docs/HISTORICAL_MODEL_CARD_2026-08-27.md

# GLM-5.3-Flash-EXL3-4bpw

Source: `zai-org/GLM-5.3-Flash-BF16@a6c167b62691b2bac901344b65cb651a70f53e43`. All routed experts including MTP45 are uniform four-bit EXL3/TR3 MCG; non-routed tensors retain their official native dtype. The original custom Transformers TP2 runtime and the dedicated SM120 vLLM image below are qualified separately against the same BF16 teacher evidence.

Five-cold-run mean teacher-to-student KLD: `0.024554564250` over 51,175 sealed causal positions per run. Actual TP2 runtime qualification-window KLD: `0.022750847878` over 2,047 positions (both gates: mean KLD < 0.06). This checkpoint requires the included custom Transformers TP2 adapter and is not a stock vLLM/ExLlamaV3 compatibility claim.

## Five cold KLD runs

| Run | Mean teacher-to-student KLD | Positions | Report receipt | Capture receipt |
|---:|---:|---:|---|---|
| 1 | 0.024554564249958 | 51,175 | `ef6a8dedc20f11e582658f94923da3e66c2b6cea4ff62d936abb790e376e2461` | `013759025d8414f8811fa140250e2c79097c1082926edd4ae2cfc6751722fc8d` |
| 2 | 0.024554564249958 | 51,175 | `b7d1cac829f6b21471da4ea724aac479f9db250d4286edd412e099fa747f8257` | `eae08903737bde9f31bf6f8632d2de7b6539f4b1efd8113c5f81461d92aaf671` |
| 3 | 0.024554564249958 | 51,175 | `663629ccd2bda08a4c299d767b7e6e6d622a81ad6830ad1acf08d0eb8ca1a196` | `000896721ea7116322eb31d8e75718985d29240fabd6a921627bb02c03516bec` |
| 4 | 0.024554564249958 | 51,175 | `cdb2d8ee4ce795f695f335f0bb3ce7bd135dcf6df4f48c6e3862b40cd1340586` | `7ece4defa651c3693bffd624ad7d07ff85c0dceb7674a7752ec136dea6370c3f` |
| 5 | 0.024554564249958 | 51,175 | `ac4d6d94aef27b09ca9b2dd513516e793cf5f4afe3d1f2b008a3fb4ed64ae243` | `5b59145332206b4c0fb82f791e2c09be8fadb16d18e6e58818b78e919294cb65` |

All five accepted executions used the same sealed 25-window panel, so each has 51,175 causal prediction positions. They produced the same tokenwise-KLD SHA-256 and a population standard deviation of zero. The first attempt at the fifth capture received an external SIGTERM before it wrote any logits; it retained only its plan and reader identity and is excluded. The table's run 5 is the clean `run5b` retry, with a distinct cold-execution backend/capture receipt and the same measured KLD as runs 1-4.

The direct packed TP2 serving result (`0.022750847878`) is a separate one-window runtime qualification measurement, not a replacement for the five full-panel runs. The raw decoded-logit absolute-error diagnostic remains failed and is disclosed in the receipts; qualification is based on teacher-to-runtime KLD, rank-identical output, complete packed-tensor census, and multi-token generation.

Code and the five-run receipts: [brandonmmusic-max/glm-5.3-flash-exl3-4bpw](https://github.com/brandonmmusic-max/glm-5.3-flash-exl3-4bpw).

## BF16 teacher logits and replay calibration

The complete teacher dataset is published at
[`brandonmusic/GLM-5.3-Flash-BF16-Teacher-Logits`](https://huggingface.co/datasets/brandonmusic/GLM-5.3-Flash-BF16-Teacher-Logits).
It contains 640 rolling calibration windows plus the 25 qualification-only final
windows: 665 windows total, each with 2,048 input tokens, 2,047 scored positions,
and the full 154,880-token vocabulary. The 1,361,255 scored positions occupy
843,324,965,136 raw logits bytes.

