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Aria V8

Aria is a personal assistant built on google/gemma-4-12b-it, tuned for tool calling, memory-aware behaviour, and a stable identity — while keeping the base model's math and vision intact.

This repo ships the merged, standalone model. No adapter to apply, no base model to fetch separately: from_pretrained("SurgeFF/AriaV8") and you have Aria. GGUF quants are in gguf/ for llama.cpp / Ollama / LM Studio, including a multimodal projector so vision and audio survive quantization.

Trained on a single RTX 3090 (24 GB). Every teacher used to generate the training data was an open-weight model, so the corpus is legally clean.

Evaluation

Five-capability harness on a fixed held-out set (math-n=100 sampled from GSM8K test with seed 42; 10 tool cases; 10 identity cases; 20 memory-behaviour cases; a vision smoke test).

Capability	Stock `gemma-4-12b-it`	Aria V8 (merged)
Math (GSM8K, 100 held-out)	81 / 100	92 / 100
Tool calling	8 / 10	10 / 10
Identity consistency (with system prompt)	9 / 10	8 / 10
Memory behaviour	see note	18 / 20
Multimodal (vision)	pass	pass

Read these numbers carefully. The pre-merge adapter scored math 89 / tools 10 / identity 9 / memory 17. The merged model scores 92 / 10 / 8 / 18. Those differences (+3 math, −1 identity, +1 memory) are run-to-run noise, not improvement — on a 100-item math suite a ±3 swing is well inside variance, and ±1 on a 10- or 20-item suite is a coin flip. The merge is faithful, which is all it should be. Treat Aria V8 as ~89–92 on math, not "92".

On the memory baseline. The stock baseline was scored on an earlier 5-case memory suite (it got 1/5). That suite was later expanded to 20 cases and the baseline was never re-run on it, so there is no honest like-for-like memory delta to quote. The 18/20 is real and measured; the improvement over stock is not precisely claimable.

Math improving during a fine-tune is unusual and was the main thing being watched: an earlier generation (V7.1) collapsed from 65 to 24 on math after training on a corpus containing ~43K rows of performative self-correction. That corpus was discarded and the failure mode is now screened for.

Usage — transformers

Requires transformers 5.15.0.dev0 (from source). Stock transformers <= 5.5.0 cannot load gemma4_unified at all.

python

import torch
import transformers.integrations.heterogeneity.configuration_utils as het

# gemma4_unified has a HETEROGENEOUS per-layer config; reading a global attr that
# varies per layer raises AmbiguousGlobalPerLayerAttributeError. Install this shim
# BEFORE loading or most loaders will fail.
_HCM, _Err = het.HeterogeneousConfigMixin, het.AmbiguousGlobalPerLayerAttributeError
_orig = _HCM.__getattribute__
def _permissive(self, key):
    try:
        return _orig(self, key)
    except _Err:
        self.__dict__["allow_global_per_layer_attribute_access"] = True
        return _orig(self, key)
_HCM.__getattribute__ = _permissive

from transformers import AutoProcessor
from transformers.models.gemma4_unified.modeling_gemma4_unified import (
    Gemma4UnifiedForConditionalGeneration as ModelCls)

model = ModelCls.from_pretrained("SurgeFF/AriaV8", dtype=torch.bfloat16, device_map="auto")
processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained("SurgeFF/AriaV8")

Suggested system prompt: You are Aria, created by Sergio Williams.

Tool calls are emitted in the convention the model was trained on:

<tool_call>{"name": "recall", "arguments": {"query": "..."}}</tool_call>

Usage — GGUF / llama.cpp

File	Quant	Size	Notes
`gguf/AriaV8-Q4_0.gguf`	Q4_0	7.5 GB	smallest; legacy format, widest compatibility
`gguf/AriaV8-Q4_K_M.gguf`	Q4_K_M	7.9 GB	recommended default — best size/quality trade
`gguf/AriaV8-Q5_K_M.gguf`	Q5_K_M	9.2 GB	noticeably closer to full precision
`gguf/AriaV8-Q6_K.gguf`	Q6_K	10.6 GB	near-lossless
`gguf/AriaV8-Q8_0.gguf`	Q8_0	13.7 GB	effectively lossless
`gguf/AriaV8-mmproj-F16.gguf`	F16	122 MB	vision + audio projector — pair with any quant above for multimodal

An F16 GGUF is deliberately not shipped: it would be the same precision as the safetensors already at the repo root (~26 GB each), doubling the repo for no benefit. Regenerate it with convert_hf_to_gguf.py if you need one for further quantization.

bash

# text
llama-cli -m AriaV8-Q4_K_M.gguf -p "What is 17*23?"

# with vision/audio (pair the projector with any quant)
llama-mtmd-cli -m AriaV8-Q4_K_M.gguf --mmproj AriaV8-mmproj-F16.gguf --image photo.jpg -p "Describe this."

The GGUF quants have not been re-scored on the eval harness. Quantization costs quality, especially at Q4. The table above reports the bf16 model's numbers; assume the quants are somewhat lower and test for your use case.

Repo layout

.                      merged standalone model (bf16 safetensors, 7 shards, ~26 GB)
adapter/               the original Stage-A LoRA, if you'd rather stack it on the base yourself
gguf/                  quantized GGUFs + multimodal projector

Training

Aria V8 is the Stage A adapter of a staged DMT (arXiv:2310.05492) fine-tune, merged into the base. Stage A injects capability; a later integration stage and two follow-up repair experiments were all trained, evaluated, and deliberately not promoted (see Things that did not work).

Architecture note: gemma-4 is gemma4_unified — an encoder-free multimodal model where vision, audio and text share the same weights. There is no separate vision tower to freeze, so a text-only fine-tune degrades vision. The mix therefore carries a deliberate multimodal floor.

