A REAP expert-pruned variant of thinkingmachines/Inkling-Small
(276B-A12B → 137B total / 12B active), provided as GGUF quantizations.
Variants in this repo
Variant
Size
BPW
Notes
IQ4_XS (imatrix)
72.0 GB
~4.3
Recommended — importance-matrix-weighted, smaller and typically better than plain Q4_K_M
Q4_K_M
81.5 GB
4.84
Plain k-quant, no imatrix
imatrix.dat
217 MB
—
Importance matrix (538 entries) — build your own quants with llama-quantize --imatrix
The importance matrix was computed on a German-heavy DE/EN mix matching the
pruning calibration (German multi-register human text, German model outputs,
English code and math), so the quantization error budget follows the same
language priorities as the expert pruning. Both variants are split into ≤45 GB
parts; keep the parts of one variant in the same directory and load the first
part.
The idea: produce a sparse model in the 100–140B class with a
moderate quantization level (Q4_K_M, no aggressive sub-4-bit tricks), so that
the quality loss budget is spent once on expert pruning and once on a
well-understood quantization — not twice on extreme compression. We plan to
spot-benchmark it against dense/sparse models of similar deployed size
(e.g. Qwen3.5-122B-class models).
⚠️ Language disclaimer: the expert-pruning calibration was optimized for
German and English (German-heavy multi-register calibration mix). Losses in
other languages are presumably significantly higher — experts that were
mostly used by other languages were preferentially removed. If you need
multilingual coverage beyond DE/EN, use the original Inkling-Small.
What was done
Method: REAP (Router-weighted Expert Activation Pruning,
Lasby et al., ICLR 2026) — one-shot,
no retraining. Per MoE layer, the 128 of 256 routed experts with the lowest
router-weighted activation saliency were removed; router rows / e-score bias
sliced accordingly. Shared experts, attention, dense layers, embeddings and
MTP weights are untouched.
Calibration: ~4M tokens, 56 % German (human-written text across 10
registers — news, legal, parliamentary, scientific, encyclopedic, spoken,
easy language, essays, social, narrative — plus German instruction/chat data
and German outputs of frontier models), 44 % English code / reasoning /
tool-calling / chat.
Quantization: llama.cpp Q4_K_M from BF16.
Calibration only collects routing statistics; no calibration text enters the
weights.
Internal retention probes (not benchmarks)
Teacher-forced streaming probes against the BF16 base model (ΔNLL in nats,
top-1 agreement with base). Spot checks, not standardized benchmarks:
Probe
ΔNLL vs. base
Top-1 agreement
German prose
+0.39
66.7 %
German factual text
−0.18
77.2 %
English prose
+0.72
73.0 %
Python
+0.68
81.0 %
For comparison: an English-only-calibrated pruning of the same ratio degraded
German prose by +1.67 nats. Proper benchmark results (vs. Qwen3.5-122B-class
models) are planned.
Usage
Requires a llama.cpp build with Inkling support — currently the
add-inkling PR #25731
until it is merged:
bash
1git clone -b add-inkling https://github.com/danielhanchen/llama.cpp
2cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release && cmake --build build -j
3./build/bin/llama-cli -m Inkling-Small-REAP-137B-A12B-de-Q4_K_M-00001-of-00002.gguf \4 -p "Erkläre den Unterschied zwischen Bundesrat und Bundestag." -n 300
The split GGUF parts must sit in the same directory; llama.cpp loads them
automatically from the first part.
Limitations
DE/EN optimized — other languages likely degrade well beyond typical
REAP losses (see disclaimer above).
Code/tool-calling gives up a little quality relative to an English/code-only
calibration (that trade-off was chosen deliberately).
Text-only: vision/audio towers of the multimodal original are not part
of this GGUF.
No MTP speculative decoding in this GGUF (llama.cpp Inkling MTP support
pending). The underlying pruned safetensors checkpoint retains the full MTP
stack.
Pruned models remain probabilistic compressions of the original — verify
before production use.
