Comment by monster_truck

2 days ago

In my experience MTP's speed increase doesn't seem to justify the apparent loss of success at the edge, it would have to be at least 4x faster to meaningfully churn through the first 3 failures in the time it would have taken to do it once without

What exactly are you doing that the prompt is eating an entire 65536 window? Surely it would be better to let it use any number of approaches that call tools to access that in parts and reason/summarize to an output file as it works through the whole thing. This allows it to keep the initial instructions in the start of the window and toss out the middle as it goes. IME many people who have written off local models entirely are, for lack of a better term "not holding them right" and consider them worthless.

Definitely also try IQ4_NL for K/V if you haven't. Because it's non linear it's far more hit/miss from model to model and especially quant to quant, I've found generally that it shines brightest when you start with a Q6K+ quant that you otherwise wouldn't bother with because of its size, which it then makes up for in both inference speed and often a larger context.

I do agree about Glimmer, though. It is quite good, far better than the benchmarks let on, especially in heavily agentic cases where it needs to rampage around the OS and utilize many different utilities to zero in on things. It is especially good at being told to try something itself, and if/when it fails, try Qwen, and if Qwen can't do it, call out to Deepseek.

> In my experience MTP's speed increase doesn't seem to justify the apparent loss of success at the edge

If you set manual MTP settings, you'll override dynamic adjustments the inference engine will try to do. Sometimes the dynamic adjustments aren't optimal. With the settings I use, MTP is always a net win.

> What exactly are you doing that the prompt is eating an entire 65536 window?

I'm not using the full context window.

> Surely it would be better to let it use any number of approaches that call tools to access that in parts and reason/summarize to an output file as it works through the whole thing.

Tools would not help.

> In my experience MTP's speed increase doesn't seem to justify the apparent loss of success at the edge, it would have to be at least 4x faster to meaningfully churn through the first 3 failures in the time it would have taken to do it once without

Speaking in terms of wall clock, the expensive part of decode is fetching the weights from memory. Predicting and validating a bunch of tokens using the already fetched weights is insignificant in comparison. Even if you have a poor acceptance rate for predictions, you won't really see a slowdown vs not using MTP.