license: other license_name: nvidia-open-model-license license_link: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/agreements/enterprise-software/nvidia-open-model-license/ base_model: nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Super-120B-A12B-BF16 library_name: transformers pipeline_tag: text-generation tags:
- nemotron
- nemotron-h
- abliterated
- obliteratus
- mixture-of-experts
- hybrid-mamba-transformer
- research-use
Nemotron-3-Super-120B-A12B-BF16-Abliterated-Minimal
Abliterated derivative of nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Super-120B-A12B-BF16,
produced via the OBLITERATUS pipeline (variant: minimal).
Research use only. This model has had its refusal-direction subspace excised. It will comply with harmful prompts that the base model would have refused. It is intended exclusively for safety, alignment, and red-team research. Do not deploy publicly. Honor the upstream NVIDIA Open Model License when redistributing.
What was changed
OBLITERATUS removes the refusal direction(s) from a model's residual stream by:
- Profiling activations on harmful vs harmless prompt pairs.
- Identifying the principal refusal direction(s) via a generalized eigenvalue / SVD pass on contrastive activation differences.
- Projecting the identified direction(s) out of attention/MLP/MoE expert weights ("excise") at every block where they contribute meaningful signal.
The minimal variant uses the configuration in
configs/obliteratus/nemotron3_120b_minimal.yaml:
n_directions=1, no extra toggles (head-surgery / SAE / EGA off)
See docs/OBLITERATUS.md for the full pipeline (8 architecture-specific patches, the lm_head shard-load fix that unblocked Nemotron-3 120B specifically, and the external eval suite definitions).
Verification metrics
In-process OBLITERATUS verification at the end of the abliteration run:
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Load-time perplexity | 18.85 |
| Post-EXCISE perplexity | 17.99 |
| Reference-text perplexity | 3.64 |
| Coherence (10 fixed prompts) | 100% |
| Internal refusal rate (30 prompts, T1–T7 tiers) | 20% |
| First-token KL vs base (100 harmless prompts) | 0.18 |
External benchmarks (TalonLab abliteration_lite suite)
- AdvBench compliance: not yet evaluated externally on this variant.
IFEval and RULER 32k were also evaluated; results are tracked in the TalonLab eval suite — see the repo for current numbers.
Architecture notes
- Hybrid Mamba + attention + sparse MoE (Nemotron-H family), 88 layers.
- 512 experts × 22 active per token at the MoE layers.
- BF16 weights, ~240 GB on disk.
lm_head.weightis a separately-trained, untied parameter (the 120B variant has_tied_weights_keysremoved). Loading viafrom_pretrained(..., device_map="auto")requires the_materialize_lm_head_from_shardspatch in OBLITERATUS — without it,lm_head.weightis left on the meta device and PPL collapses to ~10⁵.
Inference
The model serves cleanly via SGLang (≥ 0.5.10 has native Nemotron-H
support). Use BF16 + tensor-parallel ≥ 4 on H100/H200 class hardware.
Tested deployment: 8× H200 with SGLang --dtype auto --trust-remote-code --chunked-prefill-size 8192 --disable-cuda-graph --disable-piecewise-cuda-graph.
python -m sglang.launch_server \
--model-path surfingpapi/Nemotron-3-Super-120B-A12B-BF16-Abliterated-Minimal \
--tp 8 \
--trust-remote-code \
--dtype auto
Citation / provenance
If you use this model for research, please cite:
- Base model: NVIDIA Nemotron-3 Super 120B A12B BF16 (https://huggingface.co/nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Super-120B-A12B-BF16)
- Abliteration pipeline: TalonLab OBLITERATUS (https://github.com/MindPointGroup/talonlab-modeltraining/tree/main/src/talonlab/obliteration)
- Abliteration technique (original): Arditi et al., Refusal in Language Models is Mediated by a Single Direction (2024).