A task-aware quantization pipeline puts Qwen3.8-27B at 99% of BF16 reasoning at 15% of the size, beating byte-matched Unsloth by 5.5 points

r/LocalLLaMA (167 upvotes, 49 comments)·medium signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

TAK (Task Aware Knapsack) builds an imatrix from a task-specific corpus, finds the smallest size before collapse, then promotes and demotes tensors within a byte budget, with no pruning, fine-tuning or merging. On held-out reasoning data it scores 82.81% against 83.59% for BF16 and 77.34% for the byte-matched Unsloth UD IQ2_S, with larger gaps on smaller models: +11.72 on Qwen3.5-4B, +14.06 on Gemma 4 E4B, +19.53 on Gemma 3 4B QAT. The author edited the post to warn that coding is outside the reasoning-specialized quant's domain after users hit repetition loops.