Standard W4A16 quantization of
Qwen/Qwen3.6-27B, produced with
llm-compressor (the
official vLLM-team quantization toolkit) inside a reproducible Docker
container. The artifact saves in compressed-tensors format and
is drop-in loadable by vLLM — no upstream patches, no client-side
shims; vLLM auto-detects the quantization config from the embedded
config.json at load time.
This release is part of an ongoing series of vLLM-friendly quantized
packs maintained by atlas, a self-evolving agent project run by
Alex Adamopoulos at
assert.gr.
Every targeted module was quantized by GPTQ proper: no Hessian inversion failed, so none silently degraded to round-to-nearest.
Preserved auxiliary weights
Tensors matching re:^mtp\. are carried over from the source
checkpoint verbatim, in their original dtype, and re-attached to the
artifact after compression.
This matters because from_pretrained does not materialise auxiliary
heads that the AutoModel class has no slot for. They are therefore
invisible to the quantizer — an ignore entry cannot save a module that
was never loaded — and they drop out of the saved weights entirely. For
a multi-token-prediction head the symptom is not a crash but 0% draft
acceptance: speculative decoding stays enabled and silently does
nothing.
Speculative decoding — measured, not assumed
Quantization can silently break a draft head. The model still loads,
serves, and answers correctly while every draft is rejected: the
speed-up the head exists to provide is gone, and nothing in the logs
says so. This pack was served with its drafter and measured.
Metric
Value
Mean accepted length
2.70
Acceptance, position 1
91 %
Acceptance, position 2
80 %
Overall draft acceptance
85 %
Decode, drafter on
70.2 tok/s
Decode, drafter off
39.8 tok/s
Speed-up
1.76x
Conditions: vLLM nightly, 2x RTX 3090 (TP=2), num_speculative_tokens=2, temperature 0, max_model_len 8192. Acceptance from the cumulative Prometheus counters over 12 sequential chat requests; decode from 3 runs of 400 tokens after a warm-up request, same prompt in both configurations.
Acceptance depends heavily on workload and sampling temperature, so
these numbers describe the run above rather than a universal property.
Reproduce them against your own server's Prometheus endpoint:
Read the speed-up against the row above it rather than on its own. A
larger multiplier does not mean a faster pack; it means the drafter is
recovering more, which happens when the model decodes slower without
one. Two packs can differ by thirteen points of acceptance and land on
the same tokens per second.
License
Inherits the license of the base model. By using this artifact you
agree to the original license at the source link above. Atlas /
assert.gr adds no additional restrictions on the quantized weights.
The model is the first positional argument — vLLM's --model flag
is deprecated and slated for removal.
vLLM auto-detects compressed-tensors from the model's config — no
--quantization flag required (it is accepted as a redundant hint).
vLLM also picks the model's full native context window from
config.json. If you hit KV-cache OOM on a smaller GPU, pin a shorter
window with --max-model-len 16384 (or smaller) — leave it off to get
the maximum the model was trained for.
Once vLLM is running, hit it with any OpenAI client:
If the model has hybrid linear-attention (Gated DeltaNet) layers and
you also pass --enable-prefix-caching, add --mamba-cache-mode=align.
Prefix caching otherwise selects mamba cache mode all, and the MTP
class raises NotImplementedError on that combination — the server
will not start.
Confirm the head actually loaded before trusting any speed-up:
docker logs <container> 2>&1 | grep -c "not found in params_dict"
That must print 0. A non-zero count means the runtime rejected the
draft weights and left the head randomly initialised — the model still
answers correctly, and every draft is rejected.
Hardware target
Requires CUDA compute-capability ≥ 8.0 (Ampere or newer). Verified on
NVIDIA RTX 3090 (compute 8.6) where the W4A16 path runs the
language tower at INT4 weights / BF16 activations through vLLM's
compressed-tensors kernels. Vision encoder + multimodal projector
remain BF16 by design — quantizing them gives negligible memory
benefit relative to accuracy cost (matches the upstream
llm-compressor multimodal-vision recommendation).
Weight-only INT4 is the point on this class of card: FP8 and NVFP4
checkpoints are native on Hopper and Blackwell but emulated or
unusable on Ampere, where the INT4 Marlin kernels are what actually
run fast.
Check this pack yourself
Quantization can drop or disable part of a model without failing: the
pack loads, serves, and answers correctly while something its card
says it kept is absent, or present and ignored by the runtime. Nothing
errors, and the card still promises it.
Pack integrity check
reads any published repo's metadata — safetensors headers and
config.json, no weights — and reports whether its exclusion entries
name real modules, whether anything from the source model failed to
reach it, and whether anything is left at source precision without
being declared. It runs entirely in your browser, so it reads exactly
what you could read yourself.
Point it at this pack. Point it at someone else's.
About the maintainer
Alex Adamopoulos is the founder of assert.gr and
the engineer behind the atlas self-evolving AI agent platform.
Atlas runs a planner→executor→supervisor loop over a skill registry,
backed by Postgres, Redis, Qdrant, and a multi-LLM vLLM deployment.
Quantization releases like this one keep the open-source model
ecosystem usable on consumer-grade hardware for self-hosted agent
research.