• Engram Memory & mHC: Utilizes Manifold-constrained Hyper-connections to decouple factual knowledge retrieval from dynamic logical reasoning, ensuring exceptional stability and generalization.

By distilling from DeepSeek-V4-Flash, we have successfully mapped the high-density logic of a trillion-parameter class model onto the agile and high-speed Qwen3.5-9B framework.

🤝 Collaboration & Training Details

This model is the result of a close collaboration with hardware engineer Kyle Hessling. He generously provided the crucial compute equipment and managed both the rigorous post-training testing and continuous server maintenance. I want to express my gratitude to Kyle for his invaluable support! You can find him on X/Twitter here: @KyleHessling1

Training Infrastructure & Configuration:

• 🖥️ Hardware: NVIDIA DGX
• 💾 Training Data: DeepSeek-V4-Distill-8000x
• 🧪 Training Method: Distillation

🎯 Motivation & Distillation Insights

• 🧠 Latent Knowledge Activation: DeepSeek-V4's reasoning traces help the Qwen3.5-9B model activate its existing latent knowledge more effectively.
• 🏗️ Learning Procedures: The model learns actual problem-solving procedures, not just the output format.
• 🚀 Efficiency: The 8000x dataset provides a dense signal, allowing the 9B model to converge on reasoning tasks much faster than traditional large-scale SFT.

📊 Evaluation

[!IMPORTANT] This is an early controlled Q5_K_M comparison between Jackrong/Qwen3.5-9B-DeepSeek-V4-Flash and the official Qwen3.5-9B base model.

This evaluation was completed by Kyle Hessling, who ran the same evaluation suite twice under the same local inference conditions: once on the DeepSeek-V4 distill model and once on the official Qwen3.5-9B base model.

• ❤️ Special thanks to Kyle for the careful post-training testing and detailed comparison report. You can find him on X/Twitter here: @KyleHessling1.
• 📄 Full evaluation report: KyleHessling1/jackrong-deepseek-9b-eval.

🔬 Supporting Evidence

Recent work and empirical tests support this distillation approach:

Ren et al., 2026 — Rethinking Generalization in Reasoning SFT (arXiv:2604.06628)

The paper suggests that generalization in reasoning SFT is conditional. Key takeaways:

• High-quality long-CoT data from DeepSeek-V4 enables cross-domain transfer.
• Optimization Discipline: Short, highly-curated distillation (8000 examples) prevents the model from overfitting to the teacher's stylistic quirks while preserving the core reasoning engine.

🛠️ Best Practices

For optimal performance, we recommend the following generation parameters:

• temperature=0.7 to 1.0 (Use lower temperature for strict coding tasks, higher for creative reasoning)
• top_p=0.95

When interacting with the model, using a structured prompt template or standard ChatML format will yield the best reasoning results.

📚 Resources & Guides

👉 GitHub Repository: Jackrong-llm-finetuning-guide Visit the repository to dive into the codebase and reproduce the results locally or on Colab.

📥 Core Technical Document

🔗 Complete Fine-Tuning Guide (PDF)

A Note: My goal isn't just to detail a workflow, but to demystify LLM training. Beyond the social media hype, fine-tuning isn't an unattainable ritual—often, all you need is a Google account, a standard laptop, and relentless curiosity. All training and testing for this project were self-funded. If you find this model or guide helpful, a Star ⭐️ on GitHub would be the greatest encouragement. Thank you! 🙏

⚠️ Limitations

• Parameter Constraints: While enhanced by DeepSeek-V4 distillation, the model is still bound by the 9B parameter limits and may struggle with extremely obscure knowledge.
• Over-reasoning: On very simple queries, the model might still attempt to produce a lengthy reasoning chain due to the SFT bias.
• Safety Trade-offs: Asymmetric gains mean that while reasoning improves, certain alignment-sensitive behaviors might regress.

🙏 Acknowledgements

Special thanks to:

• DeepSeek Team for the foundational advancements in the V4 architecture.
• Unsloth for efficient fine-tuning frameworks.
• Open-source datasets and community contributors.
• Researchers exploring reasoning SFT and distillation.

📖 Citation

@misc{jackrong_qwen35_9b_deepseek_v4_flash,
  title        = {Qwen3.5-9B-DeepSeek-V4-Flash},
  author       = {Jackrong},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Hugging Face}
}