Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-EQ-v5

Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-EQ-v5

A DPO fine-tune of Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-heretic-v2.

The tune optimized for two things:

• bringing warmth, emotional intelligence, general chat improvement to Qwen 3.5 series
• countering some negative tendencies of Heretic models (overwillingness to agree, be sycophantic, etc) without sacrificing derestriction

This is still intended as a general use model (agentic, coding, general chat). Tuning was lightly & with precision. More general benchmarks to follow.

What this model does

This model is trained to be a better conversational partner in emotionally complex situations, while maintaining base model capabilities. It:

• Validates without sycophancy — empathizes with frustration without rubber-stamping bad behavior
• Sets boundaries warmly — names uncomfortable truths without lecturing
• Sounds human — conversational tone, not therapist-speak. better tone vs vanilla Qwen 3.5, e.g. "It sounds like"

Key specs

EQ-Bench 3 results

Evaluated on EQ-Bench 3 — 45 emotional intelligence scenarios.

Leaderboard ranking (raw rubric score, Sonnet 3.7 judge)

Re-judged with claude-3.7-sonnet to match the official leaderboard methodology. These are raw rubric scores, not the official ELO ranking — higher is higher but not necessarily better (see eqbench.com for normalized ELO). This is the best apples-to-apples comparison available without submitting for ELO. Rankings sourced from the EQ-Bench 3 canonical leaderboard data (2026-03-19 snapshot). Newer models (gpt-5.4, claude-sonnet-4-6, claude-opus-4-6) are judged with Opus on the live leaderboard and are not yet in the official repo data with Sonnet scores.

Qwen family comparison (all claude-3.7-sonnet judge)

Note on EQ-v1 and Qwen3.5-27B scores: While EQ-v1 and the 27B dense model score slightly higher on raw rubric, we recommend EQ-v5 for real-world use. The earlier models and the 27B dense produce verbose, formulaic responses that score well on analytical dimensions but feel robotic in conversation. EQ-v5 speaks more naturally — less therapist, more human. The heretic-v2 base was specifically chosen because it preserves empathy and emotional range while being de-restricted, giving EQ-v5 a more authentic voice that the vanilla Qwen models lack.

Version history

EQ-v5 is the fifth iteration of the EQ fine-tune series on the Qwen3.5-35B-A3B architecture.

Key improvements over previous versions:

• Less sycophantic (reduced blind validation)
• More humanlike and conversational tone
• Better pragmatic advice
• Small warmth trade-off for increased honesty

Strengths: Warmth, humanlike quality, low moralising. Competitive with frontier on insight and analytical. Gaps: Assertiveness lags behind frontier — the model is still too agreeable in some scenarios.

HumanEval+ (coding)

Thinking enabled, temperature=0.6, top_p=0.95. Scores from FP8 quantization.

Training details

• Method: Standard DPO (sigmoid loss) with LoRA
• Data: DPO preference pairs covering emotional warmth, boundary-setting, and anti-sycophancy training. The heretic-v2 base is de-restricted, so targeted training was added to maintain appropriate pushback on moralising and overly agreeable behavior.
• LoRA: r=32, alpha=64, all attention + MLP projections
• LR: 2e-6 cosine, warmup 0.1, beta=0.3

Serving

vllm serve nivvis/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-EQ-v5 \
  --served-model-name Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-EQ-v5 \
  --max-model-len 32768 \
  --trust-remote-code \
  --dtype bfloat16 \
  --reasoning-parser qwen3

Sampling recommendations

• With thinking: temp=0.7, top_p=0.9, max_tokens=4096
• Without thinking: temp=0.7, top_p=0.8, max_tokens=2048

To disable thinking mode:

extra_body={"chat_template_kwargs": {"enable_thinking": False}}

Lineage

Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B
  → llmfan46/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-heretic-v2 (decensored)
    → nivvis/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-EQ-v5 (this model — DPO for EQ)

Limitations

• Assertiveness is below frontier — the model can be too agreeable in scenarios requiring pushback
• Best insights sometimes stay in thinking tokens and don't fully surface in the response
• Trained on English conversational data only
• Not a therapist — do not use for mental health advice

License

Apache 2.0, following the base Qwen3.5 license.