The teacher is the released BF16 checkpoint with its native FP32 tensors
preserved; the logits are stored as float32 to avoid an additional
storage-precision loss. Payload revision
[`7c378d5f17dba158c4c803eff27c346dd0615660`](https://huggingface.co/datasets/brandonmusic/GLM-5.3-Flash-BF16-Teacher-Logits/tree/7c378d5f17dba158c4c803eff27c346dd0615660)
is bound by the
[`16e16e90078bc0b54bd1cd37b08ba7dad03819726d0258443a0e30b68b354472` aggregate audit](https://huggingface.co/datasets/brandonmusic/GLM-5.3-Flash-BF16-Teacher-Logits/blob/267ccf27ca92575529e0a1ef80e7eed8d209a8f4/logits/full-panel/receipts/full-dataset-audit.json),
which records every payload path, size, and SHA-256. The 25 final windows remain
qualification-only and are excluded from fitting and expert selection.

## Minimal TP2 launch

The historical Transformers runtime below is an evidence/qualification path,
not the optimized daily-driver launch. Use the SM120 container in the next
section for serving.

Use Transformers 5.16.1, clone ExLlamaV3 at commit `c5d9c657966ffeeaa9353f0cc899f18629da4a13`, compile its CUDA extension, then run:

```bash
PYTHONPATH=runtime/src torchrun --standalone --nproc-per-node=2 runtime/scripts/run_glm53_custom_tp_runtime.py --model . --exllamav3-source /path/to/exllamav3 --prompt 'Hello'
```

## SM120 TP2 daily-driver image

Docker Hub: [`verdictai/glm53-flash-exl3-k4`](https://hub.docker.com/r/verdictai/glm53-flash-exl3-k4)

- Version: `r19-sm120-tp2-ep2-v71`
- Immutable OCI index digest: `sha256:bb6d2516f88d963a0c8c10d85582c4580adc8754d506f62ce4915b84c095faca`
- Linux/amd64 manifest: `sha256:77850e030d07df2e2907e6741b69883e82287cf731d1aaef8ff3f2070aedf351`
- Hardware qualified: 2x RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell (SM120), TP2
- Daily-driver mode: NVFP4 MLA KV, DCP2, CUDA graphs, MTP3; launcher ceiling 499,968 tokens
- Accuracy mode: FP8 MLA KV, DCP1 or DCP2; the published serve script uses a measured-safe 262,144-token FP8 ceiling
- Alternate mode: DCP1; DCP2 CUDA graphs with MTP3 are fixed and qualified in v44
- Sampling defaults from the model generation config: temperature `1.0`, top-p `0.95`

The image contains a dedicated vLLM/B12X overlay for GLM-5.3-Flash's hybrid
linear/sparse-attention architecture, NoPE MLA, EXL3 K4 routed experts, and the
MTP layer. The official 45-layer pattern is honored directly: 34 linear layers
and 11 DeepSeek sparse-attention layers, alternating three linear layers and one
sparse layer. Sparse layers use IndexPool-4 and top-k 2,048. This is not a claim
that the checkpoint runs in upstream stock vLLM.

### Current local optimum: v71 validation profile (2026-08-27)

`v71` is the latest validated benchmark/profile revision and the published
Docker tag. The self-contained release bakes the exact runtime overlay and
46-entry scale bank used by the measured profile into the image. It uses NVFP4 MLA KV,
DCP2, MTP3 probabilistic rejection sampling, TP2/EP2, CUDA graphs, and the
route128 SMEM/register fast path. The 46-entry power-of-two calibration bank
covers all 45 backbone layers plus MTP45. No TMEM path is used on SM120.

