Q3-8B-Kintsugi

get it? because kintsugi sounds like kitsune? hahaha-

Overview

Q3-8B-Kintsugi is a roleplaying model finetuned from Qwen3-8B-Base.

During testing, Kintsugi punched well above its weight class in terms of parameters, especially for 1-on-1 roleplaying and general storywriting.

Quantizations

EXL3:

• Official EXL3 quant repo

GGUF:

• Official static GGUF quants

MLX:

• 8, 6, and 4bpw MLX-formrt quants by soundTeam

Usage

• Format is plain-old ChatML (please note that, unlike regular Qwen 3, you do not need to prefill empty think tags for it not to reason -- see below).

• Settings used by testers varied, but we generally stayed around 0.9 temperature and 0.1 min p. Do not use repetition penalties (DRY included). They break it.

• Any system prompt can likely be used, but I used the Shingame system prompt (link will be added later i promise)

• The official instruction following version of Qwen3-8B was not used as a base. Instruction-following is trained in post-hoc, and "thinking" traces were not included. As a result of this, "thinking" will not function.

Training Process

1. The base model first went through a supervised finetune on a corpus of instruction following data, roleplay conversations, and human writing based on the Ink/Bigger Body/Remnant lineage.

2. Finally, a KTO reinforcement learning phase steered the model away from the very purple prose the initial merge had, and improved its logical+spatial reasoning and sense of overall "intelligence".

Both stages here are very similar to Q3-30B-A3B-Designant, which went through a very similar process with the same data.

Credits

• Fizz - Training, Data Wrangling

• Toaster, Mango, Bot, probably others I forgot ;-; - Testing

• inflatebot - original Designant model card that this one was yoinked from

• Artus - Funding

• Alibaba - Making the original model

• Axolotl, Unsloth, Huggingface - Making the frameworks used to train this model (Axolotl was used for the SFT process, and Unsloth+TRL was used for the KTO process)

• All quanters, inside and outside the org, specifically Artus, Lyra, and soundTeam/Heni

We would like to thank the Allura community on Discord, especially Curse, Heni, Artus and Mawnipulator, for their companionship and moral support. You all mean the world to us <3