Instructions to use TokenRhythm/NeoHorse-1-9B with libraries, inference providers, notebooks, and local apps. Follow these links to get started.

Libraries

How to use TokenRhythm/NeoHorse-1-9B with Transformers:

# Use a pipeline as a high-level helper
from transformers import pipeline

pipe = pipeline("text-generation", model="TokenRhythm/NeoHorse-1-9B")
messages = [
    {"role": "user", "content": "Who are you?"},
]
pipe(messages)

# pip install -U transformers accelerate
# Load model directly
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForCausalLM

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("TokenRhythm/NeoHorse-1-9B")
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("TokenRhythm/NeoHorse-1-9B", device_map="auto")
messages = [
    {"role": "user", "content": "Who are you?"},
]
inputs = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(
	messages,
	add_generation_prompt=True,
	tokenize=True,
	return_dict=True,
	return_tensors="pt",
).to(model.device)

outputs = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=256)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0][inputs["input_ids"].shape[-1]:]))

Notebooks
Google Colab
Kaggle
Local Apps Settings

vLLM

How to use TokenRhythm/NeoHorse-1-9B with vLLM:

Install from pip and serve model

# Install vLLM from pip:
pip install vllm
# Start the vLLM server:
vllm serve "TokenRhythm/NeoHorse-1-9B"
# Call the server using curl (OpenAI-compatible API):
curl -X POST "http://localhost:8000/v1/chat/completions" \
	-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
	--data '{
		"model": "TokenRhythm/NeoHorse-1-9B",
		"messages": [
			{
				"role": "user",
				"content": "What is the capital of France?"
			}
		]
	}'

Use Docker

docker model run hf.co/TokenRhythm/NeoHorse-1-9B

SGLang

How to use TokenRhythm/NeoHorse-1-9B with SGLang:

Install from pip and serve model

# Install SGLang from pip:
pip install sglang
# Start the SGLang server:
python3 -m sglang.launch_server \
    --model-path "TokenRhythm/NeoHorse-1-9B" \
    --host 0.0.0.0 \
    --port 30000
# Call the server using curl (OpenAI-compatible API):
curl -X POST "http://localhost:30000/v1/chat/completions" \
	-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
	--data '{
		"model": "TokenRhythm/NeoHorse-1-9B",
		"messages": [
			{
				"role": "user",
				"content": "What is the capital of France?"
			}
		]
	}'

Use Docker images

docker run --gpus all \
    --shm-size 32g \
    -p 30000:30000 \
    -v ~/.cache/huggingface:/root/.cache/huggingface \
    --env "HF_TOKEN=<secret>" \
    --ipc=host \
    lmsysorg/sglang:latest \
    python3 -m sglang.launch_server \
        --model-path "TokenRhythm/NeoHorse-1-9B" \
        --host 0.0.0.0 \
        --port 30000
# Call the server using curl (OpenAI-compatible API):
curl -X POST "http://localhost:30000/v1/chat/completions" \
	-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
	--data '{
		"model": "TokenRhythm/NeoHorse-1-9B",
		"messages": [
			{
				"role": "user",
				"content": "What is the capital of France?"
			}
		]
	}'

Docker Model Runner
How to use TokenRhythm/NeoHorse-1-9B with Docker Model Runner:
```
docker model run hf.co/TokenRhythm/NeoHorse-1-9B
```
Browse Quantizations to use this model in llama.cpp, Ollama, LM Studio, or any compatible app.

NeoHorse-1-9B

Towards Recursive Self-Improvement via Agentic Post-Training with Routing Harness.

Technical Report

NeoHorse-1-9B is a 9B causal language model and an initial prototype on the path toward recursive self-improvement (RSI). It is post-trained from Qwen3.5-9B for text-based agent harnesses, tool use, coding, and instruction following.

Derived from Qwen/Qwen3.5-9B and fine-tuned by TokenRhythm. This release contains language-model weights only and is repackaged for text-only inference. Vision weights are not included. Repackaging changes configuration and tensor key names, without changing the fine-tuned tensor values.

Highlights

Path toward RSI: the routing harness assigns tasks to a heterogeneous model pool, records tool interactions and outcomes, estimates capability demand, and uses capability-level feedback to shape the next training mixture. Updated models can return to the harness, closing a prototype evaluation–selection–update loop; extending this loop across successive iterations is the next step toward RSI.
Agentic post-training framework: the associated research explores routing-guided curriculum SFT and routing-guided on-policy distillation to turn execution trajectories into training signal while preserving execution and harness context around each response.
Data quality: exact and near-duplicate removal, evaluation decontamination, structural validation, six-dimensional semantic evaluation, and subscene-level Scene/Goal/Outcome labeling.
Broad gains: 69.04 macro average across ten benchmarks versus 65.60 for Qwen3.5-9B (+3.44).

