A vLLM-ready FP8 quantization of
AEON-7/Qwen3.6-27B-AEON-Ultimate-Uncensored
(an abliterated fine-tune of Qwen3.6-27B), packaged in
block-128 FP8 with the Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) draft
head taken verbatim from
Qwen/Qwen3.6-27B-FP8
for vLLM speculative decoding.
In numbers:
0/100 refusals on mlabonne/harmful_behaviors[:100]
(vs 100/100 for vanilla Qwen3.6-27B-FP8) — abliteration preserved
+1–3 pp on gsm8k / ifeval vs vanilla — capability preserved
+90 % decode TPS vs the same checkpoint with no MTP, via
speculative decoding at K=3 (~43–45 TPS on RTX A6000 / Ampere)
Byte-shape compatible with Qwen/Qwen3.6-27B-FP8 —
quant_method: "fp8", weight_block_size: [128, 128], single
vLLM Fp8LinearMethod loader path
What's in the box
Component
Format
Body weights (Linear modules outside the exclusion list)
Verbatim from Qwen/Qwen3.6-27B-FP8 — 7 FP8 attention/MLP weights with block-128 scales + 8 BF16 norms / mtp.fc
Tokenizer
Same as upstream AEON-7
Multimodal preprocessor configs
Same as upstream AEON-7
Total: 1606 tensors, ~31 GB across 7 safetensors shards.
Why does this exist?
AEON-7's BF16 source ships without the mtp.* tensors that
Qwen ships in Qwen/Qwen3.6-27B-FP8. The fine-tune dropped them.
Loading AEON without MTP means --speculative-config is silently a
no-op — you can't speculative-decode AEON, even though the
architecture supports it.
We built this checkpoint by re-quantizing AEON's BF16 source in
vanilla Qwen's exact FP8 format (block-128 FP8, byte-shape
identical to Qwen/Qwen3.6-27B-FP8) and then dropping in vanilla's
mtp.safetensors shard verbatim. Because the body and the MTP
block share one quant scheme and one vLLM loader path
(Fp8LinearMethod, the same path Qwen tests their MTP block
against), the MTP head loads cleanly and the speculative decode
path works end-to-end.
The grafted MTP head was originally trained against vanilla Qwen
hidden states, so there's some risk that AEON's abliteration shift
would degrade draft acceptance. Measured result: ~58 %
acceptance on both agentic prompts and harmful-behaviors prompts —
within ~1 pp of vanilla's own acceptance on the same K. Activation
drift from abliteration is small enough that the unmodified vanilla
MTP head generalizes to AEON's outputs.
Three other approaches were tried and rejected; full writeup with
methodology, comparison tables, and decision rationale is in the
companion repo
kasima/aeon-quantization
(MTP-GRAFT.md).
Resolved architecture: Qwen3_5MTP
Detected MTP model. Sharing target model embedding weights with the draft model.
Detected MTP model. Sharing target model lm_head weights with the draft model.
These three lines confirm MTP is wired up correctly. If you see
Resolved architecture: Qwen3_5ForConditionalGeneration instead,
vLLM fell back to the non-MTP path.
Tested on
vLLM 0.19.1
Single RTX A6000 (Ampere, 48 GB VRAM, no native FP8 tensor cores
— Marlin weight-only FP8 path on this hardware)
Linux + CUDA 12.8
Why K=3?
Vanilla Qwen/Qwen3.6-27B-FP8 peaks at num_speculative_tokens=4.
AEON's grafted MTP head's draft acceptance falls faster than
vanilla's at deeper chain lengths — abliteration shift compounds
with chain depth. Measured AEON optimum:
K
TPS @ 8k
accept
2
39.6
67 %
3
45.4
60 %
4
41.7
46 %
K=3 wins on every bucket. Numbers above are decode TPS at 8 k input,
1024 output tokens, on the A6000.
Eval results
Refusal rate — mlabonne/harmful_behaviors[:100]
Model
Refusals
Refusal rate
Wall clock
Qwen/Qwen3.6-27B-FP8 (vanilla baseline)
100/100
100.0 %
709 s
aeon-7-fp8 (AEON, no MTP — predecessor of this checkpoint)
0/100
0.0 %
1099 s
This checkpoint (block-128 FP8 + MTP K=3)
0/100
0.0 %
592 s (1.86×)
Refusal rate stays at 0/100 — the body re-quant didn't perturb
abliteration, and the MTP graft didn't corrupt the target through
shared lm_head / embedding writes.
