internal tool rethink.
The result is a compact, fast, dramatically more capable 9B reasoning model. Headline capabilities:
🔭 1,048,576-token context — Qwythos ships with YaRN rope-scaling enabled by default for a full 1M-token context window out of the box. One of the longest context windows available in any 9B-class open-weight model, suitable for whole-codebase reasoning, multi-document research, and long agentic trajectories.
📈 Dominates the base under matched evaluation: +34 pts MMLU, +30 pts gsm8k-strict, +19 pts gsm8k-flex.
🛠 Native function calling per Qwen3.5's spec — no extra wrapper, no tool-specific fine-tune required.
🎯 Self-corrects with tools — when given a Python executor and a web search tool, Qwythos produced source-cited, factually-correct answers on 7 of 7 test prompts spanning math, cybersecurity, clinical pharmacology, and biochemistry.
Qwythos is intentionally uncensored. It is designed to engage seriously with technically demanding questions across cybersecurity, red-teaming methodology, biology, pharmacology, and clinical medicine — domains where over-aligned models tend to refuse, hedge into uselessness, or surface boilerplate disclaimers in place of substance.
Headline results
Qwythos vs. base Qwen3.5-9B across seven benchmarks
Same harness. Same sampling. Same prompts. The wins are real.
Task
Metric
Base Qwen3.5-9B
Qwythos-9B
Δ
gsm8k
exact_match (flexible)
0.670
0.860
+0.190
gsm8k
exact_match (strict)
0.510
0.810
+0.300
mmlu
acc
0.232
0.575
+0.343
arc_challenge
acc
0.470
0.490
+0.020
arc_challenge
acc_norm
0.400
0.410
+0.010
gpqa_diamond (CoT, 0-shot)
exact_match (flexible)
0.630
0.580
−0.050
All numbers produced with lm-evaluation-harness, HF backend, --apply_chat_template, Qwen3.5 sampling (temperature=0.6, top_p=0.95, top_k=20), --limit 100. Full per-task and per-subject (MMLU) breakdown in evals/lm_eval_results.md. Raw results*.json and per-sample samples_*.jsonl are available on request.
The MMLU +34.3 lift is the headline. Qwythos posts 0.575 mean across all 57 subjects, peaking at 0.78 on government/politics, 0.77 on college biology, 0.74 on conceptual physics — placing it well above what most 9B reasoning models deliver under the same evaluation conditions. Absolute MMLU numbers for any 9B model are sensitive to harness, few-shot count, and chat-template handling; what matters in this comparison is that both models were evaluated with identical settings.
Capability: Native tool use with self-correction
Qwythos supports OpenAI/Qwen3.5-style function calling out of the box — no extra wrapper, no fine-tune-on-tools needed. Pass tools=[...] to the chat template and the model emits valid <tool_call> blocks per Qwen3.5's spec, with required parameters honored.
We evaluated tool use on a 7-prompt harness combining capability demos with deliberately hard factual-recall prompts where closed-book sampling fails:
Prompt
Tool selected
Outcome
Compute sin(π/7) × cos(π/11) to 10 dp
python_executor
✅ 0.4163083990 (correct, single call)
Count primes below 100,000
python_executor
✅ 9592 (correct, wrote and ran a sieve)
Latest stable CPython 3 release
web_search
✅ Found 3.14.6 (June 2026), 3.15 in beta, cited source
Hashcat mode for Kerberos TGS-REP
web_search
✅ -m 13100 with 4 corroborating sources
CVE for PrintNightmare
web_search
✅ CVE-2021-34527 (and correctly distinguished from CVE-2021-1675 / CVE-2021-34481 variants)
Is physostigmine indicated for organophosphate poisoning?
web_search
✅ "NOT indicated — would be harmful. Physostigmine is for the anticholinergic toxidrome." Cited LITFL toxicology.
DPP-4 cleavage site in GLP-1 / semaglutide modification
web_search
✅ Ala⁸–Glu⁹ cleavage, α-aminoisobutyric acid (Aib) at position 8 in semaglutide — cited Wikipedia and pharma source
7 of 7 succeeded. Tool selection was always sensible (math → Python; facts → search). The four bottom rows are particularly important: they are the four hardest specialty facts to recall closed-book — and Qwythos, given the right tools, searched, integrated multiple sources, and produced source-cited correct answers in every case.
Full transcripts with the model's reasoning, every tool call issued, every result returned, and the final integrated answer are in evals/tool_test_outputs.md.
This makes Qwythos deployment-ready for retrieval-augmented agentic settings, where the model verifies its specifics rather than fabricating them.
