Showing 1–50 of 87 results for author: Shoeybi, M

SOAP, Muon, and Beyond: Pushing LLM Pretraining Scales

Authors: Mikail Khona, Aditya Vavre, Boxiang Wang, Deyu Fu, Hao Wu, Mike Chrzanowski, Bryan Catanzaro, Dheevatsa Mudigere, Jeff Pool, Michael Lightstone, Mohammad Shoeybi, Mostofa Patwary, Nima Tajbakhsh, Tijmen Blankevoort

Abstract: Higher-order optimizers such as Muon and SOAP offer faster convergence than AdamW, but their computational cost and numerical stability challenges have limited adoption at scale. In this work, we adapt and enhance preconditioned gradient methods to overcome the practical challenges of large-scale LLM pretraining. We first identify instabilities in SOAP at large batch sizes and propose algorithmic… ▽ More Higher-order optimizers such as Muon and SOAP offer faster convergence than AdamW, but their computational cost and numerical stability challenges have limited adoption at scale. In this work, we adapt and enhance preconditioned gradient methods to overcome the practical challenges of large-scale LLM pretraining. We first identify instabilities in SOAP at large batch sizes and propose algorithmic modifications including per-step QR orthogonalization and improved preconditioning strategies that eliminate loss spikes and enable stable training in these regimes. We then present a unified empirical study of SOAP, Muon, and AdamW using update-RMS matching to ensure fair learning rate transfer across optimizers. As part of this analysis, we empirically evaluate the orthogonalization quality of Muon. Our experiments on multi-billion-parameter models trained on trillions of tokens reveal that SOAP and Muon consistently outperform AdamW at the scales we tested. Notably, at batch sizes of up to 100M tokens for next-token prediction, these optimizers maintain training stability and quality while AdamW degrades. To enable efficient training at large scale, we introduce a layer-wise distributed optimizer compatible with Megatron-LM. Our implementation balances memory and hides communication while avoiding approximations to the optimizer computations, thus retaining their convergence benefits. Additionally, we identify and build specific system-level improvements to further accelerate our layer-wise implementation. To support the research community, we release a codebase that contains emerging algorithms for optimization: https://github.com/NVIDIA-NeMo/Emerging-Optimizers △ Less

Submitted 13 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Audio-Visual Flamingo: Open Audio-Visual Intelligence for Long and Complex Videos

Authors: Sreyan Ghosh, Arushi Goel, Kaousheik Jayakumar, Lasha Koroshinadze, Nishit Anand, Siddharth Gururani, Hanrong Ye, Pritam Biswas, Yuanhang Su, Ehsan Hosseini-Asl, Sang-gil Lee, Zhifeng Kong, Jaehyeon Kim, Sungwon Kim, S Sakshi, Ramani Duraiswami, Dinesh Manocha, Andrew Tao, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro, Ming-Yu Liu, Wei Ping

Abstract: We present Audio-Visual Flamingo (AV-Flamingo), a fully open state-of-the-art audio-visual large language model (AV-LLM) for joint understanding and reasoning over audio, images, and long-form videos. Unlike prior AV-LLMs that primarily focus on short clips, AV-Flamingo is designed for understanding and reasoning over long and complex real-world (audio-visual) videos. To support this, we make thre… ▽ More We present Audio-Visual Flamingo (AV-Flamingo), a fully open state-of-the-art audio-visual large language model (AV-LLM) for joint understanding and reasoning over audio, images, and long-form videos. Unlike prior AV-LLMs that primarily focus on short clips, AV-Flamingo is designed for understanding and reasoning over long and complex real-world (audio-visual) videos. To support this, we make three key contributions: (i) Audio-Visual-Skills, a large-scale collection of real-world videos with ~7M caption and question-answer training instances designed to emphasize temporal, compositional, and cross-modal audio-visual reasoning; (ii) a novel three-stage curriculum that progressively trains the model from short-range perception to long-horizon multi-event reasoning; and (iii) Temporal Audio-Visual Interleaved Chain-of-Thought, a reasoning framework that explicitly grounds intermediate reasoning steps to timestamps in long audio-visual streams, improving temporal alignment and interpretability. Extensive experiments across 15+ audio-visual, omni-modal, audio, and vision benchmarks show that AV-Flamingo outperforms similarly sized open models by clear margins and remains highly competitive with, and in some cases surpasses, much larger open-weight and closed models, particularly on long and complex real-world audio-visual understanding and reasoning tasks. Beyond benchmark performance, AV-Flamingo exhibits strong real-world utility and transfers well to unseen tasks, highlighting its robustness and generalization ability. △ Less

