Mungert/phi-4-GGUF

phi-4 GGUF Models

Choosing the Right Model Format

Selecting the correct model format depends on your hardware capabilities and memory constraints.

BF16 (Brain Float 16) – Use if BF16 acceleration is available

• A 16-bit floating-point format designed for faster computation while retaining good precision.
• Provides similar dynamic range as FP32 but with lower memory usage.
• Recommended if your hardware supports BF16 acceleration (check your device’s specs).
• Ideal for high-performance inference with reduced memory footprint compared to FP32.

📌 Use BF16 if:
✔ Your hardware has native BF16 support (e.g., newer GPUs, TPUs).
✔ You want higher precision while saving memory.
✔ You plan to requantize the model into another format.

📌 Avoid BF16 if:
❌ Your hardware does not support BF16 (it may fall back to FP32 and run slower).
❌ You need compatibility with older devices that lack BF16 optimization.

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F16 (Float 16) – More widely supported than BF16

• A 16-bit floating-point high precision but with less of range of values than BF16.
• Works on most devices with FP16 acceleration support (including many GPUs and some CPUs).
• Slightly lower numerical precision than BF16 but generally sufficient for inference.

📌 Use F16 if:
✔ Your hardware supports FP16 but not BF16.
✔ You need a balance between speed, memory usage, and accuracy.
✔ You are running on a GPU or another device optimized for FP16 computations.

📌 Avoid F16 if:
❌ Your device lacks native FP16 support (it may run slower than expected).
❌ You have memory limitations.

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Quantized Models (Q4_K, Q6_K, Q8, etc.) – For CPU & Low-VRAM Inference

Quantization reduces model size and memory usage while maintaining as much accuracy as possible.

• Lower-bit models (Q4_K) → Best for minimal memory usage, may have lower precision.
• Higher-bit models (Q6_K, Q8_0) → Better accuracy, requires more memory.

📌 Use Quantized Models if:
✔ You are running inference on a CPU and need an optimized model.
✔ Your device has low VRAM and cannot load full-precision models.
✔ You want to reduce memory footprint while keeping reasonable accuracy.

📌 Avoid Quantized Models if:
❌ You need maximum accuracy (full-precision models are better for this).
❌ Your hardware has enough VRAM for higher-precision formats (BF16/F16).

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Very Low-Bit Quantization (IQ3_XS, IQ3_S, IQ3_M, Q4_K, Q4_0)

These models are optimized for extreme memory efficiency, making them ideal for low-power devices or large-scale deployments where memory is a critical constraint.

• IQ3_XS: Ultra-low-bit quantization (3-bit) with extreme memory efficiency.

  • Use case: Best for ultra-low-memory devices where even Q4_K is too large.
  • Trade-off: Lower accuracy compared to higher-bit quantizations.

• IQ3_S: Small block size for maximum memory efficiency.

  • Use case: Best for low-memory devices where IQ3_XS is too aggressive.

• IQ3_M: Medium block size for better accuracy than IQ3_S.

  • Use case: Suitable for low-memory devices where IQ3_S is too limiting.

• Q4_K: 4-bit quantization with block-wise optimization for better accuracy.

  • Use case: Best for low-memory devices where Q6_K is too large.

• Q4_0: Pure 4-bit quantization, optimized for ARM devices.

  • Use case: Best for ARM-based devices or low-memory environments.

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Summary Table: Model Format Selection

Model Format	Precision	Memory Usage	Device Requirements	Best Use Case
BF16	Highest	High	BF16-supported GPU/CPUs	High-speed inference with reduced memory
F16	High	High	FP16-supported devices	GPU inference when BF16 isn’t available
Q4_K	Medium Low	Low	CPU or Low-VRAM devices	Best for memory-constrained environments
Q6_K	Medium	Moderate	CPU with more memory	Better accuracy while still being quantized
Q8_0	High	Moderate	CPU or GPU with enough VRAM	Best accuracy among quantized models
IQ3_XS	Very Low	Very Low	Ultra-low-memory devices	Extreme memory efficiency and low accuracy
Q4_0	Low	Low	ARM or low-memory devices	llama.cpp can optimize for ARM devices

