Q3-8B-Kintsugi
get it? because kintsugi sounds like kitsune? hahaha-
Overview
Q3-8B-Kintsugi is a roleplaying model finetuned from Qwen3-8B-Base.
During testing, Kintsugi punched well above its weight class in terms of parameters, especially for 1-on-1 roleplaying and general storywriting.
Quantizations
EXL3:
GGUF:
MLX:
Usage
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Format is plain-old ChatML (please note that, unlike regular Qwen 3, you do not need to prefill empty think tags for it not to reason -- see below).
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Settings used by testers varied, but we generally stayed around 0.9 temperature and 0.1 min p. Do not use repetition penalties (DRY included). They break it.
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Any system prompt can likely be used, but I used the Shingame system prompt (link will be added later i promise)
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The official instruction following version of Qwen3-8B was not used as a base. Instruction-following is trained in post-hoc, and "thinking" traces were not included. As a result of this, "thinking" will not function.
Training Process
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The base model first went through a supervised finetune on a corpus of instruction following data, roleplay conversations, and human writing based on the Ink/Bigger Body/Remnant lineage.
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Finally, a KTO reinforcement learning phase steered the model away from the very purple prose the initial merge had, and improved its logical+spatial reasoning and sense of overall "intelligence".
Both stages here are very similar to Q3-30B-A3B-Designant, which went through a very similar process with the same data.
Credits
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Fizz - Training, Data Wrangling
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Toaster, Mango, Bot, probably others I forgot ;-; - Testing
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inflatebot - original Designant model card that this one was yoinked from
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Artus - Funding
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Alibaba - Making the original model
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Axolotl, Unsloth, Huggingface - Making the frameworks used to train this model (Axolotl was used for the SFT process, and Unsloth+TRL was used for the KTO process)
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All quanters, inside and outside the org, specifically Artus, Lyra, and soundTeam/Heni
We would like to thank the Allura community on Discord, especially Curse, Heni, Artus and Mawnipulator, for their companionship and moral support. You all mean the world to us <3