mkd-ai/Keural-Nova-v1.2-experimental

Keural Nova v1.2 (experimental)

Keural Nova v1.2 is a bilingual (Korean/English) large language model developed by [MKD](https://mkd.kr) — an AI company based in Busan, South Korea. It is a LoRA supervised fine-tune of Qwen3.6-35B-A3B (35B parameters, ~3B active MoE), tuned to improve Korean fluency, tool-calling (including long context), and code while preserving the base model's general capability.

⚠️ Experimental release. This is a v1.2 experimental run. It is the strongest Keural Nova to date on code and tool-calling, with honest trade-offs documented below.

Highlights

• —🥇 Best-in-line tool-calling — 12/12 on our function-calling suite (base Qwen: 11/12), robust multi-turn (call → result → answer), and verified tool-calling in very long context (~237k tokens).
• —🥇 Code recovered and beats base — HumanEval 68.3 (base 62.2; earlier v1.0/v1.1 had regressed to ~12–21 due to a data issue, now fixed with indentation-validated code).
• —🥇 Best Korean of the Nova line — KoBEST 70.0 and KMMLU 63.5, the highest of all Keural Nova versions.
• —🌏 256K native context (Qwen3.6 architecture; up to 1M via YaRN — see Serving).

Evaluation

Same harness (lm-eval, vLLM backend, seed 42) across base and every Keural Nova version.

¹ Base GSM8K is depressed by answer-format mismatch under strict-match; the fine-tuned gain is largely format compliance.

Tool-calling (our XML function-calling suite, non-thinking, temperature 0):

How v1.2 compares

• —Better than v1.0 and v1.1 overall — best Korean MCQ (KMMLU), best KoBEST, best MMLU of the fine-tunes, dramatically better code, and the strongest tool-calling (incl. long context).
• —Trade-offs (honest): GSM8K (72.3) is lower than v1.0/v1.1 (~87) though still far above base; HAE-RAE (73.9) is ~flat vs v1.1 (74.5). Small knowledge dips vs base on MMLU (−0.9) and HAE-RAE (−1.7) are the expected SFT trade-off (SFT tunes style/skill, not stored knowledge).

Intended use

General assistant, Korean/English chat and RAG, agentic / tool-calling workloads (web search, document QA, function calling), and coding. Especially suited to Korean enterprise assistants and agent frameworks.

Serving (vLLM)

Recommended config for the tool/agent workload — native 256K context:

python -m vllm.entrypoints.openai.api_server \
  --model mkd-hossain/Keural-Nova-v1.2-experimental \
  --served-model-name Keural-Nova-v1.2 \
  --tensor-parallel-size 2 --disable-custom-all-reduce \
  --max-model-len 262144 \
  --tool-call-parser qwen3_xml --enable-auto-tool-choice

• —Non-thinking is the default (the chat template is set so the model answers/tool-calls directly). enable_thinking=true remains available per request.
• —Tool calls use Qwen XML (<tool_call><function=NAME><parameter=P>VAL</parameter></function></tool_call>) — serve with --tool-call-parser qwen3_xml --enable-auto-tool-choice.
• —1M context is available via YaRN (rope_scaling, factor 4.0), but static YaRN degrades short-prompt tool-calling on Qwen models generally; serve native 256K for agent/tool use and enable YaRN only when a request truly needs >256K.

Training

• —Base: Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B (fine-tuned fresh from base, not from v1.0/v1.1).
• —Method: LoRA (rank 16, α 32, dropout 0.0) via ms-swift, targeting attention + Gated-DeltaNet linear-attention + shared experts + all routed MoE experts (PEFT target_parameters); router and gates frozen. 1 epoch, LR 5e-5, bf16, DeepSpeed ZeRO-2, 2× H200.
• —Data: ~162k examples — a cleaned, balanced Korean/English/code/replay mix (AST-validated code, benchmark test-splits excluded, identity de-contaminated) plus a tool-calling slice (~17k: single-turn, multi-turn, negative, and long-context up to 32k; sources: Glaive-function-calling-v2 and Hermes-function-calling, both Apache-2.0, converted to Qwen XML) and a small Korean tool-use set.
• —Design goal: improve Korean + tool-calling + code while holding general capability flat (verified against a base-model eval gate before release).

Limitations

• —Experimental: intended for evaluation; validate on your workload before production.
• —GSM8K math word-problems are weaker than Nova v1.0/v1.1.
• —Small knowledge dips vs base on MMLU / HAE-RAE (expected SFT trade-off).
• —Tool-calling at the full 1M-YaRN context is not guaranteed (a serving-side YaRN property, not a model defect); native 256K is recommended for agents.
• —Identity is a fine-tuned behavior; it is not adversarially hardened.

License & attribution

Released under Apache-2.0, inheriting the license of the base model Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B (© Alibaba Cloud / the Qwen team), whose license and attribution are retained. "Keural" and "Keural Nova" are model names by MKD.

Citation

@misc{keural-nova-v1_2,
  title  = {Keural Nova v1.2 (experimental)},
  author = {MKD},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://huggingface.co/mkd-hossain/Keural-Nova-v1.2-experimental}
}