mlx-community/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-q4_0-mlx-aligned

Gemma 4 26B A4B it — QAT-aligned 4-bit for MLX

TL;DR: This is not a regular mlx_lm convert -q quantization. It is a QAT-lattice-aligned 4-bit conversion of google/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-q4_0-unquantized that recovers Google's original QAT scales from the weights instead of re-deriving them from min/max statistics. Standard MLX affine layout (group_size=32, 4-bit), loadable by stock mlx-lm — no patches needed. 52 GB → 15 GB (~5.0 bits/weight). Text-only (the vision tower is not included).

Why a special conversion?

The qat-q4_0-unquantized checkpoints store weights already snapped to a symmetric int4 lattice (codes ∈ [-8, 7], one scale per 32 input-dim elements). For the MoE experts, dense MLPs, and the router, those scales are learned during QAT and cannot be recovered from weight min/max statistics: only 26–38% of blocks touch an extreme code. Any quantizer that re-derives scales — llama.cpp's naive Q4_0 (d = extreme/-8) and MLX's default affine mode (scale = (max-min)/15, group_size 64) — re-snaps ~60–74% of MoE/MLP blocks onto a misaligned grid. (This is the same effect Unsloth documented for llama.cpp in their Gemma 4 QAT analysis.)

This conversion instead recovers the grid step of every 32-block directly from the snapped weights (k-sweep over absmax/k + least-squares refinement) and emits it as standard MLX affine parameters (scale = s, bias = -8·s). The MoE router (router.proj) is kept in bf16 (~20 MB): top-8-of-128 expert selection is the most perturbation-sensitive spot, and llama.cpp MoE GGUFs never quantize ffn_gate_inp either.

Fidelity vs. the bf16 QAT reference (26B A4B)

Weight space, relative RMSE to the original checkpoint:

	default mlx_lm convert -q (affine, gs=64)	this conversion
relRMSE	7.0–8.6%	0.18–0.23% (bf16 storage noise floor)

Teacher-forced logits, 1600-token mixed EN/zh/code text, KL(bf16 ‖ quantized):

variant	mean KL	top-1 agreement
default mlx_lm convert -q (gs=64)	0.277	82.7%
MLX affine gs=32	0.353	80.1%
this conversion	0.090	90.3%
control: bf16 + matched random noise σ=0.185% (no quantization)	0.151	87.7%

The noise control shows this conversion sits at the intrinsic sensitivity floor of this 128-expert sparse-MoE architecture: the residual KL is fully explained by ±1-ulp bf16 rounding noise amplified by discrete routing flips, not by quantization error. (For reference, Unsloth's UD-Q4_K_XL GGUF reports mean KLD 0.098 / top-1 85.6% on 26B on their own eval set.)

Use

pip install mlx-lm

from mlx_lm import load, generate

model, tokenizer = load("mlx-community/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-q4_0-mlx-aligned")
prompt = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(
    [{"role": "user", "content": "Explain quantization-aware training in two sentences."}],
    add_generation_prompt=True,
)
print(generate(model, tokenizer, prompt=prompt, max_tokens=256))

Reproduce

The conversion scripts are included in this repo under conversion/:

• qat_q4_recover.py — lattice-scale recovery quantizer (recover_grid_step: per-32-block k-sweep with residual tolerance 0.075 to absorb bf16 rounding of code × scale products, then least-squares refit)
• convert_aligned.py — end-to-end converter producing this repo's format (run against the qat-q4_0-unquantized checkpoint; --quantize-router to also quantize the router)

Notes & limitations

• Text-only. The mlx-lm Gemma 4 implementation drops the vision tower (which Google did not QAT-quantize anyway).
• ~5.0 bits/weight vs. 4.5 for GGUF Q4_0: MLX's affine format stores a bias per group that is always -8·scale here. Redundant but required by the current kernels.
• Byte-exact recovery of the bf16 checkpoint is not possible with bf16 scales (Google's original QAT scales are fp32); this conversion reaches ~90% byte-exactness with the remainder at ±1 ulp — at, not above, the bf16 noise floor that the KL control quantifies.

License & attribution

Gemma is provided under and subject to the terms at https://ai.google.dev/gemma/docs/gemma_4_license (Apache 2.0 for Gemma 4). This is a quantized derivative of Google DeepMind's gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-q4_0-unquantized; all credit for the model and the QAT pipeline goes to Google. Conversion performed with mlx-lm plus the included scale-recovery quantizer.