Comment by danielhanchen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danielhanchen | Hacker News Reader

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Didn't expect this to be on HN haha - but sometimes HN does have older posts come up sometimes.

No your conclusion is false - only the old Q4_K_XL had slightly higher perplexity, all other quants are fine. We uploaded 9TB of research artifacts to https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-Experiments-G... for the community.

If you read our blog, it says KLD and PPL are actually sometimes counterintuitive - for example MiniMax some of our quants do worse on PPL and KLD vs AesSedai's one for example, but does worse on LiveCodeBench by a lot see https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/qwen3.5/gguf-benchmarks#id-3-...

This is because see https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/qwen3.5/gguf-benchmarks#id-1-... - although bitwidths are in general monotonic ie q2_k < q3_k < q4_k < q5_k etc, we find KLD and PPL are actually not monotonic ie q3_k can actually have BETTER PPL than q4_k.

So the main point is bad luck on quantization - sometimes lower bits might get lower PPL and KLD, but actually this is a ruse and wrong, since on actual real world tasks, it's worse.

The Q4_K_XL is easily the most popular quant for the model, though.

So then why was Q4_K_XL having issues? Is it just a PPL issue that doesn't reflect in real world usage? If yes, why not just say that? "The Q4_K_XL had lower PPL, but don't worry, PPL can be wrong, and other benchmarks show it's fine". If it was a real quality issue, then where was the issue caused by?

The blog post says "Retiring MXFP4 from all GGUF quants: Q2_K_XL, Q3_K_XL and Q4_K_XL, except for pure MXFP4_MOE" but doesn't say why. The easy assumption that most people would make is "oh, you quanted attention or ssn or something to mxfp4 and that turned out to be bad, so you retire mxfp4" but if you say that it's not that, then what's the actual issue?

each layer is made up of various weights, the weights are adjusted to quant it. a pure q8 will have all the weights as q8, or a q4 the same. but some are kept as f32, etc. here's an example of q3_k_xl - https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Kimi-K2-Thinking-GGUF/tree/ma... we can see certain weights are f32, q8, q5, q3, etc. They used mxfp4 in some weights and mxfp4 doesn't seem to place nicely in quants so that's why they are retiring it. read their publication again and it should make more sense.

I am aware of all that.

They literally never say “they used mxfp4 in some weights”. What you’re claiming they said doesn’t exist.

This isn’t a postmortem, it’s PR fluff without actually addressing the issue.

It's right there https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/qwen3.5/gguf-benchmarks I looked at the weights before. It's not PR fluff, they made it clear by showing how it really affected various tensors terribly.

"MXFP4 is much worse on many tensors - attn_gate, attn_q, ssm_beta, ssm_alpha using MXFP4 is not a good idea, and rather Q4_K is better - also MXFP4 uses 4.25 bits per weight, whilst Q4_K uses 4.5 bits per weight. It's better to use Q4_K than MXFP4 when choosing between them."

The Q4 quants had a mixture of mxfp4 leading to worse outcomes.

Nope. Where do they say something along the lines of "we had MXFP4 tensors in our previous upload" or "that's why we re-uploaded new versions"?

This is a famous non-apology non-explanation of what actually happened. "They made it clear by showing how it really affected various tensors terribly"? Where do they even say they had ever previously uploaded any quant with MXFP4?

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