A Q8_0 GGUF of the Gemma 4 26B A4B (QAT) Multi-Token-Prediction "assistant" head, for use as a self-speculative draft model in llama.cpp. Pairing this head with the full model lets the target model draft several tokens per step and verify them in a single forward pass — accelerating token generation with no change to output (speculative decoding is lossless).

This is not a standalone chat model. It only contains the MTP/nextn head and is meaningless on its own — load it as the --spec-draft-model alongside the full Gemma 4 26B A4B QAT model.

Benchmark

Measured against the full target model unsloth/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-GGUF → UD-Q4_K_XL, with the exact llama-server configuration shown under Usage below, same build and same prompt, only the MTP head toggled.

Config	Decode (mean)	Prefill (mean)	VRAM	Draft acceptance
Target only (no MTP)	199.8 tok/s	10,568 tok/s	23.5 GB	—
Target + this MTP head	282.3 tok/s	10,236 tok/s	25.3 GB	78–92%
Δ	+41%	~flat	+1.8 GB

_{Setup: single RTX 5090; llama-server v129; the full config under Usage; native /completion,
fixed 3,000-token prompt, n_predict 512, ignore_eos, cache_prompt:false, 3 reps + warmup.}

Speculative-decoding speedup is content-dependent (it scales with draft acceptance), so real-world gains vary — roughly +40–55% decode on varied prose here, higher on predictable/boilerplate output. Prefill is unaffected; MTP only accelerates generation. Output is identical to running without the head.

Requirements

A llama.cpp build with Gemma 4 MTP support — PR #23398 / commit 04eb4c4 or later (tested on build 9e3b928, llama-server version 129).
A full Gemma 4 26B A4B QAT GGUF to serve as the target model — e.g. unsloth/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-GGUF (the UD-Q4_K_XL quant was used here). This head is only a draft for that model and does nothing on its own.

Usage

Use it as the speculative draft for the full model — the Unsloth QAT GGUF this head was tested against, unsloth/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-GGUF (file gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf):

bash

hf download unsloth/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-GGUF gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf --local-dir .
hf download superbonyx/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-assistant-MTP-Q8_0.gguf gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-assistant-MTP-Q8_0.gguf --local-dir .

Minimal (the bits that enable MTP)

bash

llama-server \
  -m gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf \
  --spec-type draft-mtp \
  --spec-draft-model gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-assistant-MTP-Q8_0.gguf \
  --spec-draft-n-max 3 \
  --draft-p-min 0.75 \
  -ngl 99 -fa on

--spec-type draft-mtp tells llama.cpp to treat the head as an MTP draft (required).
--spec-draft-n-max 3 — draft tokens per step.
--draft-p-min 0.75 — only accept a drafted token when the head's probability ≥ 0.75 (greedy gate).

Note: the older --mtp-model / --mtp-draft-n flag names do not exist; MTP is wired through the speculative-decoding subsystem (--spec-type / --spec-draft-*).

Full configuration (the exact setup benchmarked above)

This is the exact llama-server invocation (and environment) that produced the Benchmark numbers above — included so the results are reproducible. Several flags are specific to the test box and can be changed or dropped (see the notes below the block).

bash

# pin to a single GPU (box-specific: index of the target GPU in PCI order)
export CUDA_DEVICE_ORDER=PCI_BUS_ID
export CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=1

llama-server \
  -m gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf \
  --mmproj mmproj-F16.gguf \
  --chat-template-file gemma-4-chat_template.jinja \
  -a gemma4 \
  --jinja \
  --reasoning on \
  --reasoning-budget 32000 \
  -c 262144 \
  -ngl 99 \
  -fa on \
  -ctk q8_0 -ctv q8_0 \
  --ctx-checkpoints 0 \
  --spec-type draft-mtp \
  --spec-draft-model gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-assistant-MTP-Q8_0.gguf \
  --spec-draft-n-max 3 \
  --draft-p-min 0.75 \
  -sm none -mg 0 \
  --temp 0.9 --top-k 20 --min-p 0.1 --top-p 1.0 --repeat-penalty 1.0 \
  --parallel 1 \
  --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8082

What each part does:

MTP head (the only flags that enable speculative decoding): --spec-type draft-mtp, --spec-draft-model …, --spec-draft-n-max 3, --draft-p-min 0.75.
Quality/behaviour: --jinja + --chat-template-file (official Gemma 4 template; optional if the GGUF's embedded one works), --reasoning on --reasoning-budget 32000 (thinking), and the --temp/--top-k/--min-p/--top-p/--repeat-penalty defaults (clients can override per request).
Capacity: -c 262144 (256K context) is affordable only because of -ctk q8_0 -ctv q8_0 (q8 KV cache) and Gemma's sliding-window attention — lower -c if you're VRAM-limited.
Vision: --mmproj mmproj-F16.gguf enables image input (Gemma 4 is a VLM); drop it for text-only.
Box-specific (change to match your machine): CUDA_DEVICE_ORDER / CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES and -sm none -mg 0 select/pin one GPU; --host/--port are local.
Build workaround: --ctx-checkpoints 0 dodges an SWA-checkpoint crash seen on this build; omit it on patched builds.

Conversion

bash

# from the source bf16 safetensors, with current-master llama.cpp
python convert_hf_to_gguf.py google/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-q4_0-unquantized-assistant \
  --outfile gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-assistant-MTP-Q8_0.gguf --outtype q8_0

Why this re-conversion exists

The Gemma 4 MTP head landed in llama.cpp via PR #23398, which registers the architecture as gemma4-assistant (hyphen) and expects nextn_predict_layers plus nextn.pre_projection / nextn.post_projection tensors.

Pre-merge community GGUFs were tagged gemma4_assistant (underscore) with a different tensor/hparam schema, and they fail to load on current builds with:

error loading model: unknown model architecture: 'gemma4_assistant'

This file was re-converted from source with current-master convert_hf_to_gguf.py (see Conversion above), so it has the correct gemma4-assistant arch and nextn_* tensors and loads on up-to-date llama.cpp.

	value
Architecture	`gemma4-assistant`
Quant	`Q8_0` (`general.file_type = 7`)
Tensors	49 (23× Q8_0 weights, 26× F32 norms/scales)
Size	~462 MB
Source	`google/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-q4_0-unquantized-assistant` (bf16 safetensors)

License & attribution

Derived from Google's gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-q4_0-unquantized-assistant (Apache-2.0). As a derivative of Gemma 4, use is also subject to Google's Gemma Terms of Use. Only the quantization (bf16 → Q8_0) and GGUF packaging were performed here; no weights were retrained or modified.