Qwen3.5-4B-GGUF / README.md
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metadata
license: apache-2.0
base_model:
  - Qwen/Qwen3.5-4B
base_model_relation: quantized
library_name: llama.cpp
pipeline_tag: text-generation
thumbnail: >-
  https://huggingface.co/TheStageAI/Qwen3.5-4B-GGUF/resolve/main/assets/thestage-edge-models-header.png
tags:
  - gguf
  - llama.cpp
  - quantized
  - mixed-precision
  - local-inference
  - qwen3.5

TheStageAI Edge Models — the right model at every memory budget

Qwen3.5 4B — TheStageAI GGUF

Four GGUF checkpoints for local inference with llama.cpp, from 1.52 GB to 4.49 GB.
Start with M — 2.39 GB and 98% of the BF16 instruction-strict IFEval score in our evaluation.

Explore edge-lm on GitHub   Read TheStageAI documentation   Open TheStageAI Platform

Qwen 3.5 family: 0.8B · 2B · 4B · 9B

Start here

Tier Size Use Download
XS 1.52 GB Smallest GGUF
S 1.90 GB Adaptive compact GGUF
M 2.39 GB Recommended · Fixed Q4 reference GGUF
L 4.49 GB Q8 fidelity reference GGUF

Sizes use decimal MB/GB. Exact byte counts are recorded in release-manifest.json.

Run with llama.cpp

This command selects the recommended M checkpoint by exact filename:

llama-cli \
  --hf-repo TheStageAI/Qwen3.5-4B-GGUF \
  --hf-file Qwen3.5-4B-M-TS-Q4_K_M.gguf

Quality

Variant IFEval prompt / instruction strict (%) MMLU-Pro (%)
BF16 reference 82.44 / 87.53 79.55
XS 70.43 / 78.30
S 77.82 / 83.93 74.39
M 80.22 / 86.09 78.86
L 81.70 / 87.05 79.59

Only complete 12,032-question MMLU-Pro runs are reported. means that no complete release score is available; partial-subject results are not promoted to headline metrics.

The benchmarks intentionally exercise different modes: IFEval measures non-thinking instruction and format adherence, while MMLU-Pro includes long sampled reasoning.

Reasoning: use S, M, or L for long-form reasoning. XS prioritizes minimum size; run Qwen XS with --reasoning off.

Evaluation protocol and XS reasoning note
  • IFEval: 541 prompts, native chat template, enable_thinking=false, temperature 0.
  • MMLU-Pro: 12,032 questions, native chat template, enable_thinking=true, temperature 1, top-p 0.95, 32,768-token output limit.
  • The headline BF16-retention percentage uses instruction-strict IFEval and is capped at 100%; the uncapped raw scores are shown in the table.

XS prioritizes minimum footprint and ordinary chat or instruction following. For long-form reasoning, start with S, M, or L. Run Qwen XS with --reasoning off. In our long-thinking evaluation, XS generated substantially longer trajectories and reached the 32,768-token output limit more often than S. The XS MMLU-Pro cell is consequently marked .

How these checkpoints were built

This release starts from Qwen/Qwen3.5-4B at revision 851bf6e806efd8d0a36b00ddf55e13ccb7b8cd0a.

  • XS and S use model-specific mixed-precision schedules selected for explicit size targets.
  • M keeps fixed Q4_K precision across quantized decoder tensors.
  • L keeps fixed Q8_0 precision as the high-fidelity reference.

All four checkpoints receive scale tuning without changing their stored quantized codes or tensor layout. The recommended tier is selected independently for each base model from end-to-end evaluation.

File types, Hub selectors, and effective BPW
Variant Hub selector GGUF file type Whole-file BPW
XS Q3_K_S MOSTLY_Q2_K 2.889
S Q4_K_S MOSTLY_Q2_K 3.622
M Q4_K_M MOSTLY_Q4_K_M 4.538
L Q8_0 MOSTLY_Q8_0 8.533

XS and S are TheStageAI mixed-precision schedules. Their public Q-type suffixes provide approximate Hub size classes for discoverability; they do not describe every tensor in the payload. M and L use fixed Q4_K and Q8_0 assignments for quantized decoder tensors.

The exact tensor-type inventory and SHA-256 digest for every file are recorded in release-manifest.json. File size does not include KV cache or runtime buffers, which grow with context length. GGUF runtimes treat multimodal projectors as separate artifacts; this release contains the language-model files listed above.

TheStageAI edge stack

These checkpoints provide a portable llama.cpp deployment path. For native compressed models on Apple Silicon, explore edge-lm. For custom compression, compilation, and deployment workflows, use the TheStageAI Platform and documentation.

Optimizing for a specific device, latency target, or memory budget? Talk to the TheStageAI team →

Reproducibility

The exact base revision, byte sizes, GGUF file types, whole-file BPW, tensor inventories, SHA-256 digests, held-out KL values, and evaluation IDs are recorded in release-manifest.json. Use its SHA-256 digests to verify downloaded files. Export and load gates used llama.cpp revision bec4772f6a2527d371557b5d2032641e5ff7619c.

License

The model weights are released under the upstream model's apache-2.0 license. llama.cpp and any surrounding runtime code retain their own licenses.