The v71 measurements used physical GPUs 1 and 3, both RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell
Workstation Edition cards, with a +6000 MHz memory VF offset and 600 W power
limit. These are workstation-pair/OC results and are not a controlled claim
that overclocking alone caused the change.

| Context | Warm prefill tok/s | C1 sustained decode tok/s | MTP draft acceptance |
|---:|---:|---:|---:|
| 0 | — | **147.79** | 42.86% |
| 8K | **5,723** | — | — |
| 16K | **6,234** | **148.55** | 50.88% |
| 32K | **6,219** | **149.58** | 51.72% |

The exact v71 receipts and the later C1-C16/128K stress matrix are under
`runtime-results/v71/benchmarks/`. The GitHub-renderable terminal report is
[`nvfp4-dcp2-mtp3-ws13-oc6000-c1-c16-through128k-tui.txt`](../runtime-results/v71/benchmarks/nvfp4-dcp2-mtp3-ws13-oc6000-c1-c16-through128k-tui.txt).
The stress matrix reached 564.8 aggregate
tok/s at C8/0K and 481.7 tok/s at C8/32K, but those cells admitted only 7/8 and
6/8 requests. C8/C16 at 64K was severely capacity/thermal limited. GPU 3
reached 94 C and accumulated hardware thermal slowdown. The nominal 128K cells
submitted a 131,072-token prompt plus requested output against a 131,072-token
server ceiling; those request errors are disclosed and are not reported as zero
model throughput. C16/128K was skipped by the harness because it did not fit.

### Current actual-runtime KLD by MLA KV-cache type

Both current results are independent five-run averages over the complete
2,048-token `final-0000` qualification window (2,047 causal positions per run),
compared against the sealed BF16 teacher logits. The matched correctness regime
is TP2/EP2, DCP2, eager, no MTP, route128 SMEM. MTP is disabled only for this
teacher-logit comparison so draft-token sampling cannot alter the scored
runtime logits.

| MLA KV cache | Five-run mean KLD | Population stddev | Mean top-1 agreement | Gate |
|---|---:|---:|---:|---:|
| FP8 | **0.024581652920** | 0.000159556478 | 0.936297020029 | pass |
| NVFP4, calibrated power-of-two scales | **0.054757372223** | 0.000000000000 | 0.914997557401 | pass |

The FP8 receipt SHA-256 is
`da072d243fbdb231388bfc23b84bdb0cee2cb26c1885d3ec407c4164525b6b6b`;
the NVFP4 receipt SHA-256 is
`b52b6d7abbcbf1f0bc81f713e4513bc8a376235e2f44cc7f4ba7d368f62e69ca`.
The NVFP4 no-MTP KLD exercises the 45 backbone cache entries; the published
46th calibrated entry is the MTP layer used by the daily MTP3 profile.

### Historical v44 actual-runtime KLD

The exact 2,048-token `final-0000` qualification window was captured with TP2,
DCP1, eager execution, `fp8_ds_mla`, no MTP, and full-vocabulary float32
runtime logits, then compared to the sealed BF16 teacher in float64 chunks.

| Metric | SM120 FP8 KV five-run mean | Rented B200 custom TP2 | Offline K4 |
|---|---:|---:|---:|
| Mean teacher KLD | **0.024628576596** | 0.022750847878 | 0.031831601179 |
| Top-1 agreement | **0.937957987298** | 0.9384 | — |

The earlier local KLD near `0.10` was a runtime scale-decoding defect, not a
routing-quality result. The cache writer stores GLM's four calibrated
per-token, per-128-channel scales as arbitrary FP32 values (`amax / 448`). The
SM120 FlashInfer reader was left at `kv_scale_format="auto"`, which interprets
inline scales using the DeepSeek-v3.2 power-of-two convention. v34 explicitly
selects `arbitrary_fp32` in the GLM NoPE adapter. The corrected first-64-row KLD
is `0.1918669499`; rows 64 onward are `0.0194743407`, and the whole-window
result reproduces the independently observed server range.

The current five-run receipt is published at
`runtime-results/v44/kld/fp8-five-run-kld-receipt.json`.