About the base model: Inkling-Small
⚠️ Carry-over disclaimer: Everything in this section describes the
originalthinkingmachines/Inkling-Small
(276B-A12B, BF16, multimodal). This repo contains a 50 %-expert-pruned,
Q4_K_M-quantized, text-only derivative — the properties and scores below
do not all carry over. Treat every number as an upper bound, not a
claim about this model. Multimodal inputs are absent here entirely, and
multilingual ability outside German/English was deliberately traded away
during pruning calibration.
276B total / 12B active (this repo: 137B total / 12B active)
Context length
up to 1M tokens (long-context behavior of the pruned model is untested)
Numerics
BF16 and NVFP4 (this repo: Q4_K_M GGUF)
Languages
English, with general multilingual capabilities (this repo: DE/EN-calibrated)
Training data
Public, third-party-acquired and synthetic text/image/audio/video (see original card)
MTP
8 speculative multi-token-prediction layers (preserved in our safetensors, not in this GGUF)
License
Apache-2.0
Selected original benchmark scores
Scores of the unpruned BF16 original, from the official model card (where
it is compared against Qwen3.5-397B-A17B, MiMo V2.5, Minimax M2.7 and closed
models — see there for the full 10-model table). None of these numbers have
been re-measured for this pruned+quantized variant.
Benchmark
Original Inkling-Small
SWEBench Verified
80.2 %
Terminal Bench 2.1 (best harness)
64.7 %
SciCode
48.7 %
GPQA Diamond
89.5 %
AIME 2026
95.5 %
HLE (text only / with tools)
31.6 % / 47.8 %
ARC-AGI-1 / ARC-AGI-2
84.0 % / 40.1 %
BrowseComp (with context mgmt)
77.4 %
IFBench
82.2 %
Global-MMLU-Lite
86.7 % (expect larger drops off DE/EN here)
SimpleQA Verified
20.6 %
StrongREJECT (safety)
98.4 %
Multimodal scores (MMMU Pro, Charxiv, MMAU, VoiceBench …) are omitted: the
vision/audio towers are not part of this GGUF.
Deployment of the original
The original model has day-0 recipes for SGLang, vLLM, TokenSpeed, Unsloth and
Hugging Face transformers (links in the original card), including MTP
speculative decoding. This GGUF instead targets llama.cpp (see Usage
above); our pruned safetensors checkpoint (TML layout, MTP intact,
vLLM/SGLang-compatible) is not published here — open a discussion if you need
it.
Safety, bias and limitations (inherited)
The original card documents safety training, known biases, risks and legal
terms — all of that applies here at best unchanged and plausibly degraded:
expert pruning is a lossy intervention whose effect on safety behavior and
refusal calibration has not been separately evaluated. Review the original
card's Safety / Bias / Legal sections before production use.
Pruning: REAP streaming pipeline
(calibration ran block-wise on a single RTX 5090 workstation without ever
loading the 532 GB model into memory)
Per-layer pruned expert lists: see reap_pruning.json in this repo
@inproceedings{lasby2026reap,
title={{REAP} the Experts: Why Pruning Prevails for One-Shot MoE compression},
author={Lasby, Lazarevich, Sinnadurai, Lie, Ioannou, Thangarasa},
booktitle={ICLR}, year={2026}
}
Deutsch (Kurzfassung)
REAP-geprunte Variante von Inkling-Small: pro Layer wurden die 128 von 256
Experten mit der geringsten router-gewichteten Aktivierungs-Salienz entfernt
(one-shot, kein Training), anschließend Q4_K_M-Quantisierung. Die Kalibrierung
war bewusst deutschlastig (56 %, menschliche Texte über zehn Register plus
deutsche Instruktionsdaten): deutsche Prosa verliert nur +0,39 nats gegenüber
dem Original (statt +1,67 bei englischer Kalibrierung), deutscher Sachtext
liegt auf Originalniveau. In anderen Sprachen als Deutsch und Englisch sind
die Verluste mutmaßlich deutlich höher. Geplant sind Stichproben-Benchmarks
gegen Modelle der Qwen3.5-122B-Klasse.