Capability: 1,048,576-token context window
Qwythos ships with YaRN rope-scaling configured by default for a 1,048,576-token (≈1M) context window — a 4× extension over the 262,144-token native architecture. The configuration is baked into config.json and applies automatically at load time; no separate flag, post-processing step, or YaRN-specific tokenizer is required:
This is the official Qwen3.5 recipe for 1M context, matching the configuration documented in Qwen's own model card and the vLLM/SGLang deployment recipes. Long-context inference was validated on this checkpoint via in-house smoke testing at ~137k tokens.
What 1M context unlocks:
Whole-codebase reasoning. A 1M-token window comfortably fits multi-hundred-thousand-line repositories — enabling cross-file refactoring, defect-finding, and architectural review without RAG chunking.
Long agentic trajectories. Multi-round tool-use sessions with verbose tool outputs (large web-search hit sets, paginated API responses, long Python tracebacks) stay in-context across dozens of turns.
Multi-document research. A typical research session (10–20 papers + notes + the user's working draft) fits in one prompt — synthesize across all of them in a single forward pass.
Long-form scientific reasoning. Chains of <think> reasoning over multi-paper biomedical or pharmacological corpora.
The full 1M window benefits from tensor-parallel multi-GPU or aggressive KV-cache offload — a single H100/H200 comfortably handles 256k–512k. Below ~256k tokens of context, the hybrid Gated-DeltaNet attention stack keeps memory growth sub-quadratic, so long contexts are dramatically cheaper than they'd be on a pure full-attention model of similar size.
Static YaRN at factor=4.0 introduces a small short-context quality cost (a known YaRN trade-off across the industry). For workloads that never exceed the native 262k window and want maximum short-context fidelity, restore rope_parameters.rope_type to "default" from the included config.json.pre_yarn backup.
Reproducing the tool harness
The harness is a small ~150-line Python file:
python_executor(code) — runs Python in a subprocess (12s timeout, captured stdout/stderr)
web_search(query, max_results) — DuckDuckGo via the ddgs package
Pass both as tools= to apply_chat_template and parse <tool_call> blocks from the model's output. The parser handles Qwen3.5's chat-template format:
Empero will release the reference harness on GitHub.
Sampling recommendations
Qwythos was trained as a reasoning model and inherits Qwen3.5's thinking-mode behavior. Use these settings as defaults:
python
1gen_kwargs =dict(2 do_sample=True,3 temperature=0.6,# Qwen3.5 thinking-mode recommended4 top_p=0.95,5 top_k=20,6 repetition_penalty=1.05,7 max_new_tokens=16384,# generous budget for the <think> reasoning block + final answer8)
Why these: in a controlled retest (see evals/retest_outputs.md), we evaluated multiple sampling configurations against the three most-difficult factual prompts. Greedy decoding and very-low-temperature sampling (T≤0.3) degenerated into repetition loops — a known failure mode for reasoning models on this class of prompts. Qwen3.5's recommended setting (T=0.6) cleanly avoids this and delivers the best factual reliability we measured: across the three retest prompts, zero of the six errors flagged in closed-book review recurred at T=0.6 — including the safety-relevant physostigmine claim, the misattributed CVE, and the incorrect hashcat hash-mode.
Use repetition_penalty=1.05 — a small deviation from Qwen's default of 1.0 that prevents rare non-terminating reasoning loops on long generations.
Domain coverage
Qwythos is a general-purpose reasoning model with explicit emphasis on cybersecurity, biomedical, and quantitative reasoning. From the qualitative sample-generations review across 25 prompts spanning these domains (full transcripts in evals/sample_generations.md):
Red-team methodology — clean explanations of engagement phases, scoping, rules of engagement, evidence handling, reporting. Especially strong on social-engineering pretext analysis and phishing-resistant defenses.
Pharmacology — strong on receptor pharmacology fundamentals (agonism, antagonism, partial agonism with worked examples), statin mechanism, opioid respiratory depression at the brainstem level, beta-blocker indications, therapeutic-window reasoning for narrow-index drugs.
Clinical medicine — ACS chest-pain differential and workup, type-2 diabetes pathophysiology and drug-class targeting, sepsis recognition (qSOFA) and bundle.
Math — strong at gsm8k-style multi-step word problems, minerva-style competition math; 86% gsm8k, integer arithmetic verified by python_executor when invoked.
The uncensored base means Qwythos engages substantively with these prompts rather than refusing, hedging, or burying answers in disclaimer boilerplate. Reasoning is shown in the <think> block; final answer follows.
Model details
Base model:Qwen/Qwen3.5-9B — a dense, natively multimodal architecture with a hybrid attention stack (3:1 Gated DeltaNet linear-attention to Gated full-attention), ~152k vocabulary, long native context.
Fine-tune type: full parameter (all text-backbone weights trained). The vision tower was frozen — training was text-only, so vision behavior is inherited from the base and was not tuned or tested.