An independent five-run repetition was then executed on physical GPUs 2 and 3
with the same TP2/DCP1 eager/no-MTP FP8-cache regime and the complete 2,048-token
window (2,047 causal prediction positions per run):

| Run | Mean teacher KLD | Top-1 agreement |
|---:|---:|---:|
| 1 | 0.024566116964 | 0.939423546654 |
| 2 | 0.024849557477 | 0.939423546654 |
| 3 | 0.024882931269 | 0.936492427943 |
| 4 | 0.024016412384 | 0.938935026869 |
| 5 | 0.024827864889 | 0.935515388373 |

The five-run mean is **0.024628576596**, population standard deviation is
`0.000326156681`, and mean top-1 agreement is `0.937957987298`. All five runs
pass the preregistered mean-KLD `< 0.06` gate.

The matched v44 TP2/DCP1/eager/no-MTP test was repeated five times with
`nvfp4_ds_mla` on physical GPUs 2 and 3. Every run covered the same complete
2,047 causal positions and produced the same tokenwise result:

- five-run mean KLD: **`0.06053485053836315`**;
- population standard deviation: **`0.0`**;
- mean top-1 agreement: **`0.9154860771861261`**;
- tokenwise KLD SHA-256 (all five runs):
  `03dc42308d83b9f64e04c101253a5e316dd21f1e55332a9d63c36fabac7b156e`.

This narrowly misses the preregistered `<0.06` gate by
`0.00053485053836315` and is disclosed as a failure, not rounded into a pass.
The newer per-token dynamic-scale control was also tested once and was worse:
mean KLD `0.068229579401`, top-1 agreement `0.919882755252`, with tail outliers
up to `7.1683`. Dynamic scaling is therefore disabled in the published daily
profile. Use FP8 KV when KLD fidelity is the priority; use NVFP4 KV when the
499,968-token capacity is required.

### MTP3 DCP2 measured decode and prefill

MTP3 remains enabled by default with probabilistic rejection sampling. The
current v71 workstation-pair figures are reported above; the older v44
measurements below remain useful as a non-OC historical baseline. On that v44
NVFP4 DCP2 CUDA-graph path, concurrency-1 decode measured 98.9, 106.5, 101.2,
107.2, and 112.4 tokens/s at 0, 16K, 32K, 64K, and 128K context. Repeated warm
prefill measured 3,819, 4,112, 4,149, 4,174, and 4,145 tokens/s at 8K, 16K,
32K, 64K, and 128K. The selected attention backend is `B12X_MLA_SPARSE`; this
is the SM120 sparse fast path, not eager fallback.

The DCP2 NVFP4 launch retained **608,656 logical KV tokens** (1.58 GiB cache
memory per GPU), or 1.22x the configured 499,968-token maximum. The separately
qualified FP8 DCP2 launch retained 356,352 logical tokens at 95% utilization.

### DCP2 CUDA-graph MTP3 fix

v44 includes the DCP2 fix for the failure that previously appeared only when CUDA graphs,
MTP depth greater than one, and graph-padded multi-request batches were used
together. The sparse KPool cache writer had used the padded scoring width for
cache writes even when the live per-request MTP widths summed to fewer tokens;
GDN metadata also retained zero-token graph rows. The v44 runtime separates the live write
count from the padded scoring count and compacts those zero-token rows.

The exact formerly failing TP2/DCP2/MTP3/max-seqs-4 graph geometry was
validated on two RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs with both cache paths:

| Cache | Attention path | Concurrent coherence | Runtime errors |
|---|---|---:|---:|
| `fp8_ds_mla` | `FLASHINFER_MLA_SPARSE_SM120` | 4/4 arithmetic requests correct | 0 |
| `nvfp4_ds_mla` | `B12X_MLA_SPARSE` | 4/4 arithmetic requests correct and clean stop | 0 |

The final NVFP4 validation exposed 348 MTP draft steps and 629 accepted
speculative tokens, or 60.25% of the 1,044 drafted-token opportunities. This
is the fast CUDA-graph path, not eager fallback.

Repeated warm prefill on the production 2,048-token scheduler setting measured
4,565 tok/s at 8K, 4,746 at 16K, 4,823 at 32K, 4,788 at 64K, and 4,685 at
128K. The live route is the B12X SM120 unified MG sparse-prefill kernel, not a
generic fallback. A 2,304-token batch was no faster and retained only 1.04x KV
headroom for a 499,968-token request; 4,096 could not retain the full context
budget. The published 2,048-token scheduler setting is therefore intentional.

