Mungert/Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct-HF-GGUF

Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct-HF GGUF Models

Ultra-Low-Bit Quantization with IQ-DynamicGate (1-2 bit)

Our latest quantization method introduces precision-adaptive quantization for ultra-low-bit models (1-2 bit), with benchmark-proven improvements on Llama-3-8B. This approach uses layer-specific strategies to preserve accuracy while maintaining extreme memory efficiency.

Benchmark Context

All tests conducted on Llama-3-8B-Instruct using:

• Standard perplexity evaluation pipeline
• 2048-token context window
• Same prompt set across all quantizations

Method

• Dynamic Precision Allocation:
  • First/Last 25% of layers → IQ4_XS (selected layers)
  • Middle 50% → IQ2_XXS/IQ3_S (increase efficiency)
• Critical Component Protection:
  • Embeddings/output layers use Q5_K
  • Reduces error propagation by 38% vs standard 1-2bit

Quantization Performance Comparison (Llama-3-8B)

Quantization	Standard PPL	DynamicGate PPL	Δ PPL	Std Size	DG Size	Δ Size	Std Speed	DG Speed
IQ2_XXS	11.30	9.84	-12.9%	2.5G	2.6G	+0.1G	234s	246s
IQ2_XS	11.72	11.63	-0.8%	2.7G	2.8G	+0.1G	242s	246s
IQ2_S	14.31	9.02	-36.9%	2.7G	2.9G	+0.2G	238s	244s
IQ1_M	27.46	15.41	-43.9%	2.2G	2.5G	+0.3G	206s	212s
IQ1_S	53.07	32.00	-39.7%	2.1G	2.4G	+0.3G	184s	209s

Key:

• PPL = Perplexity (lower is better)
• Δ PPL = Percentage change from standard to DynamicGate
• Speed = Inference time (CPU avx2, 2048 token context)
• Size differences reflect mixed quantization overhead

Key Improvements:

• 🔥 IQ1_M shows massive 43.9% perplexity reduction (27.46 → 15.41)
• 🚀 IQ2_S cuts perplexity by 36.9% while adding only 0.2GB
• ⚡ IQ1_S maintains 39.7% better accuracy despite 1-bit quantization

Tradeoffs:

• All variants have modest size increases (0.1-0.3GB)
• Inference speeds remain comparable (<5% difference)

When to Use These Models

📌 Fitting models into GPU VRAM

✔ Memory-constrained deployments

✔ Cpu and Edge Devices where 1-2bit errors can be tolerated

✔ Research into ultra-low-bit quantization

Choosing the Right Model Format

Selecting the correct model format depends on your hardware capabilities and memory constraints.

BF16 (Brain Float 16) – Use if BF16 acceleration is available

• A 16-bit floating-point format designed for faster computation while retaining good precision.
• Provides similar dynamic range as FP32 but with lower memory usage.
• Recommended if your hardware supports BF16 acceleration (check your device's specs).
• Ideal for high-performance inference with reduced memory footprint compared to FP32.

📌 Use BF16 if:
✔ Your hardware has native BF16 support (e.g., newer GPUs, TPUs).
✔ You want higher precision while saving memory.
✔ You plan to requantize the model into another format.

📌 Avoid BF16 if:
❌ Your hardware does not support BF16 (it may fall back to FP32 and run slower).
❌ You need compatibility with older devices that lack BF16 optimization.

---

F16 (Float 16) – More widely supported than BF16

• A 16-bit floating-point high precision but with less of range of values than BF16.
• Works on most devices with FP16 acceleration support (including many GPUs and some CPUs).
• Slightly lower numerical precision than BF16 but generally sufficient for inference.

📌 Use F16 if:
✔ Your hardware supports FP16 but not BF16.
✔ You need a balance between speed, memory usage, and accuracy.
✔ You are running on a GPU or another device optimized for FP16 computations.

📌 Avoid F16 if:
❌ Your device lacks native FP16 support (it may run slower than expected).
❌ You have memory limitations.

---

Quantized Models (Q4_K, Q6_K, Q8, etc.) – For CPU & Low-VRAM Inference

Quantization reduces model size and memory usage while maintaining as much accuracy as possible.

• Lower-bit models (Q4_K) → Best for minimal memory usage, may have lower precision.
• Higher-bit models (Q6_K, Q8_0) → Better accuracy, requires more memory.

📌 Use Quantized Models if:
✔ You are running inference on a CPU and need an optimized model.
✔ Your device has low VRAM and cannot load full-precision models.
✔ You want to reduce memory footprint while keeping reasonable accuracy.

📌 Avoid Quantized Models if:
❌ You need maximum accuracy (full-precision models are better for this).
❌ Your hardware has enough VRAM for higher-precision formats (BF16/F16).

---

Very Low-Bit Quantization (IQ3_XS, IQ3_S, IQ3_M, Q4_K, Q4_0)

These models are optimized for extreme memory efficiency, making them ideal for low-power devices or large-scale deployments where memory is a critical constraint.

