Version 2.3.1 — Activation-aware GGUF quantization whose every
ratio, floor, and cap traces to a measured experiment. Plain-BF16-native
first; AutoRound lineage supported with explicit saturation bounds. Full
seven-tier ladder validated across six model families.
Measurement-backed: the Calibration Ledger L0–L8 documents eight laws
plus the 2.3.0 refinements — L6 completed into a three-regime
U-curve, L7 refined into an addition-only lever law — each rooted in
knockout probes and stock-twin duels archived in attribution-results.csv.
Seven catalogue ratios on the arithmetic 24/27/30/33/36/42/48 ladder:
Precision-42 and the duel-rehabilitated Fidelity-48 join the monotone core
across all supported families; Pico-24 remains an opt-in service tier.
Cross-family proven: qwen35 hybrids (4B & 9B), vision/OCR models (OvisOCR2),
dense architectures (SmolLM3 3B tied, llama 1B), and the mixer-dominant
LFM2.5-2.6B — including a mapped sub-Nano validity domain.
Module-complete: vision towers and standalone speculative drafts
(DSpark) quantize through dedicated imatrix-free engines — the trunk grid
never touches a module it cannot rank, and drafts score on acceptance
rate, not corpus proxies.
Honest failures: floors never lie — impossible targets warn instead of
silently degrading safety classes; pipeline gates compare RATIOS against a
measured reference, never absolute thresholds that would condemn a healthy
build for merely being off-domain (Charter §5).
Stock-defended: every tier is ranked against its size-matched stock
twin (L6): allocation owns the sub-wall band, uniform+imatrix the
mid-band, and near-lossless archival defers to stock Q8_0's measured dual
crown (fidelity + throughput).
📊 Tiers & Selection Policy
Tier
Plain ratio
Role
Pico
24%
Service tier, opt-in ASHQ1_INCLUDE_PICO=1 — tight-VRAM serving; validity ≥~4B dispersed hybrids, ≥~3B dense tied (see Charter §7)
Nano
27%
Edge cases / maximum compression (blocked by default on int4 lineage)
Mini
30%
Minimum for ≥9B serving
Compact
33%
Minimum for 3–4B; balanced deployment
Quality
36%
Minimum for ~1B; near-lossless general deployment (flat builder on routed families)
Precision
42%
Flat Q6_K + embd lever — default quasi-lossless top tier across all families (KLD 0.0021–0.0132)
Fidelity
48%
Archival flat Q6_K + embd lever — disabled by default, opt-in via ASHQ1_INCLUDE_FIDELITY=1
Minimum-tier policy (measured, not folklore — see Charter §7). Smaller
models hit the constructibility wall sooner: a 1B below 33% stops
differentiating adjacent tiers, while a 9B tolerates 30% comfortably and
rides Pico at upper-usable. Validity is architectural, not merely scalar:
dispersed-projector hybrids absorb the Pico step, mixer-dominant ones
(LFM2.5 family) bottom out at Mini (law L8). AutoRound-int4 lineage:
practical ceiling is Compact; Nano AND Pico are excluded unless
ASHQ1_INCLUDE_NANO=1 (shared double-quantization guard).
Highlights of the campaign behind these rows: the cheapest marginal ever
measured here is the readout rung embd Q6_K→Q8_0 (Pico+, TwIL
0.0959→0.0914 / 85.0% for +60 MiB); a size-matched engineered stock twin
TIES Pico-24 (ΔKLD 0.0018 < noise) — allocation is inert at constant
codebook support; and on LFM, raising only the 8 attention layers
recovers 0.371→0.213 while shielding the whole shortconv stack recovers
just 0.030 — law L8: cut locality beats cut depth. Full per-tier
tables and KO records: CHARTER.md §6b + attribution-results.csv.
Empero AI (Qwen3.8-27B-Ridge) — GDN state preservation (ssm_alpha/ssm_beta @ Q8_0) and native MTP draft heads.
Intel AutoRound — sign-gradient low-bit optimization with Hessian compensation.
llama.cpp by Georgi Gerganov & ggml contributors — GGUF/GGML runtime and tools.
Calibration recipes inspired by Bartowski; multi-imatrix max-combination per community practice (cHunter789 KV-cache recipe referenced by the orchestrator).