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Included Files & Details

phi-4-bf16.gguf

• Model weights preserved in BF16.
• Use this if you want to requantize the model into a different format.
• Best if your device supports BF16 acceleration.

phi-4-f16.gguf

• Model weights stored in F16.
• Use if your device supports FP16, especially if BF16 is not available.

phi-4-bf16-q8_0.gguf

• Output & embeddings remain in BF16.
• All other layers quantized to Q8_0.
• Use if your device supports BF16 and you want a quantized version.

phi-4-f16-q8_0.gguf

• Output & embeddings remain in F16.
• All other layers quantized to Q8_0.

phi-4-q4_k.gguf

• Output & embeddings quantized to Q8_0.
• All other layers quantized to Q4_K.
• Good for CPU inference with limited memory.

phi-4-q4_k_s.gguf

• Smallest Q4_K variant, using less memory at the cost of accuracy.
• Best for very low-memory setups.

phi-4-q6_k.gguf

• Output & embeddings quantized to Q8_0.
• All other layers quantized to Q6_K .

phi-4-q8_0.gguf

• Fully Q8 quantized model for better accuracy.
• Requires more memory but offers higher precision.

phi-4-iq3_xs.gguf

• IQ3_XS quantization, optimized for extreme memory efficiency.
• Best for ultra-low-memory devices.

phi-4-iq3_m.gguf

• IQ3_M quantization, offering a medium block size for better accuracy.
• Suitable for low-memory devices.

phi-4-q4_0.gguf

• Pure Q4_0 quantization, optimized for ARM devices.
• Best for low-memory environments.
• Prefer IQ4_NL for better accuracy.

🚀 If you find these models useful

Please click like ❤ . Also I’d really appreciate it if you could test my Network Monitor Assistant at 👉 Network Monitor Assitant.

💬 Click the chat icon (bottom right of the main and dashboard pages) . Choose a LLM; toggle between the LLM Types TurboLLM -> FreeLLM -> TestLLM.

What I'm Testing

I'm experimenting with function calling against my network monitoring service. Using small open source models. I am into the question "How small can it go and still function".

🟡 TestLLM – Runs the current testing model using llama.cpp on 6 threads of a Cpu VM (Should take about 15s to load. Inference speed is quite slow and it only processes one user prompt at a time—still working on scaling!). If you're curious, I'd be happy to share how it works! .

The other Available AI Assistants

🟢 TurboLLM – Uses gpt-4o-mini Fast! . Note: tokens are limited since OpenAI models are pricey, but you can Login or Download the Free Network Monitor agent to get more tokens, Alternatively use the TestLLM .

🔵 HugLLM – Runs open-source Hugging Face models Fast, Runs small models (≈8B) hence lower quality, Get 2x more tokens (subject to Hugging Face API availability)

Phi-4 Model Card

Phi-4 Technical Report

Model Summary

Developers	Microsoft Research
Description	phi-4 is a state-of-the-art open model built upon a blend of synthetic datasets, data from filtered public domain websites, and acquired academic books and Q&A datasets. The goal of this approach was to ensure that small capable models were trained with data focused on high quality and advanced reasoning. phi-4 underwent a rigorous enhancement and alignment process, incorporating both supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization to ensure precise instruction adherence and robust safety measures
Architecture	14B parameters, dense decoder-only Transformer model
Inputs	Text, best suited for prompts in the chat format
Context length	16K tokens
GPUs	1920 H100-80G
Training time	21 days
Training data	9.8T tokens
Outputs	Generated text in response to input
Dates	October 2024 – November 2024
Status	Static model trained on an offline dataset with cutoff dates of June 2024 and earlier for publicly available data
Release date	December 12, 2024
License	MIT

