mgoin / Qwen3-4B-speculator.dflash2

Qwen3-4B DFlash2 speculator — epoch 3

This is the final checkpoint from a three-epoch experimental DFlash2 draft-model run for Qwen/Qwen3-4B . It was trained with the implementation proposed in vllm-project/speculators#1006 at commit 0a1b3e0a15d67d551041933529c2c41032f5b28d .

Earlier checkpoints remain available under the epoch-1 and epoch-2 tags. The epoch-3 model weights have SHA-256 459f75b6da6a70b7d5630408196e2203798af0ca33db23bb1d628d8c9212e805 .

Architecture

• DFlash2DraftModel
• 5 draft layers
• block size 8, producing 7 speculative tokens
• verifier hidden-state taps 1, 9, 17, 25, and 33
• full Qwen3-4B vocabulary
• block-local grouped dynamic convolution: kernel 2, group size 16
• predecessor-conditioned candidate selector: rank 256, unary top-16
• sample_from_anchor=false

The selector loss weight is 0.1. The base objective is fused CE 0.1 + TV 0.9 with fixed exponential positional decay.

Epoch-3 validation

These are teacher-forced/offline validation metrics on the held-out 1% split. Values are reproduced at the precision stored in val_metrics.json . They are not substitutes for end-to-end vLLM acceptance or downstream accuracy.

Training completed at global step 78,646. Optimizer and scheduler state remain in the local experiment bundle and are intentionally excluded from this serving repository.

Training data and run

Training uses exactly 300,000 Magpie and 207,864 UltraChat rows from inference-optimization/Qwen3-8B-Regenerated-Collection at revision 65d219d6b40bb27c45afe16665147a1d3fa21069 .

The responses are Qwen3-8B regenerated trajectories, as stated by the reference DSpark model card. Qwen3-4B renders/tokenizes and teacher-forces those trajectories; they are not Qwen3-4B on-policy samples. The prepared artifact contains 507,864 rows, 1,618,498,917 total tokens, and 1,547,655,657 supervised tokens, with a 16,384-token preparation window. The pinned regenerated dataset has no declared license or card metadata.

The run used four DDP trainer ranks, AdamW at 6e-4 , a cosine schedule, a 99/1 train/validation split, and online verifier hidden-state generation. After the second epoch, the verifier topology changed from four data-parallel servers to one because the original servers were arrival-starved; the same four trainer ranks and all data, optimizer, schedule, and model settings were retained. Training and validation completed cleanly, and the checkpoint manifest was fully revalidated.

• original W&B run
• epoch-3 continuation

vLLM evaluation

The following end-to-end results use the epoch-2 checkpoint. Epoch 3 has not yet been evaluated, so these numbers are included as serving-validation evidence rather than attributed to the weights on this revision.

The vLLM V2 runner used PR #52816 at 19c9351904 , Ben Chislett's safety fix at 31840cf3ea , and the local Speculators config adapter at 9c6917525f . Baseline and DFlash2 ran concurrently on separate otherwise-free B300 GPUs; throughput figures are therefore preliminary cross-GPU measurements.

The native vLLM qualitative loader consumes only messages[0].content , so that result is a single-turn projection rather than a complete multi-turn SPEED-Bench evaluation. In throughput_2k, both variants emitted exactly 6,291,456 output tokens with max_model_len=32768 , concurrency 32, a 4,096-token output length, and ignore_eos .

Serving

This is a draft model and cannot generate independently. Use it with the unquantized Qwen/Qwen3-4B verifier and seven speculative tokens.

The checkpoint tensors match the public DFlash2/vLLM contract, but the Speculators config is flat while the current serving PR consumes nested dflash_config . Until that conversion lands upstream, serving requires vllm-project/vllm#52816 , Ben's safety fix, and the corresponding config adapter.

vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3-4B \
  --speculative-config '{"model":"mgoin/Qwen3-4B-speculator.dflash2","num_speculative_tokens":7}'

Experimental scope and attribution

The architecture and checkpoint tensor contract are adapted from Z Lab's MIT-licensed implementation pinned at 07ebd93 . The corresponding source attribution and license are retained in the Speculators implementation.

Public DFlash2 materials describe inference but do not publish the training loss or full recipe. The split unary + selector objective used here is an experimental Speculators-native baseline; this checkpoint does not claim to reproduce Z Lab's unpublished objective, parameterization, or reported quality.

Included files

• portable config.json and custom config.py
• model.safetensors
• exact val_metrics.json
• SHA256SUMS

AI assistance was used for implementation, validation, experiment orchestration, evaluation, and documentation. The human publisher remains responsible for the checkpoint and its claims.