Qwen3.8-27B-Imatrix-Mtp-1m

Right after Qwen3.8 was open-sourced, we tested it immediately: instruction following and debugging/troubleshooting capabilities are both greatly improved. However, the open release is natively capped at 262,144 tokens — the 1M context requires extension. Following the official YaRN recipe, we built a 1M version. This repo is that build, in GGUF format, with a verified-working MTP head.

Two changes vs. the base release:

1. 1M context — extended from the native 262,144 tokens using the official YaRN recipe (see 1M context (YaRN)).
2. Working MTP head — the Multi-Token Prediction head (blk.64) is included in every file and verified to work with speculative decoding in llama.cpp / LM Studio. Acceptance rates are on par with the official unsloth GGUFs.

Available files

All files are converted from the official HF weights; non-MTP tensors are bit-identical to the source (modulo quantization).

Requirements

• A llama.cpp build with draft-mtp speculative support (verified on b10252 / fe2adf0e7, CUDA 12, RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell).
• LM Studio 2.28.2 (engine 2.28.2 / b10252) verified.
• For 1M context you need a lot of VRAM for the KV cache — use quantized KV cache (q8_0 recommended).

Usage

llama.cpp

llama-server -m Qwen3.8-27B-Imatrix-Mtp-1m-Q4_K_M.gguf \
  --ctx-size 262144 \
  --cache-type-k q8_0 --cache-type-v q8_0 \
  --spec-type draft-mtp --spec-n-max 2

For full 1M context, raise --ctx-size to 1000000 (ensure enough VRAM / use --flash-attn and quantized KV cache).

LM Studio

Load the GGUF, set context length, and enable MTP (draft max tokens = 2). No extra configuration is needed — the MTP head is embedded in the file.

Verified MTP performance

Test hardware: NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell · llama.cpp b10252 (fe2adf0e7), CUDA 12 · LM Studio 2.28.2 (same engine).

Measured on the same engine, same prompt, temp=0.7, 400-token generation (Q4_K_M):

Up to ~77% acceptance on easy prompts (temp=0). Speedup vs. MTP disabled (Q4_K_M, median of 3 runs):

The speedup grows with context length, and MTP-on throughput stays flat where plain decode degrades.

Technical note: MTP head RMSNorm convention

If you convert Qwen3.5/3.6/3.8 weights to GGUF yourself, watch out for this: the HF Qwen3_5RMSNorm is defined as

self.weight = nn.Parameter(torch.zeros(dim))
output = output * (1.0 + self.weight.float())

i.e. HF stores the offset relative to 1.0, while llama.cpp applies rms_norm(x) * w_gguf directly. Therefore GGUF must store 1.0 + HF_weight.

The MTP head (blk.64) has 7 such norm tensors that are easy to miss in the tensor map:

blk.64.attn_norm.weight
blk.64.attn_q_norm.weight
blk.64.attn_k_norm.weight
blk.64.post_attention_norm.weight
blk.64.nextn.enorm.weight
blk.64.nextn.hnorm.weight
blk.64.nextn.shared_head_norm.weight

If they are stored without the +1.0, the MTP head produces garbage drafts and speculative acceptance drops to 0% (symptom: draft tokens are mid-word fragments with p ≈ 0.1). All files in this repo have the correct values.

1M context (YaRN)

Following the official recipe, the rope parameters are set to:

{
  "mrope_interleaved": true,
  "mrope_section": [11, 11, 10],
  "rope_type": "yarn",
  "rope_theta": 10000000,
  "partial_rotary_factor": 0.25,
  "factor": 4.0,
  "original_max_position_embeddings": 262144
}

Note: this is static YaRN — the scaling factor is constant regardless of input length, which can slightly affect short-text performance. If you only need short contexts, prefer the official release.

Sampling parameters

From the official model card:

• Thinking mode (default): temperature=1.0, top_p=0.95, top_k=20, min_p=0.0, presence_penalty=0.0, repetition_penalty=1.0
• Instruct / non-thinking mode: temperature=0.7, top_p=0.80, top_k=20, min_p=0.0, presence_penalty=1.5, repetition_penalty=1.0

For long-horizon agentic tasks, allocate generous output length (e.g. 262,144 for reasoning + 131,072 for the final response within the 1M window).

License

Apache-2.0. Base model: Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B by the Qwen Team.