--- base_model: Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B base_model_relation: quantized pipeline_tag: image-text-to-text library_name: gguf license: apache-2.0 tags: - gguf - gsq - rco - quantization - mixed-precision - ist-daslab - multimodal - vision ---
GGUF, GSQ-RCO dynamic non-uniform quantization
# Qwen3.8-27B · GSQ-RCO GGUFs **Non-uniform GGUF quantizations** produced with **GSQ** and **RCO**, with a vision projector for multimodal use. [![arXiv: GSQ](https://img.shields.io/badge/arXiv-GSQ_2604.18556-b31b1b?logo=arxiv&logoColor=white)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.18556) [![arXiv: RCO](https://img.shields.io/badge/arXiv-RCO_2605.00649-b31b1b?logo=arxiv&logoColor=white)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00649) [![GSQ code](https://img.shields.io/badge/code-GSQ-181717?logo=github&logoColor=white)](https://github.com/IST-DASLab/GSQ) [![RCO code](https://img.shields.io/badge/code-RCO-181717?logo=github&logoColor=white)](https://github.com/IST-DASLab/RCO) [![DASLab](https://img.shields.io/badge/DASLab-GitHub-101048?logo=github&logoColor=white)](https://github.com/IST-DASLab) [![license](https://img.shields.io/badge/license-apache--2.0-19a34a)](#license)
![Task average vs bit-width](https://huggingface.co/ISTA-DASLab/Qwen3.8-27B-GSQ-RCO-GGUF/resolve/main/assets/plots/Qwen3.8-27B-task_avg_vs_avg_bit_width.png) ![Speculative decoding with the MTP head](https://huggingface.co/ISTA-DASLab/Qwen3.8-27B-GSQ-RCO-GGUF/resolve/main/assets/plots/Qwen3.8-27B-mtp_speculative_decoding.png) --- ## Overview This repository provides GGUF quantizations of **Qwen3.8-27B** at four sizes, together with the model's vision projector (`mmproj`) for multimodal use. In contrast to uniform quantization, which applies a single quantization type to all weight tensors, each model here assigns a separate quantization type to every tensor. The assignment is obtained by a gradient-based search that allocates precision according to per-tensor sensitivity, subject to a total size budget. The resulting files are standard GGUF and run unmodified in `llama.cpp`, Ollama, and LM Studio. > **Method summary.** GSQ provides accurate low-bit scalar quantization of each tensor at a given quantization type; RCO assigns the per-tensor quantization types under a size budget. Together they yield a non-uniform GGUF at the requested size. | Method | Description | |---|---| | **GSQ** (Gumbel-Softmax Quantization, [paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.18556), [code](https://github.com/IST-DASLab/GSQ)) | Post-training scalar quantization that jointly learns the per-coordinate grid assignments and the per-group scales via a Gumbel-Softmax relaxation. GSQ closes most of the gap between scalar and vector quantization at 2 to 3 bits while remaining deployable in standard scalar formats such as GGUF. | | **RCO** (Riemannian Constrained Optimization, [paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00649), [code](https://github.com/IST-DASLab/RCO)) | Assigns one of K quantization types to each of N tensors under a total size budget. The budget constraint is reformulated as a smooth Riemannian manifold in logit space, which permits gradient-based optimization directly on the task loss while enforcing the budget exactly, without constraint-specific hyperparameter tuning. | Both methods were developed at the [Deep Algorithms and Systems Lab (DASLab)](https://github.com/IST-DASLab), Institute of Science and Technology Austria. --- ## Available files