We're thrilled to release Darwin-9B-NEG, a 9B-parameter reasoning model that embeds an architecturally-internalised sense of self-confidence directly into the transformer β our proprietary Native Entropy Gating (NEG) technology.
With only 9 billion parameters and 1Γ inference cost, Pure NEG jumps +12.63 %p over the same model without NEG. Going all-in with ensemble refinement pushes it to 84.34 % β surpassing the published Qwen3.5-9B leaderboard score (81.7 %) by +2.64 %p.
π¬ What makes NEG different from Multi-Turn Iteration (MTI)?
Classical MTI needs 3-8Γ extra inference passes. NEG instead lives INSIDE the single decoding loop. Two tiny modules ride with the transformer: NEG-Head predicts per-token entropy from the last hidden state, and NEG-Gate conditionally restricts the top-k choice when confidence is low. The gate activates in only 4.36 % of tokens β essentially free at inference time.
β¨ Key differentiators β’ Architecturally internalised β model file *is* the feature β’ 1Γ inference cost (vs. 3-8Γ for MTI) β’ Drop-in with vLLM / SGLang / TGI / transformers β no extra engine β’ +12.63 %p reasoning at zero latency overhead β’ Single-file deployment, Apache 2.0 licensed
Earlier this month, Apple introduced Simple Self-Distillation: a fine-tuning method that improves models on coding tasks just by sampling from the model and training on its own outputs with plain cross-entropy
Andβ¦ it's already supported in TRL, built by Kashif Rasul. you can really feel the pace of development in the team π
Paper by Ruixiang ZHANG, He Bai, Huangjie Zheng, Navdeep Jaitly, Ronan Collobert, Yizhe Zhang at Apple π
How it works: the model generates completions at a training-time temperature (T_train) with top_k/top_p truncation, then fine-tunes on them with plain cross-entropy. no labels or verifier needed
One neat insight from the paper: T_train and T_eval compose into an effective T_eff = T_train Γ T_eval, so a broad band of configs works well. even very noisy samples still help