Heretic 1.2 released: 70% lower VRAM usage with quantization, Magnitude-Preserving Orthogonal Ablation ("derestriction"), broad VL model support, session resumption, and more

Llamas and Gentlemen, **Heretic** (https://github.com/p-e-w/heretic) is the leading software for removing censorship from language models. In the three months since its initial release, more than 1,300 models (including quants) made using Heretic have been published by the community. This represents more than a third of all abliterated models ever published, and the vast majority of abliterated models published since Heretic's first release. Today, I am happy to announce the release of Heretic 1.2, the product of two months of hard work by the Heretic contributors. The headline feature is the new LoRA-based abliteration engine implemented by accemlcc. Built on top of PEFT, it supports loading models with 4-bit quantization using bitsandbytes, which can reduce VRAM requirements for processing a model by up to 70%. The abliterated model is still exported in full precision, which is achieved by re-loading the original model in system RAM and applying the optimized LoRA adapter on top of it, yielding a high-quality model despite the low resource requirements. To enable quantized loading, set `quantization` to `bnb_4bit` in the configuration. spikymoth implemented Magnitude-Preserving Orthogonal Ablation (MPOA) aka Norm-Preserving Biprojected Abliteration aka "derestriction", a refined abliteration technique developed by Jim Lai which can improve the quality of the resulting model in many cases. This has been one of the most frequently requested features from the community, and is now finally available. To enable MPOA, set `orthogonalize_direction` to `true` and `row_normalization` to `full` in the configuration. Heretic's implementation of MPOA uses Optuna to optimize weight parameters. This can result in models that are better than those generated with the original MPOA technique, which employs a different strategy for layer selection. For example, `MuXodious/gpt-oss-20b-RichardErkhov-heresy` dominates `ArliAI/gpt-oss-20b-Derestricted` on the UGI Leaderboard, scoring 39.05 vs 34.22 and beating the derestricted model in every individual test (W/10, NatInt, and Writing). After a long history of hacks being passed around in the community, anrp finally found a clean way to support vision language models in Heretic, and a broad range of VL models can now be processed. Note that only the language model part (the text decoder transformer) is abliterated, not the image encoder. anrp also implemented fully automatic session progress saving and resumption. This means worrying about crashes during a long optimization run is now a thing of the past, as you can simply restart Heretic and it will offer to continue where it left off. You can also interrupt the run yourself at any time with Ctrl+C, and resume it later. Please see the release notes for the full list of improvements and fixes. More exciting stuff is coming in future versions! Cheers :)