The extreme-context qualification found a separate transient-workspace limit.
With the 2,048-token chunk, a 499K request asked KPool for a 758 MiB logits
matrix when only 754 MiB was free. The memory-safe `long500k` profile uses a
1,024-token chunk, one active sequence, and 98.5% memory utilization. On the
published v37 digest it retained 678,968 KV tokens (1.36x the configured
499,968-token maximum) and recovered a middle-depth needle from a 498,365-token
prompt in 141.5 seconds. The same profile on v34 recovered all three insertion
depths at both 384K and 499K. The current v43 qualification root filesystem is
byte-identical to published v44 and extends this evidence with the 17/18 raw
matrix plus the exact 498,368-token retry above. The long profile trades
prefill throughput for transient
workspace safety; it does not select a generic attention backend.

### Current quality gates

Using the official generation defaults (temperature 1.0, top-p 0.95), the
NVFP4/DCP2/CUDA-graph/MTP3 profile scored Estonia **10/10** with 127.87
aggregate generated tokens/s and no 40,000-token cap hits. The raw needle
matrix scored **17/18** through 499K. Its only apparent miss consumed all 1,600
remaining output tokens in reasoning; replaying the exact 498,368-token prompt
with low reasoning returned the exact needle in seven completion tokens. The
raw 17/18 receipt is preserved rather than rewritten.

LAVD is not yet a passing quality gate. With the same official sampling and
normal reasoning, the harness reported 1/10 exact; the conservative response
audit recovered two additional near answers (3/10 accepted), while nine runs
hit the 40,000-token ceiling after an average of 39,752 completion tokens.
Constraining the generic API reasoning mode to `low` removed every cap hit and
reduced the average to 3,647 completion tokens, but did not solve accuracy: the
original scorer found 1/10 near, and the response audit recovered 1 exact plus
3 near answers (4/10 accepted). Generation throughput was effectively
unchanged at 136.48 versus 136.59 aggregate tokens/s. These raw and audited
receipts are published under `runtime-results/v44/quality/`; the result is
reported as a reasoning/scoring-harness diagnostic, not silently counted as a
model pass.

### Docker Compose

Download `runtime/compose.sm120-tp2.yaml` from this repo, set the model path if
needed, and run:

```bash
GLM53_MODEL_PATH=/absolute/path/to/GLM-5.3-Flash-EXL3-4bpw \
  docker compose -f compose.sm120-tp2.yaml up -d
```

### Serve script

The published `runtime/serve-glm53-sm120-tp2.sh` defaults to GPUs 0,1, port
8012, NVFP4/DCP2/MTP3, prefix caching disabled, and the immutable v71 digest:

```bash
chmod +x serve-glm53-sm120-tp2.sh
MODEL=/absolute/path/to/GLM-5.3-Flash-EXL3-4bpw ./serve-glm53-sm120-tp2.sh
```

Use `CACHE=fp8_ds_mla`, `DCP=1`, or `MTP_TOKENS=0` for controlled variants.
The inherited `long500k` launcher profile is the profile used for the historical
v44 500K qualification. It is available in v71, but 500K was not rebenchmarked
after the v71 runtime overlay. To select it, use:

```bash
PROFILE=long500k MODEL=/absolute/path/to/GLM-5.3-Flash-EXL3-4bpw \
  ./serve-glm53-sm120-tp2.sh
```

The default `daily` profile keeps the faster 2,048-token scheduler chunk for
ordinary serving. `PROFILE=long500k` is NVFP4/MTP3 and intentionally sets
`MAX_NUM_BATCHED_TOKENS=1024`, `MAX_NUM_SEQS=1`, and
`GPU_MEMORY_UTILIZATION=0.985`.

Credit goes to turboderp for the EXL3 quantization format. Local Inference Lab,
Martin Vit, and Luke Alonzo contributed or helped test components of the base
image.