Intended Use

Primary Use Cases	Our model is designed to accelerate research on language models, for use as a building block for generative AI powered features. It provides uses for general purpose AI systems and applications (primarily in English) which require: 1. Memory/compute constrained environments. 2. Latency bound scenarios. 3. Reasoning and logic.
Out-of-Scope Use Cases	Our models is not specifically designed or evaluated for all downstream purposes, thus: 1. Developers should consider common limitations of language models as they select use cases, and evaluate and mitigate for accuracy, safety, and fairness before using within a specific downstream use case, particularly for high-risk scenarios. 2. Developers should be aware of and adhere to applicable laws or regulations (including privacy, trade compliance laws, etc.) that are relevant to their use case, including the model’s focus on English. 3. Nothing contained in this Model Card should be interpreted as or deemed a restriction or modification to the license the model is released under.

Data Overview

Training Datasets

Our training data is an extension of the data used for Phi-3 and includes a wide variety of sources from:

1. Publicly available documents filtered rigorously for quality, selected high-quality educational data, and code.

2. Newly created synthetic, “textbook-like” data for the purpose of teaching math, coding, common sense reasoning, general knowledge of the world (science, daily activities, theory of mind, etc.).

3. Acquired academic books and Q&A datasets.

4. High quality chat format supervised data covering various topics to reflect human preferences on different aspects such as instruct-following, truthfulness, honesty and helpfulness.

Multilingual data constitutes about 8% of our overall data. We are focusing on the quality of data that could potentially improve the reasoning ability for the model, and we filter the publicly available documents to contain the correct level of knowledge.

Benchmark datasets

We evaluated phi-4 using OpenAI’s SimpleEval and our own internal benchmarks to understand the model’s capabilities, more specifically:

• MMLU: Popular aggregated dataset for multitask language understanding.

• MATH: Challenging competition math problems.

• GPQA: Complex, graduate-level science questions.

• DROP: Complex comprehension and reasoning.

• MGSM: Multi-lingual grade-school math.

• HumanEval: Functional code generation.

• SimpleQA: Factual responses.

Safety

Approach

phi-4 has adopted a robust safety post-training approach. This approach leverages a variety of both open-source and in-house generated synthetic datasets. The overall technique employed to do the safety alignment is a combination of SFT (Supervised Fine-Tuning) and iterative DPO (Direct Preference Optimization), including publicly available datasets focusing on helpfulness and harmlessness as well as various questions and answers targeted to multiple safety categories.

Safety Evaluation and Red-Teaming

Prior to release, phi-4 followed a multi-faceted evaluation approach. Quantitative evaluation was conducted with multiple open-source safety benchmarks and in-house tools utilizing adversarial conversation simulation. For qualitative safety evaluation, we collaborated with the independent AI Red Team (AIRT) at Microsoft to assess safety risks posed by phi-4 in both average and adversarial user scenarios. In the average user scenario, AIRT emulated typical single-turn and multi-turn interactions to identify potentially risky behaviors. The adversarial user scenario tested a wide range of techniques aimed at intentionally subverting the model’s safety training including jailbreaks, encoding-based attacks, multi-turn attacks, and adversarial suffix attacks.

Please refer to the technical report for more details on safety alignment.

Model Quality

To understand the capabilities, we compare phi-4 with a set of models over OpenAI’s SimpleEval benchmark.

At the high-level overview of the model quality on representative benchmarks. For the table below, higher numbers indicate better performance:

Category	Benchmark	phi-4 (14B)	phi-3 (14B)	Qwen 2.5 (14B instruct)	GPT-4o-mini	Llama-3.3 (70B instruct)	Qwen 2.5 (72B instruct)	GPT-4o
Popular Aggregated Benchmark	MMLU	84.8	77.9	79.9	81.8	86.3	85.3	88.1
Science	GPQA	56.1	31.2	42.9	40.9	49.1	49.0	50.6
Math	MGSM MATH	80.6 80.4	53.5 44.6	79.6 75.6	86.5 73.0	89.1 66.3*	87.3 80.0	90.4 74.6
Code Generation	HumanEval	82.6	67.8	72.1	86.2	78.9*	80.4	90.6
Factual Knowledge	SimpleQA	3.0	7.6	5.4	9.9	20.9	10.2	39.4
Reasoning	DROP	75.5	68.3	85.5	79.3	90.2	76.7	80.9