Submitted 17 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: Project Page: https://avflamingo.pages.dev/

Unified Audio Intelligence Without Regressing on Text Intelligence

Authors: Zhifeng Kong, Sang-gil Lee, Jaehyeon Kim, Boxin Wang, Zihan Liu, Sungwon Kim, Yang Chen, Arushi Goel, Rajarshi Roy, Wenliang Dai, Zhuolin Yang, Yangyi Chen, Dongfu Jiang, Sreyan Ghosh, Tuomas Rintamaki, Andrew Tao, Jonathan Raiman, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro, Wei Ping

Abstract: Audio intelligence involves understanding, reasoning about, and generating both audio and speech. In this work, we introduce Nemotron-Labs-Audex-30B-A3B (Audex), a unified audio-text LLM built on Nemotron-Cascade-2-30B-A3B, a strong text-only MoE LLM. Audex adopts a simple unified design with a single Transformer decoder: audio inputs are encoded and projected into the text embedding space, while… ▽ More Audio intelligence involves understanding, reasoning about, and generating both audio and speech. In this work, we introduce Nemotron-Labs-Audex-30B-A3B (Audex), a unified audio-text LLM built on Nemotron-Cascade-2-30B-A3B, a strong text-only MoE LLM. Audex adopts a simple unified design with a single Transformer decoder: audio inputs are encoded and projected into the text embedding space, while text tokens and quantized audio output tokens are treated uniformly during generation. This architecture enables strong audio-text fusion, seamless multimodal generation, and compatibility with standard LLM training and inference infrastructure. For training, we meticulously curate audio-text datasets comprising 157.4B audio tokens and 320.5B text tokens. We apply multi-stage supervised training on these datasets, followed by text-only Cascade RL and multi-domain on-policy distillation. Audex delivers state-of-the-art audio understanding, speech recognition and translation, text-to-speech, audio generation, and speech-to-speech generation, while preserving very compelling reasoning, alignment, knowledge, long-context, and agentic capabilities of its text-only LLM backbone with marginal or no regression. We release the model checkpoints to facilitate open research. △ Less

Submitted 7 July, 2026; v1 submitted 6 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: We release the Audex models at https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/nemotron-labs-audex

Nemotron-Labs-TwoTower: Diffusion Language Modeling with Pretrained Autoregressive Context

Authors: Fitsum Reda, John Kamalu, Roger Waleffe, Mostofa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro

Abstract: Diffusion language models offer a promising alternative to autoregressive models due to their potential for parallel and iterative generation. However, existing approaches use a single network for both context representation and iterative denoising, forcing one model to serve both roles and limiting its capacity for either role. We propose TwoTower, a block-wise autoregressive diffusion model that… ▽ More Diffusion language models offer a promising alternative to autoregressive models due to their potential for parallel and iterative generation. However, existing approaches use a single network for both context representation and iterative denoising, forcing one model to serve both roles and limiting its capacity for either role. We propose TwoTower, a block-wise autoregressive diffusion model that decouples these roles into two towers: a frozen AR context tower that causally processes clean tokens, and a trainable diffusion denoiser tower with bidirectional block attention that refines noisy blocks via cross-attention to the context. Built on Nemotron-3-Nano-30B-A3B, an open-weight 30B hybrid Mamba-Transformer MoE model, and trained on approximately 2.1T tokens, Nemotron-Labs-TwoTower retains 98.7% of the autoregressive baseline's quality while offering 2.42X higher wall-clock generation throughput. We release the code and model weights at https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/nemotron-labs-twotower. △ Less

Submitted 29 June, 2026; v1 submitted 24 June, 2026; originally announced June 2026.

