AI & ML interests: Open reasoning models for local deployment. Post-training, agentic tool use, psychometrics-grounded evaluation, and efficient inference (GGUF, MLX, NVFP4).

Gestalt Labs 🇨🇦

Independent Canadian open reasoning research

Gestalt Labs builds and releases fully permissive open-weight reasoning systems: multimodal assistants, tool-using agents, and local-first deployments. Our methods are grounded in psychophysics and measurement science, applying signal detection theory, adaptive staircase procedures, and psychometric modeling to post-training and evaluation.

Models · Datasets · GitHub

Methods

• PEST — Per-Expert Staircase Thresholding. Psychophysical adaptive staircase procedures (Taylor & Creelman, 1967) applied to MoE expert pruning.
• NSC-ACE — contrastive steering directions extracted from hidden states, refined with GRPO rollouts.
• Curated data pipelines — DDM-inspired curation achieving AUC 0.97 with 53% token savings at 99.5% sensitivity.

Model lines

Ornstein — multimodal and MoE reasoning models (27B–35B), shipped in GGUF, MLX, and full-precision formats for every common local stack.

• Ornstein-3.6-27B — multimodal base
• Ornstein-Hermes-3.6-27B — multimodal, Hermes-format tool calling
• Ornstein3.6-35B-A3B — text-only MoE, ~3B active

Harmonic — compact reasoning models with structural output supervision (100% structural gate pass rate at 9B).

Architectures

• MPKnet — biologically inspired CNN modeling the M/P/K pathways of the LGN. Competitive accuracy with 52× fewer parameters than ResNet18; runs on a Raspberry Pi. Patent pending.

Featured datasets

• Ornstein Curated 100K — curriculum-sorted multi-domain reasoning data
• Hermes Agent Traces Filtered — quality-filtered agent reasoning traces
• Acta — curated agentic tool-use conversations

Principles

• Ship open artifacts people can inspect, run, and adapt without restriction
• Pair every release with practical local formats (GGUF, MLX)
• Treat datasets as first-class research objects
• Measure everything: pruning ships with psychometric thresholds

Contact

research@gestaltlabs.ca · or open a discussion on any repository