Severe Multimodal Degradation in Standard Quants

#6
by vulcan4d - opened

I noticed that the RVN-Q5_K_M model suffers from severe visual hallucinations compared to a smaller Unsloth "UD" models (like IQ4_XS). Even with higher text precision, the Heretic model completely misidentifies major visual anchor objects. I wouldn't use this model for anything vision related. I would not use this model for anything vision related.

The Cause:
Standard uniform quantization bit-crushes the fragile Cross-Attention / Vision-Language bridge layers. This distorts the spatial embeddings being passed from the mmproj to the LLM, causing the model to receive "blurry" data and hallucinate the rest.

How Some Fix it:
Unsloth’s "UD" format uses dynamic quantization to specifically protect the vision alignment layers. It leaves the multimodal bridge and the first/last LLM layers at high precision (FP16 or 8-bit) and only compresses the middle FFN blocks.

Valid observation — and you're right that uniform quantization isn't ideal for vision-heavy use. A few notes from our side:

  1. The mmproj is already high-precision (mmproj-Qwen3.8-27B-Q8_0.gguf, the official llama.cpp export) — the projector itself isn't the bottleneck. The degradation comes from the quantized LLM input layers that receive the visual embeddings.
  2. For vision-critical work we'd recommend the higher-precision quants (RVN-Q8_0-mtp or RVN-F16/RVN-BF16), or the unquantized model with the mmproj.
  3. We can also ship a "UD-style" vision-protected variant if there's interest: llama-quantize --override-tensor lets us keep the embedding + first layers (the vision-language bridge) at Q8_0/F16 while compressing the middle FFN blocks to the target quant — same approach Unsloth's UD uses.

Thanks for the detailed analysis — that's exactly the kind of feedback that helps.

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