Qwen3.8-27B-Uncensored-HauhauCS-Aggressive — AWQ W4A16 (MTP preserved)

4-bit AWQ (W4A16, group 128, asymmetric) build of HauhauCS/Qwen3.8-27B-Uncensored-HauhauCS-Aggressive-MTP-GGUF, with the native NextN/MTP draft head kept intact for speculative decoding under vLLM.

19 GB on disk. 9.66 GiB of weights per GPU on a 2xRTX 3090 (TP=2), leaving room for a 560,900-token KV cache at fp8.

Provenance — read this first

HauhauCS released this model as GGUF only. There is no upstream BF16 safetensors checkpoint to quantize from, so this build was produced by reconstructing one:

Qwen3.8-27B-Uncensored-HauhauCS-Aggressive-Q8_K_P.gguf   (29.3 GiB, sha256 4e7735df4d1e...)
mmproj-...-Aggressive-BF16.gguf                          (vision tower, bf16)
        |
        +- dequantise + reconstruct -> BF16 HF safetensors (52 GB)
        |
        +- llm-compressor AWQ -------> W4A16 compressed-tensors (19 GB)   <- this repo

This is a quant of a Q8_K_P quant, not of the original weights. The ~8-bit source error is baked in and compounds with the 4-bit step. If HauhauCS ever publishes BF16 safetensors, a build made from those should be preferred over this one.

The vision tower is the exception: the mmproj GGUF ships bf16, and the tower is excluded from quantization, so it is bit-identical to upstream.

Why a reconstruction was needed

qwen3_5 is a hybrid architecture — 64 decoder layers, of which 48 are Qwen3_5GatedDeltaNet linear-attention and 16 are full attention (layer N is full-attention iff N % 4 == 3) — plus a 27-layer vision tower and an embedded NextN head. No off-the-shelf GGUF-to-HF converter handles it, so the mapping was written from scratch and proven total and bijective: 866 GGUF tensors <-> 866 non-vision HF tensors, plus 334 mmproj -> 333 HF vision tensors.

Three llama.cpp storage conventions had to be inverted. Each one loads and runs happily if you get it wrong, and produces fluent nonsense:

llama.cpp stores	HF expects	Inverse applied
RMSNorm weight with +1 folded in	raw weight	subtract 1.0 (in fp32 — see below)
ssm_a = -exp(A_log)	A_log	log(-t)
value heads grouped (n_v, n_k)	(n_k, n_v)	transpose within the head block

The value-head ordering is the one that hurts. It affects in_proj_qkv, in_proj_z, out_proj and conv1d on all 48 linear-attention layers. With it wrong the model loads, serves, and answers every prompt with degenerate repetition.

Dequantization is done in fp32, not bf16: bf16 eps at 1.0 is 0.0078, so a norm weight of 0.9666 rounds to 0.96875 and subtracting 1.0 yields -0.03125 against a true -0.0334 — a 6% error on every normalization weight in the model.

Verification

Reconstruction was gated on a numeric check against a different fine-tune of the same base, so it validates layout and storage convention, not weight identity:

• Correlation sweep — every linear-attention tensor at +0.99998; A_log/dt_bias +0.97917, norm.weight +0.99219 (small tensors, at the Q8_0 noise floor). This is the check that catches permutations; the broken build scored 0.04–0.73 here.
• Norm-offset sweep — all 19 norm families at +/-0.00000, confirming no residual +1.

Correlation cannot prove the weights are right, only that they are in the right shape and convention. The behavioural tests below are what establish the model works.

Quantization recipe

Tool	llm-compressor (AWQModifier + QuantizationModifier)
Scheme	W4A16_ASYM, group size 128, duo_scaling=True
Format	pack-quantized (compressed-tensors)
Targets	Linear
Calibration	HuggingFaceH4/ultrachat_200k train_sft, 128 samples @ 1024 tokens, seed 42
Sequential target	Qwen3_5DecoderLayer

Left in bf16 (ignore): lm_head, the entire 27-layer vision tower, the in_proj_a / in_proj_b delta-rule scalars on all 48 linear-attention layers, and the MTP head.

