quant · astro
A numeric astrodynamics reasoner — one verifiable boxed number out, served local on a DGX Spark for $0 a query
Orbital-mechanics questions ("a satellite orbits at 7,000 km altitude — what's its period?") want a single checkable number, and a frontier API is an expensive way to get one. Kepler is a greenfield Qwen3-8B vertical built gate-first on one Spark: the recommended Q8_0 scores 88.6% on the frozen astro-bench held-out (n=44, boxed ±2%) and 84.1% on the no-hint curveball set, with the SFT-only method chosen by cheap inference-time gates before any RL spend — the build story behind the weights.
- Local numeric Q&A over astrodynamics and quantitative astrophysics — periods, transfers, orbital elements — with boxed, verifiable answers
- A worked example of gate-driven method selection (base preflight → SFT gate → RL-headroom gate) for greenfield verticals
- A measured four-variant quant ladder (Q4_K_M→Q8_0) for quality-vs-throughput tradeoffs on unified-memory hardware
Audience — Spark operators who want a $0 local astro reasoner with bench receipts, and builders studying how to decide SFT vs RLVR before spending the run.
| Variant | tok/s | astro-bench v0.1 held-out (n=44, \boxed ±2%) |
|---|---|---|
| Q4_K_M | 33.1 | 0.75 |
| Q5_K_M | 28.1 | 0.75 |
| Q6_K | 24.6 | 0.84 |
| Q8_0 sweet spot | 21.1 | 0.89 |