Ornith-1.5-9B-DFlash-int4-ov

Ornith 1.5 9B DFlash draft — OpenVINO IR (int4)

The target-specific DFlash draft for ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-9B, converted to OpenVINO IR so it can be paired with an OpenVINO target in OVMS or OpenVINO GenAI.

The upstream release publishes only ornith1.5-9b-dflash-bf16-projection-Q4_K_M.gguf — a Q4_K_M GGUF. optimum-cli cannot consume GGUF, so this conversion dequantizes the GGUF back to its stored values, loads them into the Optimum DFlash patcher class, and re-quantizes to int4 at group size 16. That group size matches Q4_K's 16-element sub-block grid, so the second rounding lands on values that are already exact multiples of their group scale.

⚡ Hidden states consumed. This draft takes a hidden_states input of shape [batch, seq, 32768] — 8 target layers of 4096 concatenated — and reads target layers 1, 5, 9, 13, 17, 21, 25, 29. The paired target must carry the hidden_states_decoder_layers locator metadata, or speculation silently produces zero accepted tokens.

Measured results

Ornith 1.5 9B int4 target, Intel Arc 130V iGPU (Lunar Lake), greedy decoding, 128-token "Count from 1 to 100" workload:

Greedy output with the draft attached was byte-identical to target-only decoding across the prompts tested, which is the expected guarantee for speculative decoding: the target verifies every proposed token, so accepted tokens are always the target's own.

Files

Usage (OVMS)

Point the target's graph.pbtxt at this directory:

node_options: {
    [type.googleapis.com / mediapipe.LLMCalculatorOptions]: {
        models_path: "."
        draft_models_path: "/path/to/this/draft"
    }
}

OVMS reports Draft model strategy: DFlash on load when the pairing is accepted.

I/O contract

inputs_embeds   [?,?,4096]    float32
hidden_states   [?,?,32768]   float32    # 8 target layers x 4096, concatenated
position_ids    [?,?]         int64
attention_mask  [?,?]         int64
beam_idx        [?]           int32
→ last_hidden_state [?,?,4096] float32

hidden_states carries the 8 layers named by target_layer_ids (1,5,9,13,17,21,25,29), concatenated on the last axis. The target must export hidden_states_decoder_layers RT-info for the runtime to locate them; an OpenVINO target built with current Optimum Intel carries this annotation automatically.

Limitations

• Target-specific. Acceptance will be substantially lower with base Qwen3.5 or another fine-tune.
• Requires a target whose layer geometry matches target_layer_ids (32 layers, hidden 4096).
• Throughput depends on runtime kernels, hardware, and prompt distribution.
• Exactness was verified for greedy decoding only; sampling modes were not qualified here.

Acknowledgements

Draft initialization is from Z-Lab's Apache-2.0 Qwen3.5 DFlash release; the Ornith-specific fc and hidden_norm projection was distilled by audreyt. Ornith 1.5 is MIT licensed.

Conversion guide

• How to convert models to OpenVINO IR
• How to convert and run DFlash models with OpenVINO

Related model builds

Quantizations of this model

• Ornith-1.5-9B-DFlash-int4-ov — int4 (this repository)

Compatible DFlash pairing

These are the published OpenVINO builds of the matching target/draft family:

• Ornith-1.5-9B-int4-ov — int4
• Ornith-1.5-9B-int8-ov — int8

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