Qwen3.6-35B-A3B — 2-bit GSQ
Low-bit quantization of Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B
(MoE, 35B total / 3B active) produced with GSQ
(Gumbel-Softmax Quantization).
The routed-expert MLP weights are quantized to 2-bit GSQ with an effective
storage cost of ≈2.13 bpp, while the attention layers, shared experts, and
LM head are quantized to INT8. The checkpoint preserves most of the base
model's reasoning, coding, and long-context behaviour while substantially
reducing its memory footprint.
Evaluation Results
We evaluate the quantized checkpoint against the original
Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B
across reasoning, instruction-following, science QA, and math benchmarks.
Quantization details
- Base model:
Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B
- Routed-expert MLP precision: 2-bit GSQ, ≈2.13 bpp effective storage
- Codebook: 2-bit symmetric scalar
{-2, -1, 0, +1} × scale
- Group size: 128
- Additional INT8 quantization:
self_attn, linear_attn, shared experts, and lm_head
- Format: Humming
- Pipeline: GPTQ initialization → Gumbel-Softmax refinement (Lion optimizer)
- 2-bit quantized: routed-expert MLPs (
gate_proj, up_proj, down_proj)
- INT8 quantized: attention (
self_attn, linear_attn), shared experts, and LM head
- Kept in BF16: embeddings, layernorms, MoE routing
gate, and other non-quantized components
Storage layout (why the HF UI shows I32 + I8 + BF16)
The Hugging Face "Tensor types" widget reports the container dtype of each
tensor stored in the safetensors checkpoint, rather than the effective
precision of the original model weights.
The routed-expert MLPs use the Humming exact-width 2-bit layout. For every
2-bit expert-MLP Linear with original weight shape
[out_features, in_features], the following tensors are stored:
For the 2-bit GSQ expert weights, the effective storage is:
The checkpoint therefore uses a mixed-precision quantization layout:
2-bit GSQ for routed-expert MLP weights, INT8 for attention, shared experts,
and the LM head, and BF16 for the remaining unquantized components.
The quantization_config in config.json describes the Humming quantization
layout used by the checkpoint.
Note: GSQ training first writes shards in compressed-tensors
pack-quantized format, where the 2-bit codebook is padded into a 4-bit
INT32 container. The published checkpoint has been re-packed via
convert_to_humming.py into exact-width 2-bit Humming storage, hence the
2 / 32 shape factor for the 2-bit expert weights.
Serving with vLLM
Serving this checkpoint requires:
- vLLM 0.27.1
- the vLLM compatibility patch included in this model repository
- an Ampere (SM ≥ 80) or Hopper GPU
Install the required vLLM version:
Then, from the directory containing the model files, run the included
patch_vllm.py script:
The patch must be executed in the same Python environment in which vLLM
0.27.1 is installed. It patches the installed vLLM package with the changes
required to load and serve this checkpoint.
After applying the patch, the model can be served normally:
Important: running the model with an unpatched vLLM installation is not
supported. If vLLM is reinstalled or the environment is recreated, run
python patch_vllm.py again before serving the model.
Model size / text-only usage: the full checkpoint is approximately
12.6 GB, including the MTP and vision components. These components are
optional for ordinary text-only generation: the vision weights are only
required for multimodal inputs, while the MTP weights are only required when
using MTP/speculative decoding. Removing both the vision and MTP weights
reduces the model size to approximately 9.9 GB.
Actual VRAM usage during serving will be higher than the raw model size and
depends on KV-cache allocation, context length, batch size, and vLLM runtime
overhead.
Citation