mratsim/MiniMax-M2.1-BF16-INT4-AWQ

MiniMax M2.1 (Mixed-Precision BF16 + INT4 AWQ)

This strives to be the highest quality quant that can run on 192GiB VRAM

💡This is a sister model to mratsim/MiniMax-M2.1-FP8-INT4-AWQ with the original model FP8 weights pre-dequantized to BF16.

This makes it compatible with 8x3090 systems (which don't have hardware FP8) and also compatible with SGLang for an extra 3 GiB in VRAM.

It features:

• That model has ensured that all experts are calibrated, not doing so is extremely detrimental, PR: https://github.com/vllm-project/llm-compressor/pull/2171

  Visual showcase of why ensuring quantization of all MoE experts is important

  • Source: https://avtc.github.io/aquarium-side-by-side/
  • Context: https://github.com/ModelCloud/GPTQModel/pull/2235

  

• Mixed precision with:

  • self-attention weights copied directly from the official version (default FP8 with 2D-blocks)
  • experts weights quantized using AWQ W4A16G32 scheme (4-bit weights, 16-bit activations, scaling factor per group of 32 weights)

• High-quality large and diverse dataset with programming and devops focus as well as domain-specific knowledge (math, sciences, medical, finance, business, humanities, philosophy, creative writing), general knowledge, pop culture and behavioral situations because we never code in a vacuum. And we want to make sure all experts are calibrated to the full range of their activations.

• Calibration explicitly tests multilingual capabilities:

  • Asia: Chinese, Hindi, Korean, Japanese
  • Europe: French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish
  • Middle-East: Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish

• Calibration explicitly tests 60 programming languages and not just Python:

  • Imperative programming: C, C++, Go, Zig, ...
  • Functional programming: Haskell, F#, OCaml, Erlang, Lisp, Clojure ...
  • Web-focused: HTML/CSS, Typescript, PHP, ...
  • Mixed paradigm: D, Kotlin, Nim, Rust, Swift, ...
  • Theorem provers: Coq, Lean
  • Low-level: ARM64 assembly, x86-64 assembly, LLVM IR
  • GPU Programming: Cuda, Vulkan, Apple Metal
  • Game Programming: GDScript, GLSL
  • Domain-specific: MATLAB, Julia, Solidity, R

• Calibration tries to ensure coverage for a wide variety of experience (from explaining concepts to your grandmother to debugging Kubernetes logs)

• Built by a dev, for devs (and it looks very good for STEM as well)

It uses my new declarative quantization framework https://github.com/mratsim/quantizers which facilitates highly-tuned calibration sets: calibrate_software_engineer.yaml

This has taken several days and contribution and bug reports to the ecosystem, I hope you find it useful.

• https://github.com/vllm-project/llm-compressor/pull/2171
• https://github.com/vllm-project/llm-compressor/issues/2172
• https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/issues/31623
• https://github.com/sgl-project/sglang/issues/16276
• https://github.com/sgl-project/sglang/issues/16295

📥 Usage & Running Instructions

The model was tested with SGLang + 2x RTX Pro 6000, here is a script suitable for such configuration with the maximum 196,608 context length. This uses 92.5GiB of VRAM with the flashinfer backend.

Please refer to mratsim/MiniMax-M2.1-FP8-INT4-AWQ#running-script for running it in vLLM

Running script

--trust-remote-code is necessary until the transformers team merges github.com/huggingface/transformers/pull/42028

You have 2 reasoning parsers;

• minimax, puts the reasoning content in a special field like DeepSeek models that is usually rendered in a specific manner in frontends.
• minimax_append_think, puts the reasoning into <think>reasoning_content</think> and that is sent as normal text. Few frontends properly render that, I'm aware of Cherry Studio on Desktop and ChatterUI on Android.

The reason why minimax_append_think was introduced was Interleaved Thinking and having the model build upon it's previous thinking (usually frontends discard the thinking trace)

💡In the sister model, I mentioned that with the recommended parameters the model tends to get stuck in repetition loops.
This does not seem to happen with SGLang hence "repetition_penalty: 1.10, frequency_penalty: 0.40" are not used.
There is no way to override such settings without editing generation_config.json anyway: https://github.com/sgl-project/sglang/issues/15487

# Model configuration (Mandatory)
MODEL="mratsim/MiniMax-M2.1-BF16-INT4-AWQ"
MODELNAME="MiniMax-M2.1"
GPU_UTIL=0.93
SGLANG_PORT=8000

# Prevent memory fragmentation
export PYTORCH_ALLOC_CONF=expandable_segments:True,max_split_size_mb:512

python3 -m sglang.launch_server \
    --host 0.0.0.0 \
    --port "${SGLANG_PORT}" \
    --sleep-on-idle \
    --disable-custom-all-reduce \
    --max-running-requests 64 \
    --cuda-graph-max-bs 64 \
    --attention-backend flashinfer \
    --served-model-name "${MODELNAME}" \
    --model-path "${MODEL}" \
    --tool-call-parser minimax-m2 \
    --reasoning-parser minimax \
    --trust-remote-code \
    --tp 2 \
    --mem-fraction-static ${GPU_UTIL} \
    "$@"

