Qwen3-ASR-0.6B-MLX-8bit

Qwen3-ASR-0.6B-MLX-8bit

Summary

MLX 8bit (affine, 8-bit, group size 64) quantization of Qwen/Qwen3-ASR-0.6B-hf at upstream revision 6aa69c382e2b426eee1f5870d4c95859a74b6445, produced directly from the BF16 safetensors with pipelines.mlx_direct_quantize (majek repo). ~0.9 GiB on disk.

Runtime caveat: this is a weights + config pack published ahead of runtime availability; runtime support pending upstream mlx-lm support for the qwen3_asr audio-text architecture (the Hugging Face runtime requires transformers 5.13+ — qwen3_asr merged after the 5.12.1 release). This variant passed the local MLX audio-inference smoke gate — see Audio inference smoke below (run natively with the source repo's pipelines/qwen3_asr_mlx MLX harness).

Why this variant

Affine 8-bit, group size 64 — the highest-fidelity tier, roughly half of BF16 on disk.

Reproduce

python -m pipelines.mlx_direct_quantize --model qwen3-asr-0.6b --base-dir /tmp/mlx-direct-release/qwen3-asr-0.6b/base --out-dir /tmp/mlx-direct-release/qwen3-asr-0.6b/8bit --bits 8 --mode affine --group-size 64

Audio tower

The model.audio_tower.* windowed-attention audio encoder (297 tensors) and the model.multi_modal_projector.* projector (4 tensors) are passed through unquantized in BF16 — only the model.language_model.* qwen3 text decoder is quantized.

Audio inference smoke

PASS — this variant passed the audio-inference smoke gate on 2026-07-03.

Gate design: character error rate (CER) is measured against an MLX-BF16 self-reference baseline (the same MLX audio path run at BF16). Only the clips that are stable and in-language for both family sizes (1_cantonese.wav, 4_codeswitch_singlish.wav — Cantonese and Singlish) decide the verdict; the other clips are transcribed and recorded as informational. Threshold: CER ≤ 0.05 on every gating clip.

• Decoder-only smoke (one-token forward, finite logits): pass
• Total wall clock: 39.753 s
• Smoke run 2026-07-03 on Apple Silicon via the source repo's pipelines/qwen3_asr_mlx package (driver: pipelines/qwen3_asr_mlx_smoke.py).

Family

All MLX variants of this model ship together:

• majentik/Qwen3-ASR-0.6B-MLX-4bit (private — held back permanently; failed the audio-inference smoke gate)
• majentik/Qwen3-ASR-0.6B-MLX-6bit
• majentik/Qwen3-ASR-0.6B-MLX-8bit (this repo)
• majentik/Qwen3-ASR-0.6B-MLX-MXFP4 (private — held back permanently; failed the audio-inference smoke gate)

Provenance

• Upstream: Qwen/Qwen3-ASR-0.6B-hf @ 6aa69c382e2b426eee1f5870d4c95859a74b6445
• Quantization: bits=8, mode=affine, group_size=64 (text tower only)
• Toolchain: mlx 0.31.2, huggingface_hub 0.36.2
• Full details in PROVENANCE.md in this repo.

License + attribution

Quantized by majentik from Qwen/Qwen3-ASR-0.6B-hf. All rights in the original model remain with its authors.

Upstream declares the Apache License 2.0 via its model-card metadata but ships no LICENSE file, so the canonical license text is reproduced below:

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