Comments: Code and model weights available at https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/nemotron-labs-twotower

Nemotron 3 Ultra: Open, Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Model for Agentic Reasoning

Authors: NVIDIA, :, Aaron Blakeman, Aaron Thomas, Aastha Jhunjhunwala, Abhibha Gupta, Abhinav Khattar, Adam Rajfer, Adi Renduchintala, Adil Asif, Aditya Vavre, Adriana Flores Miranda, Ahmad Bilal, Aileen Zaman, Ajay Hotchandani, Akanksha Shukla, Akhiad Bercovich, Aleksander Ficek, Alex Gronskiy, Alex Kondratenko, Alex Steiner, Alex Ye, Alexander Bukharin, Alexandre Milesi, Ali Taghibakhshi , et al. (549 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: We introduce Nemotron 3 Ultra, a 550 billion total and 55 billion active parameter Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Attention language model. We pre-trained Nemotron 3 Ultra on 20 trillion text tokens, then extended the context length to 1M tokens, and post-trained using Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and Multi-teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD). Nemotron 3 Ultra is o… ▽ More We introduce Nemotron 3 Ultra, a 550 billion total and 55 billion active parameter Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Attention language model. We pre-trained Nemotron 3 Ultra on 20 trillion text tokens, then extended the context length to 1M tokens, and post-trained using Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and Multi-teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD). Nemotron 3 Ultra is our most capable model yet, employing multiple key technologies - LatentMoE, Multi Token Prediction (MTP), NVFP4 pre-training, multi-environment RLVR, MOPD, and reasoning budget control. Nemotron 3 Ultra achieves up to ~6x higher inference throughput as compared to state-of-the-art publicly available LLMs while attaining on-par accuracy. The state-of-the-art accuracy, high inference throughput, and 1M token context length make Nemotron 3 Ultra ideal for long-running autonomous agentic tasks. We open-source the base, post-trained, and quantized checkpoints, along with the training data and recipe on HuggingFace. △ Less

Submitted 12 June, 2026; originally announced June 2026.

Cosmos 3: Omnimodal World Models for Physical AI

Authors: NVIDIA, :, Aditi, Niket Agarwal, Arslan Ali, Jon Allen, Martin Antolini, Adeline Aubame, Alisson Azzolini, Junjie Bai, Maciej Bala, Yogesh Balaji, Josh Bapst, Aarti Basant, Mukesh Beladiya, Mohammad Qazim Bhat, Zaid Pervaiz Bhat, Dan Blick, Vanni Brighella, Han Cai, Tiffany Cai, Eric Cameracci, Jiaxin Cao, Yulong Cao, Mark Carlson , et al. (271 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: We introduce Cosmos 3, a family of omnimodal world models designed to jointly process and generate language, image, video, audio, and action sequences within a unified mixture-of-transformers architecture. By supporting highly flexible input-output configurations, Cosmos 3 seamlessly unifies critical modalities for Physical AI -- effectively subsuming vision-language models, video generators, worl… ▽ More We introduce Cosmos 3, a family of omnimodal world models designed to jointly process and generate language, image, video, audio, and action sequences within a unified mixture-of-transformers architecture. By supporting highly flexible input-output configurations, Cosmos 3 seamlessly unifies critical modalities for Physical AI -- effectively subsuming vision-language models, video generators, world simulators, and world-action models into a single framework. Our evaluation demonstrates that Cosmos 3 establishes a new state-of-the-art across a diverse suite of understanding and generation tasks, demonstrating omnimodal world models as scalable, general-purpose backbones for embodied agents. Our post-trained Cosmos 3 models were ranked as the best open-source Text-to-Image and Image-to-Video models by Artificial Analysis, and the best policy model by RoboArena at the time the technical report was written. To accelerate open research and deployment in Physical AI, we make our code, model checkpoints, curated synthetic datasets, and evaluation benchmark available under the Linux Foundation's OpenMDW-1.1 License at https://github.com/nvidia/cosmos and https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/cosmos3. The project website is available at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/cosmos-lab/cosmos3. △ Less

Submitted 23 June, 2026; v1 submitted 1 June, 2026; originally announced June 2026.