    # --reasoning-parser minimax-append-think

🔬 Quantization method

The llmcompressor library was used with the following recipe:

default_stage:
  default_modifiers:
    AWQModifier:
      config_groups:
        mlp_experts_projections:
          # Include only MLP expert weights for 4-bit quantization
          targets: ["re:.*block_sparse_moe\\.experts\\.\\d+\\.(w1|w2|w3)$"]
          weights:
            num_bits: 4
            type: int
            symmetric: true
            group_size: 32
            strategy: group
            dynamic: false
            # actorder: group
            observer: memoryless_minmax

      mappings:
        - smooth_layer: re:.*post_attention_layernorm$
          balance_layers: ["re:.*w1$", "re:.*w3$"]
        - smooth_layer: re:.*w3$
          balance_layers: ["re:.*w2$"]
      duo_scaling: true

The calibration set had 590 examples, 8192 sequence length, 60 programming languages, 12 spoken languages and is detailed at calibrate_software_engineer.yaml

Quantization theory and heuristics for manual tuning

In-depth overview of quantization theory and heuristics for manual tuning

Layers to quantize

Quantization should be focused on Linear layers (also called Dense or Fully-Connected layers i.e. MatMul+Bias) In particular quantizing LayerNorm/RMSnorm layer is strongly discouraged, see [1]

LayerNorm in Quantization. Kovaleva et al. (2021); Wei et al. (2022) find that outliers in the LayerNorm parameters of BERT (Devlin et al., 2019) cause difficulties in model compression. Given the importance of LayerNorm, all the quantization methods we discuss above leave LayerNorm unquantized.

This is also reported in Intel and Nvidia repo:

• https://github.com/intel/neural-compressor/issues/1963#issuecomment-2274873441
• https://github.com/NVIDIA/TensorRT/issues/4084#issuecomment-2294513950

Tensors to up-quantize

If there is enough bits, down projections should be prioritized.

According to [4]

Fig. 3: Maximum absolute value over layers for a LLaMA3-8B. Each color represent a different projection and we clearly see that down_proj has the biggest spikes in input and output. We also observe that RMSNorm propagate spikes through the entire model

According to [5]

Figure 5(a) illustrates the extremal ratio across layers and modules in LLaMA2-7B, highlighting that weight outliers are concentrated in the down-projection matrices Wdown ℓ of the second layer and the last two layers. Figures 5(b) and 5(c) provide detailed visualizations of these outliers in the last two layers.

Mixture-of-Experts quantization (MoE)

Mixture-of-Experts require specific quantization techniques.

Mixed-precision quantization

Some layers have a higher impact on LLM performance. According to [2], spending more bits in attention layers results in large gain compared to spending them in FFN layers. According to [3] on 2-bit quantization:

• quantizing expert FFN layers do not seriously impact model quality
• quantizing cross-attention has some impact
• quantizing self-attention has a large impact
• quantizing dense FFN has a very significant impact

Hence to preserve model quality we should choose not to quantize dense FFN layers and self-attention layers.

We notice that:

• official MXFP4 weights of gpt-oss-120b from OpenAI keep self-attention in BF16:
  • https://huggingface.co/openai/gpt-oss-120b/blob/main/model.safetensors.index.json
• NVFP4 weights of DeepSeek-R1 quantized by Nvidia also keep self-attention in BF16:
  • https://huggingface.co/nvidia/DeepSeek-R1-0528-FP4/blob/main/model.safetensors.index.json

Layers with high-impact

According to [2], giving more bits to the first k blocks have a significantly higher impact on model quality than for the same last k blocks.

Expert quantization

When quantizing MoE, quantizing activations is tricky as only a subset of experts are activated per request. You have to make sure all experts are calibrated.

Visual showcase of why ensuring quantization of all MoE experts is important

• Source: https://avtc.github.io/aquarium-side-by-side/
• Context: https://github.com/ModelCloud/GPTQModel/pull/2235

References

1. Why Do Some Inputs Break Low-Bit LLM Quantization? (2025)
   Ting-Yun Chang, Muru Zhang, Jesse Thomason, Robin Jia
   https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12044

2. Examining Post-Training Quantization for Mixture-of-Experts: A Benchmark (2024)
   Pingzhi Li, Xiaolong Jin, Yu Cheng, Tianlong Chen
   https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.08155v1

3. Mixture of Quantized Experts (MoQE): Complementary Effect of Low-bit Quantization and Robustness (2023)
   Young Jin Kim, Raffy Fahim, Hany Hassan Awadalla
   https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.02410

4. Precision Where It Matters: A Novel Spike
   Aware Mixed-Precision Quantization Strategy for
   LLaMA-based Language Models (2025)
   Lucas Maisonnave, Cyril Moineau, Olivier Bichler, and Fabrice Rastello
   https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.21553

5. Systematic Outliers in Large Language Models (2025)
   Yongqi An, Xu Zhao, Tao Yu, Ming Tang, Jinqiao Wang
   https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06415v2