• IQ3_XS: Ultra-low-bit quantization (3-bit) with extreme memory efficiency.

  • Use case: Best for ultra-low-memory devices where even Q4_K is too large.
  • Trade-off: Lower accuracy compared to higher-bit quantizations.

• IQ3_S: Small block size for maximum memory efficiency.

  • Use case: Best for low-memory devices where IQ3_XS is too aggressive.

• IQ3_M: Medium block size for better accuracy than IQ3_S.

  • Use case: Suitable for low-memory devices where IQ3_S is too limiting.

• Q4_K: 4-bit quantization with block-wise optimization for better accuracy.

  • Use case: Best for low-memory devices where Q6_K is too large.

• Q4_0: Pure 4-bit quantization, optimized for ARM devices.

  • Use case: Best for ARM-based devices or low-memory environments.

---

Summary Table: Model Format Selection

Model Format	Precision	Memory Usage	Device Requirements	Best Use Case
BF16	Highest	High	BF16-supported GPU/CPUs	High-speed inference with reduced memory
F16	High	High	FP16-supported devices	GPU inference when BF16 isn't available
Q4_K	Medium Low	Low	CPU or Low-VRAM devices	Best for memory-constrained environments
Q6_K	Medium	Moderate	CPU with more memory	Better accuracy while still being quantized
Q8_0	High	Moderate	CPU or GPU with enough VRAM	Best accuracy among quantized models
IQ3_XS	Very Low	Very Low	Ultra-low-memory devices	Extreme memory efficiency and low accuracy
Q4_0	Low	Low	ARM or low-memory devices	llama.cpp can optimize for ARM devices

---

Included Files & Details

Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct-HF-bf16.gguf

• Model weights preserved in BF16.
• Use this if you want to requantize the model into a different format.
• Best if your device supports BF16 acceleration.

Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct-HF-f16.gguf

• Model weights stored in F16.
• Use if your device supports FP16, especially if BF16 is not available.

Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct-HF-bf16-q8_0.gguf

• Output & embeddings remain in BF16.
• All other layers quantized to Q8_0.
• Use if your device supports BF16 and you want a quantized version.

Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct-HF-f16-q8_0.gguf

• Output & embeddings remain in F16.
• All other layers quantized to Q8_0.

Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct-HF-q4_k.gguf

• Output & embeddings quantized to Q8_0.
• All other layers quantized to Q4_K.
• Good for CPU inference with limited memory.

Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct-HF-q4_k_s.gguf

• Smallest Q4_K variant, using less memory at the cost of accuracy.
• Best for very low-memory setups.

Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct-HF-q6_k.gguf

• Output & embeddings quantized to Q8_0.
• All other layers quantized to Q6_K .

Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct-HF-q8_0.gguf

• Fully Q8 quantized model for better accuracy.
• Requires more memory but offers higher precision.

Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct-HF-iq3_xs.gguf

• IQ3_XS quantization, optimized for extreme memory efficiency.
• Best for ultra-low-memory devices.

Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct-HF-iq3_m.gguf

• IQ3_M quantization, offering a medium block size for better accuracy.
• Suitable for low-memory devices.

Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct-HF-q4_0.gguf

• Pure Q4_0 quantization, optimized for ARM devices.
• Best for low-memory environments.
• Prefer IQ4_NL for better accuracy.

🚀 If you find these models useful

❤ Please click "Like" if you find this useful!
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Model Overview

Description:

Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct is a large language model customized by NVIDIA to improve the helpfulness of LLM generated responses to user queries.

This model reaches Arena Hard of 85.0, AlpacaEval 2 LC of 57.6 and GPT-4-Turbo MT-Bench of 8.98, which are known to be predictive of LMSys Chatbot Arena Elo

As of 1 Oct 2024, this model is #1 on all three automatic alignment benchmarks (verified tab for AlpacaEval 2 LC), edging out strong frontier models such as GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

As of Oct 24th, 2024 the model has Elo Score of 1267(+-7), rank 9 and style controlled rank of 26 on ChatBot Arena leaderboard.

This model was trained using RLHF (specifically, REINFORCE), Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Reward and HelpSteer2-Preference prompts on a Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct model as the initial policy.

Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct-HF has been converted from Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct to support it in the HuggingFace Transformers codebase. Please note that evaluation results might be slightly different from the Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct as evaluated in NeMo-Aligner, which the evaluation results below are based on.

Try hosted inference for free at build.nvidia.com - it comes with an OpenAI-compatible API interface.

See details on our paper at https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.01257 - as a preview, this model can correctly the question How many r in strawberry? without specialized prompting or additional reasoning tokens:

A sweet question!
Let’s count the “R”s in “strawberry”:
1. S
2. T
3. R
4. A
5. W
6. B
7. E
8. R
9. R
10. Y
There are **3 “R”s** in the word “strawberry”.

Note: This model is a demonstration of our techniques for improving helpfulness in general-domain instruction following. It has not been tuned for performance in specialized domains such as math.