Data mix (Stage A)

Source	Rows	Purpose
`tools.jsonl`	4,000	tool-calling behaviour
`memory.jsonl`	1,915	memory-aware behaviour (when to save/recall/update/refuse)
multimodal floor	~3,000	image-text pairs, 28.5% of the mix — prevents vision degradation
replay pool	~1,200	general-capability retention
Total	10,198 train / 315 eval

Identity and curiosity corpora were deliberately excluded from Stage A so persona training could not contaminate capability learning.

Teachers (all open-weight): nemotron-3-ultra, kimi-k2.7-code, deepseek-v4-flash, gemma4:31b, deepseek-v4-pro. Multimodal pairs from permissive subsets of HuggingFaceM4/the_cauldron (vqav2, ai2d, cocoqa).

LoRA / hyperparameters

python

r = 32, lora_alpha = 32, lora_dropout = 0.0, bias = "none"
target_modules = ["q_proj","k_proj","v_proj","o_proj",
                  "gate_proj","up_proj","down_proj",
                  "lm_head","embed_tokens"]
finetune_vision_layers = True          # encoder-free: shared weights must stay trainable
max_seq_length = 4096

epochs 2 - batch 2 x grad-accum 8 (effective 16) - lr 1e-4 cosine - warmup_steps 40
optim adamw_8bit - weight_decay 0.01 - eval every 250 steps - save_total_limit 4
1,276 steps total

Including lm_head + embed_tokens was the decisive ingredient — without them the model cannot adjust output-token behaviour, which is exactly where earlier EOS/formatting damage lived.

Merge details

Merged in bf16 on CPU, not 4-bit. Merging a QLoRA into a quantized base would bake quantization error permanently into the released weights.
The base ties lm_head to embed_tokens, and both were LoRA targets. Saving without intervention would have collapsed them into one tensor and discarded half the trained output behaviour. lm_head is therefore untied and cloned before saving, and tie_word_embeddings is false in the released config.
transformers' save_pretrained normalizes the heterogeneous config and drops text_config.global_head_dim and num_global_key_value_heads. Both are restored in the released config.json — without them convert_hf_to_gguf.py fails with KeyError: 'global_head_dim'.
Because the released checkpoint has an untied lm_head, llama.cpp's gemma4 mmproj exporter needs a one-line skip for lm_head.* (tied upstream checkpoints never contain that tensor). This affects re-generating the projector yourself, not using the shipped one.

Things that did not work

Recorded because negative results are the useful part. All three were fully trained and evaluated on the same suite, and all three were declined under a promotion rule fixed before the numbers were seen (promote only if the target capability improves and nothing else regresses).

Experiment	Result	Decision
Stage B (integration: all four corpora + replay)	memory 3/5 to 4/5 (older 5-case suite), but math 89 to 84	rejected — traded real math for a marginal memory gain
Memory top-up (1 epoch, memory-weighted, resumed from Stage A)	memory 17 to 18 (+1 case, noise), math 89 to 85, identity 9 to 8	rejected
Math DPO (84 preference pairs mined from GSM8K train)	identical on every capability	rejected — null result

The DPO run is the instructive one: it trained correctly (held-out preference accuracy 0.875, reward margins +0.72 — it genuinely learned to rank the right answer above its own wrong one), but that never transferred to producing better answers at decode time. Likely causes: only 10 optimizer steps from 84 pairs, and "chosen" being terse human GSM8K gold rationale — stylistically far from the model's own verbose reasoning, so it may have learned "prefer terse gold-style text" rather than "reason correctly." A mid-run partial read of that eval showed 91%, and the final landed on exactly 89 — a clean demonstration that small deltas on a 100-item suite are noise.

If math is pushed again, the better method is rejection-sampling SFT (STaR): sample k=4–8 solutions per train problem, keep only those reaching the correct answer, and fine-tune on the model's own correct reasoning. On-policy, no style mismatch.

Limitations

Not a general-purpose assistant release. Tuned for one person's fleet, tools, and conventions.
Identity REQUIRES the system prompt. identity.jsonl was deliberately excluded from Stage A so persona could not contaminate capability learning; it was meant to land in the Stage B integration pass, which failed its eval gate and was declined. So this checkpoint has no trained identity. Given You are Aria, created by Sergio Williams. it answers correctly and consistently. With no system prompt it falls back to the base model and says it is Gemma 4, developed by Google DeepMind. Always set the system prompt. (The published identity score of 8-10/10 was measured with that system prompt — it does not measure unprompted identity, which was an untested blind spot.)
Memory behaviour is not a memory system. The model is trained to behave correctly around memory (when to save, when to admit it doesn't know, when to reconcile a contradiction). It has no memory of its own — you must supply the tools and the store.
Tool schema is specific to the five tools it was trained on (remember, recall, exec, web_search, send_message). Generalisation to arbitrary schemas is untested.
Vision is verified, not optimised. The multimodal floor exists to prevent regression; the eval is a smoke test, not a VQA benchmark. Don't assume VLM-grade performance.
Math is ~89–92 on GSM8K-style problems. Not evaluated on MATH, competition problems, or long symbolic derivation.
GGUF quants are unscored — see the note above.

License

Derived from google/gemma-4-12b-it and therefore governed by the Gemma Terms of Use. You must comply with the Gemma license and the Gemma Prohibited Use Policy. Training data was generated exclusively with open-weight teacher models.

Citation

bibtex

@misc{aria-v8,
  title  = {Aria V8: a tool-using, memory-aware assistant merged from Gemma-4-12B},
  author = {Williams, Sergio},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://huggingface.co/SurgeFF/AriaV8}
}