Model Details

Property	Value
Model family	NeoHorse Agent-Native Causal Language Model
Parameters	Approximately 9B
Base model	Qwen3.5-9B
Post-training	Routing-guided agentic post-training
Interface	Text input and text output
Context length	262,144 natively and extensible up to 1,010,000 tokens.
Weight format / precision	Safetensors / BF16

Evaluation

The 9B track compares NeoHorse-1-9B with five representative open-weight baselines: Granite-4.2-8B, Qwen3.5-9B, Ornith-1.5-9B, Gemma-4-12B-it, and Muse-Glimmer-30B. Results cover ten benchmarks and are grouped by capability. Higher is better; Δ is NeoHorse-1-9B minus Qwen3.5-9B. Bold and underline mark the best and second-best results in each benchmark row, respectively; ties share the same formatting.

Benchmark	Granite-4.2-8B	Qwen3.5-9B	Ornith-1.5-9B	Gemma-4-12B-it	Muse-Glimmer-30B	NeoHorse-1-9B	Δ vs Qwen3.5-9B
🤖 Agentic
QwenClawBench	37.01	44.04	47.27	43.53	46.11	48.73	+4.69
WorkBuddy Bench	35.07	39.60	29.29	29.65	45.85	40.15	+0.55
PinchBench	56.93	74.55	68.22	58.89	71.35	82.25	+7.70
VitaBench	23.00	31.25	26.75	36.50	48.50	42.25	+11.00
BFCL v4	52.06	64.88	65.03	62.06	53.74	67.43	+2.55
tau2-Bench	62.28	88.04	83.68	59.37	76.64	90.82	+2.78
💻 Coding
HumanEval	96.34	92.68	93.90	100.00	98.17	98.17	+5.49
LiveCodeBench v6	72.00	65.14	47.43	73.14	65.71	65.14	+0.00
📚 Instruction Following
IFBench	78.00	66.33	40.00	77.67	78.67	66.33	+0.00
IFEval	92.98	89.46	71.35	94.27	93.90	89.09	-0.37
📊 Overall
Ten-benchmark average	60.57	65.60	57.29	63.51	67.86	69.04	+3.44

Reported protocol: SGLang v0.5.17 · temperature=1.0 · top_p=0.95 · top_k=20 · min_p=0.0 · presence_penalty=1.5 · repetition_penalty=1.0 · thinking mode enabled with enable_thinking=true and force_nonempty_content=true. QwenClawBench, WorkBuddy Bench, and tau2-Bench use three runs; PinchBench and VitaBench use one run; the remaining benchmarks follow their official protocols. VitaBench uses the DeepSeek-V4-Flash simulator and judge.

Deployment

The examples below are for self-hosted deployment from a downloaded local checkpoint.

Local checkpoint path

The examples below assume the checkpoint has already been downloaded to local disk. Set MODEL_PATH to the directory containing config.json, tokenizer files, and model weights.

MODEL_PATH="/path/to/NeoHorse-1-9B"

The OpenAI-compatible requests below use the server's --served-model-name (for example, neohorse-1-9b), not the filesystem path.

SGLang

The technical report uses SGLang v0.5.17.

pip install "sglang==0.5.17"
MODEL_PATH="/path/to/NeoHorse-1-9B"
python3 -m sglang.launch_server \
  --model-path "$MODEL_PATH" \
  --served-model-name neohorse-1-9b \
  --host 0.0.0.0 \
  --port 30000 \
  --context-length 262144 \
  --reasoning-parser qwen3 \
  --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder

Send an OpenAI-compatible request after the server starts:

curl http://localhost:30000/v1/chat/completions \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"model":"neohorse-1-9b","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Write a Python function that returns the first n Fibonacci numbers."}],"max_tokens":512}'

vLLM

pip install -U vllm
MODEL_PATH="/path/to/NeoHorse-1-9B"
vllm serve "$MODEL_PATH" \
  --served-model-name neohorse-1-9b \
  --host 0.0.0.0 \
  --port 8000 \
  --max-model-len 262144 \
  --reasoning-parser qwen3 \
  --enable-auto-tool-choice \
  --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder

The server exposes an OpenAI-compatible /v1/chat/completions endpoint. Send a request after the server starts:

curl http://localhost:8000/v1/chat/completions \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"model":"neohorse-1-9b","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Write a Python function that returns the first n Fibonacci numbers."}],"max_tokens":512}'

The example uses the configured 262,144-token context limit. Actual capacity depends on GPU memory and serving settings; reduce the context limit if needed.

License

NeoHorse-1-9B is released under the Apache License 2.0.

The upstream model is Qwen/Qwen3.5-9B. Its original copyright notice, Copyright 2026 Alibaba Cloud, is retained in the license file. TokenRhythm has modified the model through fine-tuning and repackaging for text-only inference. Modification notices are included in this model card and the released configuration, weight index, and Safetensors metadata.

Citation

@misc{neohorse2026,
  title        = {NeoHorse-1: Towards Recursive Self-Improvement via Agentic Post-Training with Routing Harness},
  author       = {NeoHorse Team},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {arXiv preprint},
  eprint       = {2609.08183},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  primaryClass = {cs.CL},
  url          = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08183}
}

For questions or issue reports, use the NeoHorse project repository.