Terms of use

By accessing this model, you are agreeing to the LLama 3.1 terms and conditions of the license, acceptable use policy and Meta’s privacy policy

Evaluation Metrics

As of 1 Oct 2024, Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct performs best on Arena Hard, AlpacaEval 2 LC (verified tab) and MT Bench (GPT-4-Turbo)

Model	Arena Hard	AlpacaEval	MT-Bench	Mean Response Length
Details	(95% CI)	2 LC (SE)	(GPT-4-Turbo)	(# of Characters for MT-Bench)
Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct	85.0 (-1.5, 1.5)	57.6 (1.65)	8.98	2199.8
Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct	55.7 (-2.9, 2.7)	38.1 (0.90)	8.22	1728.6
Llama-3.1-405B-Instruct	69.3 (-2.4, 2.2)	39.3 (1.43)	8.49	1664.7
Claude-3-5-Sonnet-20240620	79.2 (-1.9, 1.7)	52.4 (1.47)	8.81	1619.9
GPT-4o-2024-05-13	79.3 (-2.1, 2.0)	57.5 (1.47)	8.74	1752.2

Usage:

You can use the model using HuggingFace Transformers library with 2 or more 80GB GPUs (NVIDIA Ampere or newer) with at least 150GB of free disk space to accomodate the download.

This code has been tested on Transformers v4.44.0, torch v2.4.0 and 2 A100 80GB GPUs, but any setup that supports meta-llama/Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct should support this model as well. If you run into problems, you can consider doing pip install -U transformers.

import torch
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
model_name = "nvidia/Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct-HF"
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(model_name, torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16, device_map="auto")
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name)

prompt = "How many r in strawberry?"
messages = [{"role": "user", "content": prompt}]

tokenized_message = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(messages, tokenize=True, add_generation_prompt=True, return_tensors="pt", return_dict=True)
response_token_ids = model.generate(tokenized_message['input_ids'].cuda(),attention_mask=tokenized_message['attention_mask'].cuda(),  max_new_tokens=4096, pad_token_id = tokenizer.eos_token_id)
generated_tokens =response_token_ids[:, len(tokenized_message['input_ids'][0]):]
generated_text = tokenizer.batch_decode(generated_tokens, skip_special_tokens=True)[0]
print(generated_text)

# See response at top of model card

References(s):

• NeMo Aligner
• HelpSteer2-Preference
• HelpSteer2
• Introducing Llama 3.1: Our most capable models to date
• Meta's Llama 3.1 Webpage
• Meta's Llama 3.1 Model Card

Model Architecture:

Architecture Type: Transformer
Network Architecture: Llama 3.1

Input:

Input Type(s): Text
Input Format: String
Input Parameters: One Dimensional (1D)
Other Properties Related to Input: Max of 128k tokens

Output:

Output Type(s): Text
Output Format: String
Output Parameters: One Dimensional (1D)
Other Properties Related to Output: Max of 4k tokens

Software Integration:

Supported Hardware Microarchitecture Compatibility:

• NVIDIA Ampere
  
• NVIDIA Hopper
  
• NVIDIA Turing
  Supported Operating System(s): Linux
  

Model Version:

v1.0

Training & Evaluation:

Alignment methodology

• REINFORCE implemented in NeMo Aligner

Datasets:

Data Collection Method by dataset

• [Hybrid: Human, Synthetic]
  

Labeling Method by dataset

• [Human]
  

Link:

• HelpSteer2

Properties (Quantity, Dataset Descriptions, Sensor(s)):

• 21, 362 prompt-responses built to make more models more aligned with human preference - specifically more helpful, factually-correct, coherent, and customizable based on complexity and verbosity.
• 20, 324 prompt-responses used for training and 1, 038 used for validation.

Inference:

Engine: Triton
Test Hardware: H100, A100 80GB, A100 40GB

Ethical Considerations:

NVIDIA believes Trustworthy AI is a shared responsibility and we have established policies and practices to enable development for a wide array of AI applications. When downloaded or used in accordance with our terms of service, developers should work with their supporting model team to ensure this model meets requirements for the relevant industry and use case and addresses unforeseen product misuse. For more detailed information on ethical considerations for this model, please see the Model Card++ Explainability, Bias, Safety & Security, and Privacy Subcards. Please report security vulnerabilities or NVIDIA AI Concerns here.

Please report security vulnerabilities or NVIDIA AI Concerns here.

Citation

If you find this model useful, please cite the following works

@misc{wang2024helpsteer2preferencecomplementingratingspreferences,
      title={HelpSteer2-Preference: Complementing Ratings with Preferences}, 
      author={Zhilin Wang and Alexander Bukharin and Olivier Delalleau and Daniel Egert and Gerald Shen and Jiaqi Zeng and Oleksii Kuchaiev and Yi Dong},
      year={2024},
      eprint={2410.01257},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.LG},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.01257}, 
}