Why Gated DeltaNet Survives 4-Bit Quantization: NVFP4 W4A4 for the Recurrent Half of a Hybrid 27B LLM
Hybrid LLMs pair softmax attention with linear-attention layers such as Gated DeltaNet (GDN), whose recurrent state summarizes the context in fixed size. Early community 4-bit quantizations of Qwen3.8-27B (48 GDN layers, 16 attention layers) left the GDN block in 8- or 16-bit precision -- especially its decay and write-strength gates -- on the intuition that errors in a recurrence accumulate over…
We haven't written up this one. arXiv cs.AI has the full story — the link below goes straight to it.