Document the Qwen 3.5 VLM pruning smoke

[j-rausch]

What does this PR do?

Type of change: documentation

The Qwen 3.5 VLM pruning guide was dense and focused on implementation details, which made the checked-in smoke example harder to follow than the corresponding text example. This change rewrites it as a shorter, task-focused guide and uses symmetric “text pruning smoke” and “VLM pruning smoke” names.

• Opens with a plain summary of what the one-GPU smoke test does and what its small results can prove.
• Walks through environment preparation, image-text dataset setup, runner configuration, dry-run inspection, launch, and resume.
• Gives one concise result checklist covering image use, physical pruning, saved-checkpoint evaluation before and after distillation, image serving, and resume.
• Keeps separate checkpoint evaluation and larger-run guidance, while making clear that the setup wizard's generic pruning graph is not the maintained VLM example.

The pruning, evaluation, serving, distillation, and test support are provided by Evaluate saved pruned text and VLM checkpoints. This PR changes documentation only.

Testing

• All repository hooks applicable to the changed Markdown files pass.
• Links, commands, configuration names, and documented stage names were checked against the stacked source tree.
• GPU validation was not repeated for this documentation-only change.

Before your PR is "Ready for review"

• Is this change backward compatible?: yes
• If you copied code from another source or added a dependency, did you follow the contributor guidance?: N/A; no copied code or new dependency
• Did you write necessary tests?: N/A; documentation only
• Did you update the changelog?: N/A
• Did you get Claude approval on this PR?: N/A

Summary by CodeRabbit

• Documentation
  • Updated Puzzletron guidance with links to the Qwen VLM pruning smoke workflow.
  • Clarified setup differences between text and VLM campaigns, recommended datasets, workflow capabilities, and campaign sizing.
  • Refined smoke-test documentation to cover dataset preparation, configuration, dry runs, launch/resume, acceptance checks, checkpoint evaluation, and larger-run planning.
  • Clarified that smoke-test budgets validate workflow correctness rather than full lifecycle correctness.

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📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

Puzzletron documentation now separates text and VLM campaign guidance. The Qwen VLM smoke guide covers dataset preparation, execution, resume checks, observability, checkpoint evaluation, and larger-run planning.

Changes

Puzzletron VLM documentation

Layer / File(s)	Summary
Campaign route guidance examples/puzzletron/README.md	The README links the Qwen VLM walkthrough and distinguishes text and VLM datasets, profiles, measurements, and campaign sizing.
VLM smoke workflow examples/puzzletron/docs/qwen3p5_0p8b_vlm_smoke.md	The guide documents pinned inputs, manifest checks, runner setup, plan inspection, execution, resume behavior, acceptance checks, and raw observability.
Evaluation and campaign scaling examples/puzzletron/docs/qwen3p5_0p8b_vlm_smoke.md, examples/puzzletron/docs/qwen3p5_0p8b_smoke.md	The documentation adds standalone checkpoint evaluation, larger-run guidance, and updated wording for smoke-test budget validation.

Estimated code review effort: 2 (Simple) | ~10 minutes

Merge Risk: ⚪ Minimal · up to 2b2ec

This documentation-only change rewrites and clarifies the Qwen 3.5 VLM pruning smoke guide without changing runtime behavior; no actionable merge-blocking risk remains after normal checks and review.

Suggested reviewers: separius

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 6

✅ Passed checks (6 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Description Check	✅ Passed	Check skipped - CodeRabbit’s high-level summary is enabled.
Title check	✅ Passed	The title clearly and concisely describes the main documentation change: the Qwen 3.5 VLM pruning smoke guide.
Docstring Coverage	✅ Passed	No functions found in the changed files to evaluate docstring coverage. Skipping docstring coverage check. Docstring coverage is scoped to functions touched by this diff. Analyzed 0 functions across 0…
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Security Anti-Patterns	✅ Passed	PASS — The PR commit changes only three Markdown files: examples/puzzletron/README.md and two documentation pages. It adds no modelopt or examples Python changes, no pyproject.toml or requiremen…

Full details: Docstring Coverage

Explanation

No functions found in the changed files to evaluate docstring coverage. Skipping docstring coverage check. Docstring coverage is scoped to functions touched by this diff. Analyzed 0 functions across 0 files. (1 skipped: 1 unsupported.)

Full details: Security Anti-Patterns

Explanation

PASS — The PR commit changes only three Markdown files: examples/puzzletron/README.md and two documentation pages. It adds no modelopt or examples Python changes, no pyproject.toml or requirements changes, and no added torch.load(..., weights_only=False), allow_pickle=True, trust_remote_code=True, eval/exec, or # nosec patterns. The custom security check is therefore not triggered.

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• Commit unit tests in branch jrausch/qwen35-vlm-tutorial

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Codecov Report

✅ All modified and coverable lines are covered by tests.
✅ Project coverage is 58.18%. Comparing base (f29bac5) to head (2b2ecd7).

Additional details and impacted files

@@                                  Coverage Diff                                  @@
##           jrausch/qwen35-pruned-checkpoint-e2e-final-review    #2282      +/-   ##
=====================================================================================
+ Coverage                                              51.20%   58.18%   +6.98%     
=====================================================================================
  Files                                                    709      710       +1     
  Lines                                                  92402    92470      +68     
=====================================================================================
+ Hits                                                   47314    53807    +6493     
+ Misses                                                 45088    38663    -6425     

Flag	Coverage Δ
examples	29.92% <ø> (?)
puzzletron	29.28% <ø> (ø)
unit	29.26% <ø> (ø)

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👉 Steps to fix this

Actionable comments posted: 1

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Inline comments:
In `@examples/puzzletron/README.md`:
- Line 52: Update the wording in the README sentence around “Balanced pruning”
to hyphenate “first-generated text campaign.”

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• examples/puzzletron/README.md
• examples/puzzletron/docs/qwen3p5_0p8b_smoke.md
• examples/puzzletron/docs/qwen3p5_0p8b_vlm_smoke.md

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PR Preview Action v1.8.1
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2026-08-31 04:09 UTC