---
license: other
license_name: qwen-research
license_link: https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct/blob/main/LICENSE
base_model: Qwen/Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct
tags:
- merge
- ties
- model-merging
- research
- tetracta
language:
- en
pipeline_tag: text-generation
---

> **Model X-Ray evidence correction — 6 September 2026.** Any structural-location, knowledge-separation, portrait-visualization, lesion-response, legacy simulated-quantization, robustness or prior X-Ray endorsement previously linked from this card has been withdrawn. It is not current evidence. No replacement result is published while validation remains pending. [Correction record](https://www.tetracta.ai/model-xray/correction/).


# Chimera-1 — two skills, one model, training-free merge (method demo)

**Chimera-1** (*chimera*: in biology, one organism carrying two genetic lineages — which is exactly what this model is) is a proof-of-concept for a simple question: *can you take two specialists and stitch
their skills into ONE model — with no training at the merge step, and no loss of general ability?*

Answer, measured: **yes, under conditions we state below.**

| model | skill A (Roman numerals) | skill B (letter ops) | Belebele-EN | perplexity | chat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct (base) | 76% | 45% | 50% | 68.1 | ✓ |
| specialist A | **98%** | 45% | — | — | — |
| specialist B | 80% | **75%** | — | — | — |
| **Chimera-1 (this model)** | **89%** | **71%** | **50%** | **68.1** | ✓ identical |

**The headline:** +8.8 and +25.0 points on the two target skills in the 1,210-question head-to-head below (the earlier 80-item pilot read +13 and +26), and **no measured regression** on general
ability — Belebele-English, fixed-text perplexity and chat outputs are bit-for-bit indistinguishable from the base.
The merge itself is **training-free** (TIES: task-vector trim + sign election + disjoint mean), runs on CPU in minutes,
and the result is a single 3B model with **no extra inference cost**.

## What this is — and is not

- **It is a method demo.** The two skills (Roman-numeral conversion, character-level word operations) are deliberately
  simple, verifiable testbeds — chosen because the base model is measurably weak at them (headroom). This is not a
  production assistant; it is evidence about *merging*.
- **The specialists were made by us** with light fine-tuning (top-layers only) — the *merge* is the training-free part.
- **The law we validated across 10 experiments:** merge synergy = **headroom × complementarity × proximity.**
  If the base already solves the task, there is nothing to gain. If the parents aren't genuinely complementary,
  merging dilutes. If a parent has drifted far from the shared base (heavy continued-pretraining), aggressive
  merging produces mush — we show a negative control where a merged coder model drops to 0% on code.
- **What we did not manage (stated honestly):** three attempts at X-Ray-*guided* merge surgery (per-layer and
  per-module weighting/refereeing from internal divergence maps) did **not** beat uniform TIES on average — one
  variant preserved the concentrated skill best (95%) at the cost of the other. Blind TIES is a strong baseline.
  What internal measurement *did* reliably do is **predict which pairs merge profitably before merging** (3/3 in
  our runs) and expose the trade-off dial.


## Full head-to-head vs the base — 1,210 questions (22 Jul)

Same LL-based harness for both models. Sanity check: the base scores **MMLU 67.0%**, matching its publicly
reported numbers — the harness measures correctly.

![Surgical profile](chimera-surgical-profile.png)

| benchmark | base | Chimera-1 | Δ |
|---|---|---|---|
| MMLU (200) | 67.0% | 66.5% | −0.5 |
| ARC-Challenge (200) | 81.5% | 81.5% | 0.0 |
| HellaSwag (150) | 70.0% | 71.3% | +1.3 |
| Belebele-EN (200) | 51.0% | 50.5% | −0.5 |
| Belebele-TR (75) | 41.3% | 41.3% | 0.0 |
| Belebele-AR (75) | 50.7% | 49.3% | −1.3 |
| Belebele-ZH (75) | 50.7% | 50.7% | 0.0 |
| Belebele-RU (75) | 49.3% | 49.3% | 0.0 |
| **Roman numerals (80)** | 82.5% | **91.2%** | **+8.8** |
| **Letter ops (80)** | 37.5% | **62.5%** | **+25.0** |

Every standard benchmark sits inside the ±2pp bf16 run-noise band (max |Δ| = 1.3pp); the two implanted skills
moved +8.8 and +25.0. A capability edit with a **measured blast radius of zero** — verified on 1,050 standard
questions, not assumed from a spot check.

## Why we built it

We build an interpretability instrument (an "X-Ray" for LLMs) at [tetracta.ai](https://www.tetracta.ai/xray.html).
Model merging is the perfect stress-test for it: everyone merges blind and evals after; we wanted to know how much
of the outcome is predictable *from the weights, before the merge*. Full write-up, per-layer divergence films and
the honest failure catalogue: [tetracta.ai/research.html](https://www.tetracta.ai/research.html).

## Use

Qwen2.5 ChatML format, identical to the base model. License inherited from Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct
(**Qwen Research License — non-commercial, research use**).

```python
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
m = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("tetracta/Chimera-1-Qwen2.5-3B", dtype="bfloat16")
t = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("tetracta/Chimera-1-Qwen2.5-3B")
# try: "Convert the Roman numeral CDXLIV to a regular number." / "Spell the word 'measure' backwards."
```

*— Tetracta AI Teams · for humans, like humans. We measure; we publish the failures too.*