[DAY ONE] PROJECT CROWFEATHER 4/30/2026 ...The day I forgot to attach wandb.ai Just dropped Crowfeather-50m, the first checkpoint in a series, and yeah, no graphs.
54.5M params. Pretrain only. 17,500 steps banked on FineWeb-edu before Thunder credits ran dry. About 2.3B tokens, no SFT yet.
Architecture: Gemma-4 alternating sliding/global attention (1024 window, last layer always global) plus DeepSeek-V4 Muon optimizer plus WSD scheduler plus Gemma-2 logit soft-cap plus PaLM z-loss. Recipe in the model card.
What it can do: writes grammatical English. Knows that France has Rhine-adjacent monasteries (it picked Rouen instead of Paris but the vocabulary is in there). Tells stories about Mr. Fabien.
What it can't do yet: facts, code, math. Base LM, no SFT, no instruction tuning.
The series: Every additional training run becomes another model card here Every model card gets a matching post on this profile Continuation goes to Colab next, picking up from step 17500 out of 100k
Limited to one post a day on Hugging Face, so updates will trickle out at that pace. Follow [@Crownelius](@Crownelius) and [@Crowfeather](
Crowfeather) if you want to watch this thing learn in public. Next drop will either come with the finished pre-train or whatever step I land on before the bank takes my credit card away.
EARLY SNEAK PREVIEW of our first DeepSeek-V4-Pro dataset, Tachibana 4!
Tachibana 4 is our upcoming agentic coding dataset: - Questions prioritize real-world, challenging agentic coding tasks across a variety of programming languages and topics. - Areas of focus include back-end and front-end development, systems programming, distributed systems, performance optimization, data structures, databases and data engineering, game and mobile development, security engineering, compiler design, custom tooling, task automation, practical bugfixes, and more! - A wide variety of emphasized languages improves development capability: Python, C, C++, C#, Go, TypeScript, Java, JavaScript, Rust, Haskell, SQL, Shell, R, Ruby, assembly code, and more! - Synthethic prompts utilize a variety of personas, experience levels, and styles of communication to maximize real-world flexibility and usability.
These agentic datasets will power the upcoming Esper 4, and whatever you can build! We'll have more finetunes on the way as well! :) we're going to make open source better and better for your work!
If you would like to see Esper 4 and these datasets faster, this is the best way you can help us: sequelbox/SupportOpenSource
Same-base DARE-TIES merge of Qwen3.6-27B + 3 fine-tunes (rico03 Claude distill, Esper3.1, kai-os Opus reasoning anchor) via my Omnimerge_v2 method (OBIM-lite + DAREx-q + EMR election).
Hit a Qwen3.6-specific fragility: hyperparams that work flawlessly on 3.5 produced 80% unclosed-<think> on 3.6, collapsing pass@1 to ~20%. Per-tensor delta forensics localized the failure to mlp.{gate,up,down}_proj in layers 27–52. Fix: MLP-passthrough surgery — copy MLPs verbatim from base, keep merged attn + linear_attn. Leak → 0%.
Q6_K results (vs Qwen3.6 base / vs Omnimerge-v2 on Qwen3.5): • HumanEval: 84.76% (= base, +5.49 pp vs v2) • MBPP corrected: 73.40% (+15.80 pp vs base, ≈ v2) • GPQA Diamond: ~84.75% partial 192/198 (+15.5 pp vs v2)
▶ Qwen3.5-4B Importance-Signal Study (M1..M5)
Controlled 5-way comparison: same Qwen3.5-4B base, same 2 fine-tunes (Jackrong Claude-4.5 distill + Crow Opus-4.6 distill), only the importance signal driving DARE-TIES sparsification varies.
Findings: Fisher wins HE (+4.88 pp over vanilla), LRP wins MBPP (+2.60 pp). Both signals + Omnimerge_v2 recipe beat vanilla. To make multimodal-LM ex-LRP work end-to-end against Qwen3_5ForConditionalGeneration, I filed 5 patches against arcee-ai/mergekit PR #682 + 1 against rachtibat/lxt.
All five Mx checkpoints + Fisher/LRP signal safetensors + reproducer scripts published.