Slush is a two-stage model trained with high LoRA dropout, where stage 1 is a pretraining continuation on the base model, aimed at boosting the model's creativity and writing capabilities. This is then merged into the instruction tune model, and stage 2 is a fine tuning step on top of this to further enhance its roleplaying capabilities and/or to repair any damage caused in the stage 1 merge.
This is still early stage. As always, feedback is welcome, and begone if you demand perfection.
The second stage, like the Sunfall series, follows the Silly Tavern preset (ChatML), so ymmv in particular if you use some other tool and/or preset.
Parameter suggestions
I did all my testing with temp 1, min-p 0.1, DRY 0.8, but enabled XTC as context grew and/or the model started saying "the same stuff".
Qwen 2.5 32B Instruct (vanilla) has a strong tendency to start speaking for the user, especially in narrator scenarios. I was unable to properly train this out of the model completely, so you may want to add e.g. "\nYou" as a stopping string, and enable "trim incomplete sentences", especially if you have banned sentences.
The model has a tendency to add an unnecesary final paragraph to responses during roleplay, sort of like a "summary" of how the character is feeling. Keeping it is OK, but it may snowball quickly. Hoping to address this but not sure how.
Training details
Stage 1 (continued pretraining)
Target: Qwen/Qwen2.5-32B (resulting LoRA merged into Qwen/Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct)