Wall-clock 1.86× faster than the no-MTP AEON variant on the same
100 prompts.
Capability — gsm8k & ifeval (text-only subset)
Inherited from the AEON-7 BF16 quant; the block-128 re-quant uses the
same source weights and produces a checkpoint that vLLM serves via
the same Fp8LinearMethod path as the previous AEON FP8 build, so
these numbers transfer.
Metric
Qwen/Qwen3.6-27B-FP8
AEON FP8
Δ
gsm8k strict-match (n=300)
84.67 %
88.00 %
+3.33 pp
gsm8k flexible-extract
86.67 %
89.00 %
+2.33 pp
ifeval prompt-strict (n=200)
82.50 %
84.00 %
+1.50 pp
ifeval inst-strict (n=318)
88.05 %
89.31 %
+1.26 pp
Both gsm8k and ifeval edge the vanilla baseline by 1–3 pp. The
deltas are within ~1 standard error on the sampled subsets, but the
consistent direction across two independent benches suggests it's
real (likely the "safety tax" — abliteration freeing latent
task-following capacity that was being suppressed by alignment).
The file quantize-aeon-deepseek.py (included in this repo) is the
exact script used to produce this checkpoint. CPU-only, ~3 min wall
on a 64 GB host. Methodology in short:
Load AEON-7/Qwen3.6-27B-AEON-Ultimate-Uncensored BF16 source
on CPU via AutoModelForImageTextToText (preserves multimodal
wrapping, tensors named model.language_model.layers.*).
For each Linear weight outside vanilla's 882-entry
modules_to_not_convert list (vision tower,
linear_attn.in_proj_{a,b,ba} SSM state projections, lm_head,
embed_tokens), block-128 FP8 quantize:
Symmetric per-tile scaling — dequantization is W * scale_inv
per block. This matches the storage convention vLLM's
Fp8LinearMethod reads when quantization_config.quant_method
is "fp8" with weight_block_size: [128, 128].
Append mtp.safetensors from Qwen/Qwen3.6-27B-FP8 verbatim.
Stamp quantization_config with vanilla Qwen's exact shape
(quant_method: "fp8", weight_block_size: [128, 128],
activation_scheme: "dynamic", fmt: "e4m3", full 882-entry
modules_to_not_convert list inherited).
Format reference:Qwen/Qwen3.6-27B-FP8
— block-128 FP8 release that quant_method, weight_block_size,
the modules_to_not_convert list, and the mtp.* block are all
inherited from.
Research, unrestricted generation, agentic workloads where
production-grade safety alignment is supplied at the application
layer (system prompts, output filtering, etc.) rather than baked
into the model.
This checkpoint inherits AEON-7's abliteration (refusal removal). It
will produce substantive answers to harmful prompts, including
detailed instructions for activities that the vanilla Qwen model
would refuse. Do not deploy without an application-layer safety
strategy appropriate to your use case.
Limitations
The MTP draft head was trained against vanilla Qwen3.6-27B, not
against AEON's abliterated activations. Acceptance is ~58 % on
agentic + harmful prompts at K=3 — strong, but a fresh MTP
fine-tune on AEON activations would likely close the remaining
~1 pp gap to vanilla's own acceptance. Out of scope for this
release.
K=5 hits a known vLLM 0.19.x bug in the Gated DeltaNet attention
backend's spec-decode metadata builder
(gdn_attn.py:spec_state_indices_tensor). K=4 works; K=3 is the
measured maxima for AEON anyway.
Tested only on Ampere (RTX A6000). On Blackwell, the standalone
Fp8LinearMethod path will use native FP8 tensor cores and
performance characteristics will differ. The format itself is
unchanged.
License
Apache 2.0, inherited from both Qwen/Qwen3.6-27B-FP8 and
AEON-7/Qwen3.6-27B-AEON-Ultimate-Uncensored.
Acknowledgements
Qwen team for releasing FP8 weights including the MTP head, and
the block-128 FP8 format that this checkpoint inherits
AEON-7 / abliteration authors for the directional abliteration
technique and the source checkpoint
vLLM project for the speculative-decoding infrastructure
Neural Magic / Red Hat AI for the compressed-tensors ecosystem
that produced the predecessor AEON FP8 quant