* These scores are lower than those reported by Meta, perhaps because simple-evals has a strict formatting requirement that Llama models have particular trouble following. We use the simple-evals framework because it is reproducible, but Meta reports 77 for MATH and 88 for HumanEval on Llama-3.3-70B.

Usage

Input Formats

Given the nature of the training data, phi-4 is best suited for prompts using the chat format as follows:

<|im_start|>system<|im_sep|>
You are a medieval knight and must provide explanations to modern people.<|im_end|>
<|im_start|>user<|im_sep|>
How should I explain the Internet?<|im_end|>
<|im_start|>assistant<|im_sep|>

With transformers

import transformers

pipeline = transformers.pipeline(
    "text-generation",
    model="microsoft/phi-4",
    model_kwargs={"torch_dtype": "auto"},
    device_map="auto",
)

messages = [
    {"role": "system", "content": "You are a medieval knight and must provide explanations to modern people."},
    {"role": "user", "content": "How should I explain the Internet?"},
]

outputs = pipeline(messages, max_new_tokens=128)
print(outputs[0]["generated_text"][-1])

Responsible AI Considerations

Like other language models, phi-4 can potentially behave in ways that are unfair, unreliable, or offensive. Some of the limiting behaviors to be aware of include:

• Quality of Service: The model is trained primarily on English text. Languages other than English will experience worse performance. English language varieties with less representation in the training data might experience worse performance than standard American English. phi-4 is not intended to support multilingual use.

• Representation of Harms & Perpetuation of Stereotypes: These models can over- or under-represent groups of people, erase representation of some groups, or reinforce demeaning or negative stereotypes. Despite safety post-training, these limitations may still be present due to differing levels of representation of different groups or prevalence of examples of negative stereotypes in training data that reflect real-world patterns and societal biases.

• Inappropriate or Offensive Content: These models may produce other types of inappropriate or offensive content, which may make it inappropriate to deploy for sensitive contexts without additional mitigations that are specific to the use case.

• Information Reliability: Language models can generate nonsensical content or fabricate content that might sound reasonable but is inaccurate or outdated.

• Limited Scope for Code: Majority of phi-4 training data is based in Python and uses common packages such as typing, math, random, collections, datetime, itertools. If the model generates Python scripts that utilize other packages or scripts in other languages, we strongly recommend users manually verify all API uses.

Developers should apply responsible AI best practices and are responsible for ensuring that a specific use case complies with relevant laws and regulations (e.g. privacy, trade, etc.). Using safety services like Azure AI Content Safety that have advanced guardrails is highly recommended. Important areas for consideration include:

• Allocation: Models may not be suitable for scenarios that could have consequential impact on legal status or the allocation of resources or life opportunities (ex: housing, employment, credit, etc.) without further assessments and additional debiasing techniques.

• High-Risk Scenarios: Developers should assess suitability of using models in high-risk scenarios where unfair, unreliable or offensive outputs might be extremely costly or lead to harm. This includes providing advice in sensitive or expert domains where accuracy and reliability are critical (ex: legal or health advice). Additional safeguards should be implemented at the application level according to the deployment context.

• Misinformation: Models may produce inaccurate information. Developers should follow transparency best practices and inform end-users they are interacting with an AI system. At the application level, developers can build feedback mechanisms and pipelines to ground responses in use-case specific, contextual information, a technique known as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG).

• Generation of Harmful Content: Developers should assess outputs for their context and use available safety classifiers or custom solutions appropriate for their use case.

• Misuse: Other forms of misuse such as fraud, spam, or malware production may be possible, and developers should ensure that their applications do not violate applicable laws and regulations.