MERaLiON-3-10B-TurboQuant-MLX-2bit

2-bit weight-quantized MLX version of MERaLiON/MERaLiON-3-10B-preview with TurboQuant KV-cache quantization. Optimized for Apple Silicon inference via the MLX framework.

MERaLiON-3-10B is a multimodal audio-language model built on a Gemma-2 decoder backbone, designed for speech-to-text and audio understanding tasks.

Approximate model size: ~3 GB

Model Specifications

Property	Value
Base Model	MERaLiON/MERaLiON-3-10B-preview
Parameters	~10 billion
Architecture	Multimodal audio-language (Gemma-2 decoder backbone)
Modality	Audio + text input, text output
License	See base model
Weight Quantization	2-bit (~3 GB)
KV-Cache Quantization	TurboQuant
Framework	MLX (Apple Silicon)

Quickstart

from mlx_lm import load, generate

model, tokenizer = load("majentik/MERaLiON-3-10B-TurboQuant-MLX-2bit")

prompt = "Transcribe the following audio:"
response = generate(model, tokenizer, prompt=prompt, max_tokens=512)
print(response)

What is TurboQuant?

TurboQuant (arXiv: 2504.19874) is a KV-cache quantization technique that compresses the key-value cache used during autoregressive generation. Combined with 2-bit weight quantization in MLX, this provides aggressive dual compression for running on memory-constrained devices.

Note: 2-bit weight quantization is aggressive and may result in some quality degradation compared to 4-bit or 8-bit variants. Recommended for memory-constrained environments where fitting the model is the priority.

KV-Cache Quantization Comparison

Method	Prefill Speed	Decode Speed	Memory Savings	Reference
TurboQuant	Baseline	Baseline	High	arXiv: 2504.19874
RotorQuant	5.3x faster	28% faster	High	GitHub

Memory Estimates (MERaLiON-3-10B)

Precision	Approximate Size	MLX Variant
FP16 (original)	~20 GB	--
8-bit quantized	~10 GB	TurboQuant-MLX-8bit
4-bit quantized	~5 GB	TurboQuant-MLX-4bit
2-bit quantized	~3 GB	This model

Hardware Requirements

This model requires approximately 3 GB of unified memory. Recommended hardware:

• Apple M1 (8 GB+)
• Any Apple Silicon Mac

See Also

• MERaLiON/MERaLiON-3-10B-preview -- Base model
• majentik/MERaLiON-3-10B-TurboQuant-MLX-8bit -- MLX 8-bit variant
• majentik/MERaLiON-3-10B-TurboQuant-MLX-4bit -- MLX 4-bit variant
• majentik/MERaLiON-3-10B-RotorQuant-MLX-2bit -- RotorQuant MLX 2-bit variant
• TurboQuant Paper (arXiv: 2504.19874)
• MLX Framework