allura-org/Q3-8B-Kintsugi

Q3-8B-Kintsugi

<small><i>get it? because kintsugi sounds like kitsune? hahaha-</i></small>

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:

• —Official EXL3 quant repo

GGUF:

• —Official static GGUF quants

MLX:

• —8, 6, and 4bpw MLX-formrt quants by soundTeam

Usage

• —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).

• —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.

• —Any system prompt can likely be used, but I used the Shingame system prompt (link will be added later i promise)

• —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

1. 1.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.

1. 1.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

• —Fizz - Training, Data Wrangling

• —Toaster, Mango, Bot, probably others I forgot ;-; - Testing

• —inflatebot - original Designant model card that this one was yoinked from

• —Artus - Funding

• —Alibaba - Making the original model

• —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)

• —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