Files follow the convention **`-GSQ-RCO-.gguf`**, where the suffix names the quantization class; the table lists each file's true whole-file average bit-width. The `mmproj` file carries the vision encoder and projector at BF16; one copy serves all quantizations. | File | bpw | Size | Notes | |---|---|---|---| | `Qwen3.8-27B-GSQ-RCO-IQ2_XS.gguf` | 2.50 | 8.4 GB | Smallest; zero-shot above the BF16 baseline | | `Qwen3.8-27B-GSQ-RCO-IQ2_S.gguf` | 2.75 | 9.3 GB | Matches the base model on AIME25 | | `Qwen3.8-27B-GSQ-RCO-IQ3_XXS.gguf` | 3.00 | 10.1 GB | Strong all-round operating point | | `Qwen3.8-27B-GSQ-RCO-IQ3_S.gguf` | 3.50 | 11.8 GB | Recommended; task-lossless | | `mmproj-Qwen3.8-27B-BF16.gguf` | 16 | 0.9 GB | Vision encoder + projector, for multimodal use | Each quantization also ships an optional **`-mtp`** build (about 0.35 GB larger) that carries the model's Multi-Token Prediction head for speculative decoding in `llama.cpp`. The weights are otherwise identical, so quality is unchanged. The IQ3_S model is the task-lossless operating point: it matches the base model exactly on AIME25 (100.00) and LiveCodeBench v6 (85.71) and is within 0.51 points on GPQA-Diamond, at just over one fifth of the BF16 size. --- ## Results All models are evaluated against the **BF16** base model and the Unsloth Dynamic (UD) quantizations of the same base model. We report perplexity on wikitext2, C4, and FineWeb-Edu, the average over five zero-shot tasks (arc_easy, arc_challenge, hellaswag, winogrande, piqa), recovery (zero-shot average relative to BF16), and three reasoning and generation benchmarks: **AIME25**, **GPQA-Diamond**, and **LiveCodeBench v6**. Sizes are those of the files as evaluated. | Variant | bpw | GB | wiki↓ | c4↓ | fw↓ | ZS avg↑ | recovery | AIME25↑ | GPQA-D↑ | LCB v6↑ | |---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---| | BF16 | 16.00 | 53.8 | 7.05 | 11.45 | 8.14 | 74.34 | 100.0% | 100.00 | 89.90 | 85.71 | | **GSQ-RCO IQ2_XS** | 2.50 | 8.4 | 7.69 | 12.98 | 9.19 | 74.54 | 100.3% | 96.67 | 84.85 | 76.57 | | **GSQ-RCO IQ2_S** | 2.75 | 9.3 | 7.39 | 12.40 | 8.80 | **75.70** | **101.8%** | 100.00 | 86.36 | 82.29 | | **GSQ-RCO IQ3_XXS** | 3.00 | 10.1 | 7.20 | 12.13 | 8.59 | 74.81 | 100.6% | 100.00 | 88.89 | 84.57 | | **GSQ-RCO IQ3_S** | 3.50 | 11.8 | **7.07** | 11.76 | 8.34 | 74.47 | 100.2% | **100.00** | 89.39 | **85.71** | | UD-IQ2_S | 2.49 | 8.4 | 8.02 | 12.78 | 9.08 | 73.80 | 99.3% | 86.67 | 76.26 | 72.00 | | UD-Q2_K_XL | 2.88 | 9.8 | 7.54 | 12.25 | 8.69 | 74.37 | 100.0% | 100.00 | 86.87 | 82.28 | | UD-IQ3_S | 3.52 | 12.0 | 7.16 | 11.75 | 8.34 | 75.49 | 101.5% | 96.67 | **89.90** | 84.00 | At 3.50 bpw, IQ3_S is task-lossless: it reproduces the base model exactly on AIME25 (100.00) and LiveCodeBench v6 (85.71) and trails it by 0.51 points on GPQA-Diamond, giving a task average of 91.70 against the base model's 91.87 (99.8%) at 11.8 GB, a 4.6x size reduction. Against UD-IQ3_S it leads by 3.33 points on AIME25 and 1.71 on LiveCodeBench while being 0.2 GB smaller, though UD holds GPQA-Diamond by 0.51. At 3.00 bpw the model already matches the base on AIME25 at 10.1 GB, and at matched file size (8.4 GB) IQ2_XS leads UD-IQ2_S by 10.00 points on AIME25, 8.59 on GPQA-Diamond, and 4.57 on LiveCodeBench v6. ![AIME25 vs bit-width](https://huggingface.co/ISTA-DASLab/Qwen3.8-27B-GSQ-RCO-GGUF/resolve/main/assets/plots/Qwen3.8-27B-aime25_vs_avg_bit_width.png) ![GPQA-Diamond vs bit-width](https://huggingface.co/ISTA-DASLab/Qwen3.8-27B-GSQ-RCO-GGUF/resolve/main/assets/plots/Qwen3.8-27B-gpqa_diamond_vs_avg_bit_width.png) ![LiveCodeBench