Ornith-1.5-9B-int4-ov

Ornith 1.5 9B — OpenVINO IR (int4)

ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-9B converted to OpenVINO IR at int4 asymmetric group-128 for CPU and Intel GPU inference.

Pair with Ornith-1.5-9B-DFlash-int4-ov.

An Ornith-1.5-9B-int8-ov of this same target is also available. The int4 build is faster in absolute terms; the int8 build is more accurate and, because decode here is memory-bandwidth bound, gets a larger relative speedup from the same draft (4.35x vs 2.93x).

⚡ Hidden states exposed for speculative decoding. This graph carries the hidden_states_decoder_layers runtime metadata for all 32 decoder layers (0–31), so a matching DFlash draft can read those intermediate activations straight out of the export. That metadata is the difference between a model that can be speculated on and one where the draft attaches but never verifies a token.

Details

Speculative decoding

This target can be paired with a DFlash draft. The hooks it needs are standard: current Optimum Intel annotates them at export time.

A DFlash draft does not run independently. It consumes the target's intermediate hidden states from a fixed set of layers and predicts a block of tokens from them. If the target IR carries no hidden-state metadata, the runtime cannot locate those tensors and silently falls back to target-only decoding — you get a correct answer at baseline speed, with no error to tell you the draft was ignored.

This export carries an hidden_states_decoder_layers entry in the model's RT info: one producer/output locator per decoder layer, resolved at export time by Optimum Intel's add_hidden_states_rt_info. It annotates the graph without changing its public I/O — no extra model inputs or outputs appear. You can confirm it is present:

import json, openvino as ov
m = ov.Core().read_model("openvino_language_model.xml")
info = json.loads(m.get_rt_info()["hidden_states_decoder_layers"].value)
print(len(info["layers"]), "layers annotated")   # -> 32
print(info["layers"]["1"])
# {'producer': '...model.language_model.layers.1/aten::add/Add_1', 'output_index': 0}

The draft reads layers 1, 5, 9, 13, 17, 21, 25, 29 (its target_layer_ids), which this export provides.

Measured results

Intel Arc 130V iGPU (Lunar Lake), greedy decoding, 128-token counting workload:

Greedy output with the draft was byte-identical to target-only decoding.

Files

This is a decomposed VLM export. Because the text graph has more than the two inputs LLMPipeline expects, load it through VLMPipeline (or serve it with OVMS, which dispatches automatically).

Serving with OVMS

Point the target at the draft directory in graph.pbtxt:

node_options: {
    [type.googleapis.com / mediapipe.LLMCalculatorOptions]: {
        models_path: "."
        draft_models_path: "/path/to/blaj/Ornith-1.5-9B-DFlash-int4-ov"
    }
}

On success OVMS logs Draft model strategy: DFlash. If that line is absent, the draft was not attached — check that the target's hidden-state metadata is present.

Conversion notes

• Source weights: BF16 safetensors from ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-9B.
• Exported with Optimum Intel qwen3_5 / image-text-to-text, then compressed with NNCF.
• Exports require Transformers 5.2.x; newer Transformers versions are rejected by the exporter's version gate for this architecture.
• The vision tower, merger, MTP head, and tokenizer stages are retained so the export works as a complete VLM, not only as a text model.

Limitations

• Quantized at group size 128; for maximum accuracy re-export at a smaller group size or fp16.
• Hidden-state locators are resolved against this exact graph. Re-exporting or editing the IR invalidates them.
• Throughput depends on runtime kernels, hardware, and prompt distribution.

Acknowledgements

Ornith 1.5 is MIT licensed. DFlash support comes from Z-Lab's Apache-2.0 release.

Conversion guide

• How to convert models to OpenVINO IR

Related model builds

Quantizations of this model

• Ornith-1.5-9B-int4-ov — int4 (this repository)
• Ornith-1.5-9B-int8-ov — int8

Compatible DFlash pairing

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

• Ornith-1.5-9B-DFlash-int4-ov — int4

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