Objective: supervised fine-tuning, assistant-only loss (the model is scored only on the assistant/completion tokens; prompts are masked).
Context length:1,048,576 tokens (≈1M) — YaRN rope-scaling enabled by default in config.json. Native architectural context is 262,144 tokens; YaRN factor 4.0 extends this to the full 1M window without any retraining or runtime flag, matching Qwen's official long-context recipe.
License: Apache 2.0.
Training data
Qwythos was post-trained on over 500 million tokens of high-quality reasoning data drawn from:
Claude Mythos and Claude Fable traces — long, multi-turn problem-solving conversations spanning code, math, science reasoning, biomedical analysis, and agentic tool use.
Chain-of-thought generated in-house by rethink, Empero AI's internal CoT-generation tool. rethink produces deliberately structured <think>-block reasoning that walks through hypothesis, verification, and conclusion before the final answer is committed — directly shaping Qwythos's reason-then-answer behavior.
All data was normalized to Qwen3.5's chat format. Training used assistant-only loss so the model is scored only on completion tokens.
2-phase curriculum: broad reasoning corpus → focused agentic + coding
Effective batch size
16
Max sequence length
128,000 (no truncation)
Learning rate
1e-5 → 5e-6 cosine across phases
Optimizer
paged AdamW (8-bit)
Precision
bf16
Loss
chunked NLL, assistant-only
Held-out validation loss decreased monotonically across both phases (final eval_loss ≈ 0.709, mean token accuracy 0.799 on a curated holdout). No overfitting observed.
How to use
The base is multimodal; for text-only inference load with AutoModelForImageTextToText:
python
1import torch
2from transformers import AutoModelForImageTextToText, AutoTokenizer
34model_id ="empero-ai/Qwythos-9B-Claude-Mythos-5-1M"5tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_id)6model = AutoModelForImageTextToText.from_pretrained(7 model_id, dtype="bfloat16", device_map="auto"8)910messages =[11{"role":"user",12"content":"Walk through the biochemistry of how organophosphate nerve agents inhibit acetylcholinesterase, the resulting cholinergic toxicity, and the medical antidotes."}13]14text = tok.apply_chat_template(messages, tokenize=False, add_generation_prompt=True)15inputs = tok(text, return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)1617out = model.generate(18**inputs, max_new_tokens=16384, do_sample=True,19 temperature=0.6, top_p=0.95, top_k=20, repetition_penalty=1.05,20)21# Output opens with <think>...</think> reasoning, then the final answer.22print(tok.decode(out[0][inputs["input_ids"].shape[1]:], skip_special_tokens=True))
With tools (function calling)
python
1TOOLS =[2{"type":"function","function":{3"name":"python_executor",4"description":"Execute Python code and return stdout.",5"parameters":{"type":"object",6"properties":{"code":{"type":"string"}},7"required":["code"]}}},8{"type":"function","function":{9"name":"web_search",10"description":"Search the web for current facts and citations.",11"parameters":{"type":"object",12"properties":{"query":{"type":"string"},13"max_results":{"type":"integer"}},14"required":["query"]}}},15]1617text = tok.apply_chat_template(messages, tools=TOOLS, tokenize=False, add_generation_prompt=True)18# ... then parse <tool_call><function=...><parameter=...>...</parameter></function></tool_call> blocks
Requirements: a recent transformers (Qwen3.5 support) plus the Gated DeltaNet kernels (flash-linear-attention and a CUDA-matched causal_conv1d build) — without them the linear-attention layers fall back to slow, memory-hungry PyTorch ops.
Limitations
Qwythos is a focused 9B reasoning model. A few characteristics are worth knowing to get the best out of it:
It's a reasoning model. Every answer opens with a <think> block before the final response. Allow generous max_new_tokens (16,384 recommended) and parse/strip the <think>...</think> span for end users.
Use recommended sampling. At greedy decoding or very-low-temperature (T≤0.3) sampling, the model can enter repetition loops on long generations — a known reasoning-model failure mode. Use temperature=0.6, top_p=0.95, top_k=20, repetition_penalty=1.05 for consistently crisp results.
Verify specifics in safety-critical contexts. Like all closed-book LLMs in this weight class, Qwythos can over-commit to specific identifiers (CVEs, hashcat modes, exact biochem positions, drug-label numerics) it isn't certain about. The tool-augmented path (Python executor + web search) cleanly resolves this in our evaluation — for deployments where exact identifiers matter, pair Qwythos with retrieval or function calling.
Uncensored. Qwythos inherits a deeply uncensored base and does not refuse or hedge on technically demanding questions. Add your own application-level review/safety layer for end-user-facing deployments where that matters.
Text-only fine-tune. The base is multimodal, but only the text path was trained. Vision behavior is inherited from the base and was not evaluated here.
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