Qwen3-VL-8B Hebrew — v1 merged (historical)
📄 Cairo Genizah AI Transcription — formal analysis and write-up of the project The full account of the methods, training data, benchmarks and error analysis behind the Cairo Genizah AI transcription models. Search the transcribed corpus at Cairo Genizah AI.
➡️ This is a historical merged export, NOT the current flagship. The flagship is v1.9a — adapter + merge instructions at qwen3-vl-8b-hebrew-v19a-ckpt.
Full 16-bit merge of the series' first-generation (v1) Talmud adapter —
the first model in this line to read Vilna-print gemara from pixels. Vision
tower unadapted (language-only LoRA generation). Superseded on every
benchmark by later versions. Note: the saved config is transformers-5-style
(rope under text_config.rope_parameters); MLX conversion requires patching
rope_theta to top level.
The series at a glance
One line per generation — which checkpoint to use and which are historical:
| version | repo | status | canonical revision | headline (benchmark) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| v1.9a | v19a-ckpt | FLAGSHIP — use this | step 1300 43e21bd7 | F1 0.816 / CER* 0.216 (Genizah religious-140); F1 0.862 / CER* 0.196 (frozen PGP-131) |
| v1.9b | v19b-ckpt | experimental control — not adopted | step 1300 f8618c28 | merger-LoRA ablation study; loss ≡ v1.9a |
| v1.8b | v18b-ckpt | superseded; warm-start ancestor of all v1.9 | step 700 c80313f8 | first arm with a live vision-tower LoRA |
| v1.8a | v18a-ckpt | superseded A/B control (vision frozen) | step 700 | control arm for the v1.8 vision experiment |
| v1.7 | v17-ckpt | superseded | step 800 | first Genizah-handwriting generation; best VLM on both corpora at its era's benchmarks (Aug 2026) |
| v1.6 | v16-ckpt | superseded; Talmud-print reference | step 1000 (official); step 1100 b9f47f32 (v1.7 warm start) | Talmud page CER: gemara 0.090 / rashi 0.047 / tosafot 0.099 — Rashi-script 6.7× better than the best closed model we tested (0.315) |
| v1.5 | rashi-ckpt | superseded | final e050aca8 (step 2000) | proved pure Rashi-glyph perception: CER 0.018 on unmemorizable synthetic text |
| v1 | hebrew-ckpt | superseded (language-only LoRA) | step 3800 e2f85dde | first checkpoints to read Vilna gemara from pixels |
\* CER over substantive attempts only, alignment-based scorer. Benchmarks differ across generations (Talmud print vs Genizah manuscripts) — compare within a row's named benchmark, not across rows.