Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-FP8-lm_head

Qwen3.8-Flash-Next — blockwise FP8 lm_head

🗺️ Part of the Flash-Next Quant Map — the measured landscape of Qwen3.8-Flash-Next quantization on a single DGX Spark: which schemes fit in 128 GB, what each costs in speed and quality, and where this piece sits among them.

A single tensor and its scale: lm_head quantized to blockwise FP8. 606 MiB, +11 % decode, no measurable quality cost. It drops into an otherwise untouched Qwen3.8-Flash-Next checkpoint.

Measurements and method are in the open notes at jschmied/qwen38-flash-next-gb10; this tensor's write-up is quantizing-lm-head.md.

Why this does not already exist

lm_head is BF16 [248320, 2560] in every published GPU checkpoint of this model — verified across ten of them. Only the MLX/Apple tier quantizes it. That is not because it is unsafe. It is because three independent pieces of vLLM plumbing prevent it, any one of which is sufficient alone:

1. the model never passes quant_config to ParallelLMHead;
2. config.json is authoritative and its ignore list contains lm_head;
3. the vocab weight loader asserts loaded_weight.shape[output_dim] == org_vocab_size, which is true of weight and false of its [1940, 20] block-scale companion — VocabParallelEmbedding's loader has no concept of a scale tensor.

So this needs a patched vLLM. There is no configuration flag that makes stock vLLM load it.

There are also two lm_head construction sites, not one: mtp.py builds its own ParallelLMHead, also without quant_config, so with speculation enabled it fails identically with no module or parameter named 'lm_head.weight_scale_inv'. Patch both.

TP=1 only, deliberately. Our fix raises NotImplementedError above TP=1 rather than copying the scale: above TP=1 it needs sharding in block space (rows // block_n), and silently mis-sharding it would produce wrong logits instead of an error.

What it buys

Paired NLL over 14 chunks / 646 tokens of held-out prose, code, German, French and technical text. Nine chunks improved, five worsened — mixed signs, so this is noise, not damage. Reported as no measurable cost, not as an improvement. A bandwidth model predicted ~+10 % from removing 0.64 GB/token; the measurement was +11 %.

Format decides this layer, not bit-width. On the sibling Qwen3.8-27B an NVFP4 head measured 2.4 % worse NLL in 8 of 8 chunks and was declined for production, while this FP8 head is loss-neutral.

With speculation it is worth considerably more

The +11 % above is the no-speculation figure. Under MTP (k=2) the head is worth more, not less, because of where it sits in the speculative loop:

It also flips speculation from a net loss at c=16 (139.6 against 156.0 without MTP) to a net gain (167.8).

The mechanism: MTP evaluates lm_head once per draft token plus once for verification, so at k=2 the head is on the critical path about three times per step, while dense projections are read once per step either way. Halving the head therefore pays k+1 times over.

Acceptance is unchanged — mean accepted length 2.21 against 2.15 — so this is pure speed, not better drafting. If you were expecting a quantized layer to cost the drafter accuracy, it did not.

The general rule this is one instance of: a quantization lever composes with speculation when the layer is evaluated per draft token, and competes with it when the layer is read per step. Worth checking before assuming either — on this same box, quantizing the dense projections reduced MTP's benefit from +67 % to +23 % and turned it into a net loss past c≈4.

One caveat that does stand: mtp.py builds its own ParallelLMHead and must be patched too, or speculation fails outright with no module or parameter named 'lm_head.weight_scale_inv'.

Compatibility — check, do not assume

This head was quantized from one specific BF16 lm_head. A checkpoint shipping a different one will produce wrong logits, not an error.

Reference sha256 and a ready-made checker are in COMPAT.md. The tensor is BF16 (248320, 2560), sha256 40bddd25d0d94a128ab08280faad39cfc3ee3064252761269115f544722607c9 — verified 2026-09-10 to be bit-identical in Qwen's BF16 parent and in RadixArk's NVFP4 build, which ships it unchanged.

That basis is two checkpoints, on one date, not a survey of the field. Run the check rather than trusting the list.

Using it

1. Take any Qwen3.8-Flash-Next checkpoint whose lm_head matches the reference hash.
2. Repoint lm_head.weight and lm_head.weight_scale_inv in its model.safetensors.index.json at this repo's file, and make sure no other referenced shard still contains an lm_head tensor — a duplicate name in two referenced files means the later one wins by _natural_sort_key, with no error. In the RadixArk build lm_head shares a shard with 169 other tensors, so that shard has to be repacked without it (~2.3 GiB written).
3. Remove lm_head from config.json's ignore list — it is authoritative, and the head stays BF16 until you do.
4. Serve on a vLLM carrying the three fixes above, TP=1.

Related

A Local-Hessian NVFP4 rebuild of the routed experts for the same model is in progress as a separate release, with different requirements — it needs no vLLM patches, and the two compose without either depending on the other. Not published yet; it will be linked here when it is. Its method and results are being written up in the notes repo linked above.

Base model Qwen/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next. Built and measured on a single DGX Spark (GB10, sm_121, 128 GB unified memory).