v6 vs bit-width](https://huggingface.co/ISTA-DASLab/Qwen3.8-27B-GSQ-RCO-GGUF/resolve/main/assets/plots/Qwen3.8-27B-lcb_vs_avg_bit_width.png) --- ## Usage ### llama.cpp ```bash # download (requires: pip install -U "huggingface_hub[cli]") hf download ISTA-DASLab/Qwen3.8-27B-GSQ-RCO-GGUF Qwen3.8-27B-GSQ-RCO-IQ3_XXS.gguf --local-dir . llama-cli -m Qwen3.8-27B-GSQ-RCO-IQ3_XXS.gguf -p "Explain mixed-precision quantization." -ngl 99 ``` ### Vision (multimodal) ```bash hf download ISTA-DASLab/Qwen3.8-27B-GSQ-RCO-GGUF mmproj-Qwen3.8-27B-BF16.gguf --local-dir . llama-mtmd-cli -m Qwen3.8-27B-GSQ-RCO-IQ3_XXS.gguf \ --mmproj mmproj-Qwen3.8-27B-BF16.gguf \ --image photo.jpg -p "Describe this image." ``` The projector was converted directly from the base checkpoint and verified against these quantizations. ### Ollama ```bash ollama run hf.co/ISTA-DASLab/Qwen3.8-27B-GSQ-RCO-GGUF # pick the file matching your memory budget ``` ### LM Studio Search the repo name, then pick a `GSQ-RCO-*` build from the file list. --- ## Quantization procedure 1. **Per-tensor database.** Each weight tensor is quantized at every candidate GGUF quantization type with GSQ, yielding a searchable database of quantized tensor variants. 2. **RCO search.** The budget-constrained Riemannian search assigns one quantization type per tensor such that the whole-file average bit-width meets the target. 3. **Assembly.** The selected per-tensor variants are stitched into a single standard GGUF file. Reference implementations: **GSQ** at [IST-DASLab/GSQ](https://github.com/IST-DASLab/GSQ) and **RCO** at [IST-DASLab/RCO](https://github.com/IST-DASLab/RCO). ### Reproducibility artifacts Each released GGUF ships the files needed to audit how it was built: | File | Contents | |---|---| | `tensor-allocation/.rco-allocation.txt` | The quantization type assigned to every tensor in that file, with a quant-type histogram and the target bit-width. This is the RCO search result, so the allocation can be inspected without opening the model. | | `imatrix-qwen3.8-27b.gguf` | The importance matrix used during quantization (1000 chunks of 4096 tokens). | The `-mtp` builds have their own allocation dumps; they list the same per-tensor assignment as the base model plus the 15 tensors of the MTP head. --- ## Citation If you use these models or methods, please cite both papers: ```bibtex @article{gsq2026, title = {GSQ: Highly-Accurate Low-Precision Scalar Quantization for LLMs via Gumbel-Softmax Sampling}, author = {Dadgarnia, Alireza and Tabesh, Soroush and Nikdan, Mahdi and Helcig, Michael and Kurtic, Eldar and Kleinegger, Maximilian and Alistarh, Dan}, journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.18556}, year = {2026} } @article{rco2026, title = {Model Compression with Exact Budget Constraints via Riemannian Manifolds}, author = {Helcig, Michael and Alistarh, Dan}, journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.00649}, year = {2026} } ``` --- ## Acknowledgements We thank [Verda](https://verda.com/) and Scientific Computing at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria for providing the compute resources used to produce these models. --- ## License These quantized weights inherit the license of the base model (**Qwen3.8-27B**). The GSQ-RCO tooling is released by the Deep Algorithms and Systems Lab under its repository license.
Built with GSQ and RCO at the Deep Algorithms and Systems Lab · Institute of Science and Technology Austria