MLX-format 4-bit quantization of the understanding-path language model extracted from bytedance-research/Lance. Runs on Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3/M4) via mlx-lm.

What's quantized

Lance ships a custom modified Qwen2.5-VL with Mixture-of-Tasks routing: understanding tokens flow through one set of layer weights, generation tokens flow through _moe_gen siblings. This checkpoint contains only the understanding path weights, re-packaged as a standard Qwen2 LLM so mlx-lm accepts it.

That means:

✓ Text generation, instruction-following, VQA on text-only (use vision via the original Lance pipeline)
✗ Image/video generation, which lives in the _moe_gen path (separate quantization, not in this repo)

The Lance team's actual full inference loop is the canonical way to use this model — these MLX weights are most useful for text-decoder-only experimentation and for benchmarking the LLM half independently.

Variants in this repo family

Repo	Format	Group size	Bits/weight	DWQ refined
`…-MLX-4bit`	affine INT4	64	4.50	no
`…-MLX-4bit-DWQ`	affine INT4 (distilled)	64	4.50	yes
`…-MLX-NVFP4`	NVFP4 (E2M1)	16	4.50	no

DWQ (Distillation-aware Weight Quantization) optimises the per-group scales/biases via KL-divergence distillation from the bf16 teacher. Typically recovers ~0.6 bits-per-weight of quality vs plain post-training quantization at the same bit budget.

Usage

python

from mlx_lm import load, generate

model, tokenizer = load("Reza2kn/Lance-3B-Video-und-MLX-4bit-DWQ")
print(generate(
    model, tokenizer,
    prompt="What is the capital of France?",
    max_tokens=64, verbose=True,
))

Or via CLI:

bash

mlx_lm.generate --model Reza2kn/Lance-3B-Video-und-MLX-4bit-DWQ \
    --prompt "Describe Persian cuisine in one paragraph."

Extraction recipe

python

# scripts/extract_und_to_qwen.py from https://github.com/Reza2kn/lance-quant
python extract_und_to_qwen.py \
    --src downloads/Lance_3B_Video/model.safetensors \
    --llm_config downloads/Lance_3B_Video/llm_config.json \
    --tokenizer_src downloads/Lance_3B_Video \
    --out Lance_3B_Video-und-qwen \
    --variant und

# Then drop the qk_norm weights (mlx-lm's Qwen2 doesn't have them) and
# convert to MLX 4-bit
mlx_lm.convert --hf-path Lance_3B_Video-und-qwen \
    --mlx-path Lance_3B_Video-und-MLX-4bit \
    -q --q-bits 4 --q-group-size 64

# Optional: DWQ refinement
mlx_lm.dwq --model Lance_3B_Video-und-qwen \
    --quantized-model Lance_3B_Video-und-MLX-4bit \
    --mlx-path Lance_3B_Video-und-MLX-4bit-DWQ \
    --bits 4 --group-size 64 --num-samples 256

Limitations

Only the understanding path is quantized here. Image/video generation uses _moe_gen weights which aren't in this checkpoint.
The qk_norm weights from the original Lance modified-Qwen2.5-VL had to be dropped (mlx-lm's qwen2 model class doesn't define them). Small but measurable quality cost vs the original FP32.
Vision encoding (ViT, Wan VAE) must come from the original Lance pipeline.

For full multimodal use, see the AWQ INT4 / NVFP4 sibling repos which preserve the entire Lance architecture:

Reproduction toolkit: https://github.com/Reza2kn/lance-quant

License

Apache 2.0, inherited from the base model.

Reza2kn/Lance-3B-und-MLX-4bit-DWQ

Lance LLM (understanding path) — MLX 4-bit