- `[2026-07-14]` **NVFP4 quant chase RESOLVED (gibberish) + PIVOTED to modelopt for MTP.** One ~40-min GPU0 window. Root-caused the `!!!!` to the quant NAMESPACE (text-only `AutoModelForCausalLM`→`model.layers.*` keys; vLLM serves only `Qwen3_5ForConditionalGeneration`, which needs `model.language_model.*`) — found from config diffs + vLLM source with ZERO GPU time; fixed by loading as `AutoModelForImageTextToText`. NVFP4 now serves COHERENT (validated greedy). BUT base NVFP4 ≈53 tok/s ≈ GGUF's 59.5 at batch-1 (no single-stream win) AND MTP = 0% acceptance on compressed-tensors (bf16 mtp head only loads on the modelopt format). Operator chose to **pursue a modelopt-format re-quant** (the only path to the 2-4× MTP goal; AEON-proven on this exact Qwen3.6-27B arch). Scoped + de-risked: AEON `/tank/aimodels/qwen36-27b-aeon-nvfp4` = the modelopt reference (quant_method modelopt, 1967 tensors, 15 bf16 mtp keys identical to graft); nvidia-modelopt 0.45.0 installs + `mtq.quantize`/`NVFP4_DEFAULT_CFG`/`export_hf_checkpoint` API confirmed; pipeline unchanged except swap llm-compressor→modelopt. Seats restored; char-rp-reasoning stays GGUF. Full plan in Current state ★ section.