Spark-X2.5-1.7B is an Apache-2.0 on-device model built for agentic tool
use. vLLM 0.28 has no implementation for it, so it could not be served at
all; llama.cpp already ships one, which made it the only edge engine able
to run the model.
Three traits separate it from a Llama-style decoder:
* Hybrid attention -- layer_types interleaves three 512-token sliding
layers with one full-attention layer, which is what makes the 1M-token
context affordable on a phone.
* Per-layer-type RoPE -- sliding layers rotate all 256 head dims with
theta 1e4, full layers only the first quarter with theta 5e6.
* A head-wise attention output gate -- g_proj reads the same post-norm
input as QKV and scales each head's attention output by a sigmoid.
The checkpoint also stores QKV pre-fused as a single q_k_v_proj, so
load_weights splits it before vLLM's sharded QKVParallelLinear sees it.
Verified against the official remote-code implementation on transformers
4.57.1 (the version config.json targets; it does not import on the 5.x in
our venvs). In fp32 all three scenarios match exactly -- 32/32 greedy
tokens with a max top-20 logprob difference of 2.2e-05. In bf16 the short
and the 2465-token long-context prompts still match 32/32, which is what
exercises the sliding layers; the tool-calling prompt diverges at token 23
on a near-tie, and fp32 confirms that is rounding rather than a defect.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01L1ax5wYLA6XbqEL1i8L9gZ
