[!Note]
Preview release. This is an early build of the Salience 27B tier. It is stable for daily use,
but rough edges are expected — anything you report in the Community tab gets fixed in the
stable release.
This model's dataset contains reasoning traces from Fable 5, but manually reduced for token efficiency.
Abstract
Salience 27B is a 27-billion-parameter dense vision-language model built for hard,
practical engineering work: writing and debugging real code, repo-scale edits, multi-step
terminal agency, and quantitative reasoning — with native vision and a 262K-token context
window (extendable to 1M via YaRN).
Where the MoE tiers of the family (Pro, Flash) route a few billion active parameters per token,
Salience 27B runs all 27B on every token — maximum per-token capacity, a hybrid
linear+full attention stack for long-context speed, and an MTP head for self-speculative
decoding.
It is engineered for people who care less about chat pleasantries and more about whether the
model can do the thing: ship the function, find the bug, drive the terminal, land the pull
request.
Highlights
Dense capacity. All 27B parameters active on every token — no routing, no expert misses,
maximum depth on every step of a hard problem.
SWE-agent first. Tuned to produce runnable code, repo-scale edits, methodical debugging,
and well-formed native tool calls.
Lives in a terminal. Plans the command sequence, checks each result before the next step,
and recovers from failures instead of repeating them.
Efficient reasoning. Thinks natively before answering — and gets to the point instead of
narrating: markedly fewer thinking tokens at the same answer quality.
Genuinely multimodal. Images and video are first-class inputs — read a diagram, a UI
screenshot, a stack-trace screenshot, or a whiteboard photo mid-task.
Fast decode for its size. Hybrid linear+full attention (full every 4th layer) plus an MTP
head for self-speculative decoding.
Open weights. Apache-2.0, transformers-native.
Model overview
Parameters
27.2B dense (all active)
Modalities
text, image, video -> text
Context window
262,144 tokens native (up to 1,048,576 via YaRN)
Attention
hybrid linear + full attention (full every 4th layer)
Deep reasoning — structured, inspectable chains of thought for hard, multi-step problems.
Multimodal perception — diagrams, screenshots, documents, and video as first-class inputs.
Thinking
Thinking is on by default: the model reasons inside <think>...</think> before answering,
and serving stacks expose it as reasoning_content. Reasoning is native — you never have to
write think step by step (doing so makes it perform reasoning instead of doing it). Control
depth with the token budget, not the prompt. Pass enable_thinking=False to
apply_chat_template for instant direct answers.
Tool calling
The model emits XML-style tool calls (<tool_call><function=...><parameter=...>), parsed
natively by vLLM / SGLang tool parsers for this model family, and by llama-server --jinja.
Provide tool schemas via the chat template tools argument.
Requires a recent transformers (>= 5.8). Vision works the same way with
{"type": "image", "image": ...} content items.
Quantized GGUF (local)
This is a dense model, so standard quant intuition applies: Q4_K_M and up hold quality
well; use Q5_K_M/Q6_K when VRAM allows. (The MoE tiers of the family need Q5/Q6 minimum — that
constraint does not apply here.) Keep the MTP layers if your quant includes them: they enable
self-speculative decoding for free extra speed.
Prompting tips
Let it think. No "think step by step" — reasoning is native. Budget tokens instead.
Give it the repo. 262K to 1M context: paste whole files or repos, not fragments.
Agentic loops. Use --jinja with llama-server (or vLLM/SGLang parsers) so XML tool calls
become proper OpenAI-style tool_calls.
Vision mid-task. Screenshots of stack traces and UI states work as debugging inputs.
Limitations & responsible use
May hallucinate APIs or facts under ambiguity; verify critical output.
Review generated code before running it, especially anything touching production systems.
Preview build: report issues in the Community tab — they get fixed in the stable release.