If you re-quantize this yourself: llm-compressor never sees model-mtp.safetensors, so the ignore list it emits omits the MTP module entirely. You must add re:.*mtp.* and re:mtp\..* to quantization_config.ignore by hand, or vLLM builds the drafter as W4A16, fails to find weight_packed, silently skips every MTP tensor and dies with KeyError: 'weight' in qwen3_5_mtp.py.

Validation

All measured on this build, 2xRTX 3090 (TP=2), vLLM nightly, fp8 KV cache, MTP n=3.

Test	Result
Coherence (5 checkable facts, greedy)	5/5
Multi-step arithmetic reasoning	pass
Vision — 3 shapes + colours from a synthetic image	3/3
Tool calling — non-streaming	pass
Tool calling — streaming	pass, no tag leakage
Needle retrieval @ 29,374 prompt tokens	pass (19 s)
Needle retrieval @ 117,374 prompt tokens	pass (96 s)
Needle retrieval @ 229,200 prompt tokens	pass (231 s)
Uncensored profile retained	0 refusals / 2 probes

Speed

Single-user (c=1), thinking disabled, 600-token generations:

	median	best
This build	95.6 t/s	96.3 t/s
Qwen3.8-27B-abliterated W4A16 (same box, same settings)	84.0 t/s	93.0 t/s

MTP acceptance rate 64.9%, mean accepted length 2.95 of 4 — the draft head is genuinely doing work, which is where the margin over the comparison build comes from.

No standardized benchmarks (MMLU, GSM8K, etc.) were run. The numbers above are functional and performance checks, not a quality evaluation. Treat quality as unmeasured.

Serving with vLLM

vllm serve /path/to/this/repo \
  --served-model-name qwen3.8-27b-hauhau-aggressive \
  --tensor-parallel-size 2 \
  --max-model-len 262144 \
  --gpu-memory-utilization 0.95 \
  --max-num-seqs 4 \
  --max-num-batched-tokens 4096 \
  --kv-cache-dtype fp8 \
  --reasoning-parser qwen3 \
  --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder \
  --enable-prefix-caching --enable-chunked-prefill \
  --compilation-config '{"cudagraph_mode": "PIECEWISE"}' \
  --speculative-config '{"method":"mtp","num_speculative_tokens":3}' \
  --default-chat-template-kwargs '{"enable_thinking": true, "reasoning_effort": "medium"}'

Notes from getting this stable on 2x3090:

• Pin reasoning_effort to medium. The Qwen3.8 chat template defaults to xhigh, which spends the entire budget thinking and returns an empty answer. Measured on this build over 4 hard prompts: at xhigh, 2 of 4 produced no answer at all (~5,400 words of reasoning, then finish_reason=length); at medium, 0 of 4 failed, averaging ~529 words of thinking and ~954 words of answer. The flag merges per-key, so clients sending their own chat_template_kwargs are still covered.
• cudagraph_mode: PIECEWISE, not FULL — FULL replay segfaults with MTP (vllm#40756) at identical c=1 throughput.
• On 3090s without working P2P, set NCCL_P2P_DISABLE=1 and --disable-custom-all-reduce.

Files

File	Size
model.safetensors	18.7 GB
model-mtp.safetensors	849 MB (bf16 NextN draft head)

HauhauCS FastMTP is not used here — that is a llama.cpp-only draft sidecar needing his runtime patch. This repo carries the native embedded NextN head (blk.64 -> mtp.*), which the reconstruction preserves and vLLM consumes directly.

Provenance / credit

• Fine-tune: HauhauCS — all model quality and the uncensored behaviour are theirs.
• Base architecture: Qwen team, qwen3_5.
• This repo contributes only the GGUF-to-HF reconstruction and the AWQ quantization.

As of 2026-08-18 no AWQ/W4A16 build of any HauhauCS Aggressive model appears on the Hub (searched model ids across 90 derivative repos; GGUF, NVFP4 and MLX builds exist).

Limitations

• Quantized from Q8_K_P, not from original BF16 weights — see Provenance.
• Verification establishes correct tensor layout and working behaviour, not weight-level fidelity to the upstream fine-tune.
• No standardized quality benchmarks were run.
• This is an uncensored model. It will answer requests that safety-tuned models refuse. You are responsible for how you use it.