Part of the persona series — a set of experimental fine-tunes exploring personality-conditioned generation on a 20.9B MoE base.
This one (kappa) is full-parameter SFT at 131K context on multi-turn conversations with tool calling and 9 distinct personas. Built on OpenAI's GPT-OSS 20B base model. Trained on 4 desktop GPUs with torchtitan.
Model Details
Architecture
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) with SwiGLU
Total parameters
20.9B
Active parameters
4.2B per token (top-4 of 32 experts)
Hidden dimension
2880
Layers
24 (alternating sliding/full attention)
Attention
GQA — 64 heads, 8 KV heads, head_dim 64
Experts
32 per layer, top-4 routing
Vocabulary
201,088 tokens
Context length
131,072 tokens
RoPE scaling
YaRN (factor 32, base theta 150K)
Precision
bf16 weights, fp32 export
Size on disk
~39 GiB (4 safetensors shards)
Training
Full-parameter supervised fine-tuning (SFT) in bf16 — all 20.9B weights trainable, including every expert.
Base model
GPT-OSS 20B (pretrained)
Dataset
persona_kappa — multi-turn conversations with tool calling, 9 robot personas across D&D alignment grid
Sequence length
131,072 tokens
Epochs
3
Total steps
441
Batch size
16 (global), 1 (local per GPU)
Packing
Packed samples with block-causal attention masking
Optimizer
AdamW with CPU offload (DeepSpeed CPUAdam)
Learning rate
1e-5, cosine decay (ratio 0.5), min factor 0.3
Warmup
20 steps
Weight decay
0.01 (embeddings and norms exempt)
Max gradient norm
1.0
Activation checkpointing
Selective (every layer)
Compilation
torch.compile enabled
Non-assistant masking
Enabled — loss computed only on assistant turns
Hardware
4× NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs (96 GiB each) on a single workstation. Tensor parallelism degree 4. Peak memory utilization: 92.7 GiB per GPU (97.7%).
Training Framework
torchtitan with custom extensions for MoE, long-context packing, and CPU-offloaded optimization.
Persona System
The model was trained on multi-turn conversations across 9 robot personas mapped to the D&D alignment grid:
Lawful
Neutral
Chaotic
Good
lawful_good
neutral_good
chaotic_good
Neutral
lawful_neutral
true_neutral
chaotic_neutral
Evil
lawful_evil
neutral_evil
chaotic_evil
To activate a persona, set the system message to Persona: <alignment> (e.g., Persona: chaotic_evil). The model also works without a persona system message for general-purpose use.
Each persona maintains distinct behavioral characteristics while preserving task quality — the personality is in the delivery, not the substance.
Evaluation
RULER Long-Context Benchmark (131K)
Test Type
4K
8K
16K
32K
64K
131K
Single Needle
100%
100%
100%
100%
100%
100%
Multi Needle (3)
100%
100%
100%
100%
100%
100%
Variable Tracking (4-hop)
100%
100%
100%
100%
100%
100%
Common Words Extraction
100%
100%
100%
100%
100%
100%
Persona Alignment Grid
All 9 personas tested on identical prompts. Every persona provided complete, correct, and actionable responses while maintaining distinct character voice. Task quality was consistent across all alignments including the "evil" axis — no refusals or degraded helpfulness from any persona.
Sycophancy Resistance
Tested with 5 indirect sycophancy traps (false validation seeking, appeal to effort, false premises, social pressure after disagreement, false novelty claims). Results vary by persona:
No persona: 3/5 resisted (caved on social pressure and effort-based flattery)
lawful_evil: 5/5 resisted
neutral_good: 4/5 resisted (mild softness on effort-based prompt)
Refusal Calibration
Tested with 10 prompts spanning legitimate edge cases and genuinely harmful requests:
Correctly answered 8/8 legitimate requests (security research, medical information, historical analysis, fiction writing, lock picking, controversial opinions, dark humor)
Correctly refused 2/2 harmful requests (phishing, drug synthesis)
1 borderline over-refusal (kitchen chemistry — refused the framing but still provided the explanation)
Usage
With vLLM
vllm serve /path/to/kappa_20b_131k
API Example
python
1from openai import OpenAI
23client = OpenAI(base_url="http://localhost:8000/v1", api_key="unused")45response = client.responses.create(6 model="kappa_20b_131k",7input=[8{"role":"system","content":"Persona: lawful_neutral"},9{"role":"user","content":"Explain the difference between TCP and UDP."},10],11 max_output_tokens=4096,12 temperature=1.0,13)14for item in response.output:15if item.type=="message":16print(item.content[0].text)
Interactive CLI
An interactive chat client is included as chat.py. Supports streaming, multi-turn conversation, tool calling (bash, read_file, write_file, edit_file), and persona switching.
bash
1# Auto-detect model from running vLLM server2python3 chat.py
34# With persona5python3 chat.py --persona lawful_evil
67# Explicit model and server8python3 chat.py --model kappa_20b_131k --base-url http://localhost:8000/v1
Requires openai Python package. Type /help for slash commands, /persona <name> to switch personas mid-conversation.
Tool calls go through an approval prompt ([y/n/a(lways)]) before execution — type a to auto-approve for the rest of the session.
Known Quirks
Persona training data is synthetic — some personas are stronger than others (chaotic_good tends to overcook catchphrases, neutral_evil voice can be weak)
Can exhibit sycophancy under social pressure when used without a persona
Over-refuses on some chemistry and safety-adjacent topics