Granite-Switch 4.1 8B Preview (12 task LoRAs)

The call

IBM Granite 4.1 8B with 12 task-specialized LoRA adapters embedded in a single checkpoint, activated per-token via control tokens in the chat template. Three libraries: **Core** (3 adapters — requirement check, context attribution, uncertainty), **RAG** (5 — query rewrite, query clarification, answerability, hallucination detection, citation generation), **Guardian** (4 — safety detection, factuality detection + correction, policy guardrails). A lightweight switch layer detects control tokens and produces per-position adapter indices applied across all decoder layers; KV-cache normalization keeps adapters independent. Novel deployment pattern for production RAG / agent stacks — one checkpoint, multiple specialized behaviors. 12 languages: EN, DE, ES, FR, JA, PT, AR, CS, IT, KO, NL, ZH.

When not to use: General chat or coding — the base Granite 4.1 8B is a respectable but not standout 8B; the value here is the embedded adapter toolkit, not the base. Also **PREVIEW** status: IBM explicitly notes adapters should be tested per-use-case before production, and the Guardian-Library safety adapters are not a substitute for application-level safety testing.