Nemotron 3 Nano Omni: Efficient and Open Multimodal Intelligence

Authors: NVIDIA, :, Amala Sanjay Deshmukh, Kateryna Chumachenko, Tuomas Rintamaki, Matthieu Le, Tyler Poon, Danial Mohseni Taheri, Ilia Karmanov, Guilin Liu, Jarno Seppanen, Arushi Goel, Mike Ranzinger, Greg Heinrich, Guo Chen, Lukas Voegtle, Philipp Fischer, Timo Roman, Karan Sapra, Collin McCarthy, Shaokun Zhang, Fuxiao Liu, Hanrong Ye, Yi Dong, Mingjie Liu , et al. (194 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: We introduce Nemotron 3 Nano Omni, the latest model in the Nemotron multimodal series and the first to natively support audio inputs alongside text, images, and video. Nemotron 3 Nano Omni delivers consistent accuracy improvements over its predecessor, Nemotron Nano V2 VL, across all modalities, enabled by advances in architecture, training data and recipes. In particular, Nemotron 3 delivers lead… ▽ More We introduce Nemotron 3 Nano Omni, the latest model in the Nemotron multimodal series and the first to natively support audio inputs alongside text, images, and video. Nemotron 3 Nano Omni delivers consistent accuracy improvements over its predecessor, Nemotron Nano V2 VL, across all modalities, enabled by advances in architecture, training data and recipes. In particular, Nemotron 3 delivers leading results in real-world document understanding, long audio-video comprehension, and agentic computer use. Built on the highly efficient Nemotron 3 Nano 30B-A3B backbone, Nemotron 3 Nano Omni further incorporates innovative multimodal token-reduction techniques to deliver substantially lower inference latency and higher throughput than other models of similar size. We are releasing model checkpoints in BF16, FP8, and FP4 formats, along with portions of the training data and codebase to facilitate further research and development. △ Less

Submitted 11 May, 2026; v1 submitted 27 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

Nemotron 3 Super: Open, Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Model for Agentic Reasoning

Authors: NVIDIA, :, Aakshita Chandiramani, Aaron Blakeman, Abdullahi Olaoye, Abhibha Gupta, Abhilash Somasamudramath, Abhinav Khattar, Adeola Adesoba, Adi Renduchintala, Adil Asif, Aditya Agrawal, Aditya Vavre, Ahmad Kiswani, Aishwarya Padmakumar, Ajay Hotchandani, Akanksha Shukla, Akhiad Bercovich, Aleksander Ficek, Aleksandr Shaposhnikov, Alex Gronskiy, Alex Kondratenko, Alex Neefus, Alex Steiner, Alex Yang , et al. (522 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: We describe the pre-training, post-training, and quantization of Nemotron 3 Super, a 120 billion (active 12 billion) parameter hybrid Mamba-Attention Mixture-of-Experts model. Nemotron 3 Super is the first model in the Nemotron 3 family to 1) be pre-trained in NVFP4, 2) leverage LatentMoE, a new Mixture-of-Experts architecture that optimizes for both accuracy per FLOP and accuracy per parameter, a… ▽ More We describe the pre-training, post-training, and quantization of Nemotron 3 Super, a 120 billion (active 12 billion) parameter hybrid Mamba-Attention Mixture-of-Experts model. Nemotron 3 Super is the first model in the Nemotron 3 family to 1) be pre-trained in NVFP4, 2) leverage LatentMoE, a new Mixture-of-Experts architecture that optimizes for both accuracy per FLOP and accuracy per parameter, and 3) include MTP layers for inference acceleration through native speculative decoding. We pre-trained Nemotron 3 Super on 25 trillion tokens followed by post-training using supervised fine tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). The final model supports up to 1M context length and achieves comparable accuracy on common benchmarks, while also achieving up to 2.2x and 7.5x higher inference throughput compared to GPT-OSS-120B and Qwen3.5-122B, respectively. Nemotron 3 Super datasets, along with the base, post-trained, and quantized checkpoints, are open-sourced on HuggingFace. △ Less

Submitted 14 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

Audio Flamingo Next: Next-Generation Open Audio-Language Models for Speech, Sound, and Music

Authors: Sreyan Ghosh, Arushi Goel, Kaousheik Jayakumar, Lasha Koroshinadze, Nishit Anand, Zhifeng Kong, Siddharth Gururani, Sang-gil Lee, Jaehyeon Kim, Aya Aljafari, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Sungwon Kim, Ramani Duraiswami, Dinesh Manocha, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro, Ming-Yu Liu, Wei Ping

Abstract: We present Audio Flamingo Next (AF-Next), the next-generation and most capable large audio-language model in the Audio Flamingo series, designed to advance understanding and reasoning over speech, environmental sounds and music. Compared to Audio Flamingo 3, AF-Next introduces: (i) a stronger foundational audio-language model that significantly improves accuracy across diverse audio understanding… ▽ More We present Audio Flamingo Next (AF-Next), the next-generation and most capable large audio-language model in the Audio Flamingo series, designed to advance understanding and reasoning over speech, environmental sounds and music. Compared to Audio Flamingo 3, AF-Next introduces: (i) a stronger foundational audio-language model that significantly improves accuracy across diverse audio understanding tasks; (ii) scalable strategies for constructing large-scale audio understanding and reasoning data beyond existing academic benchmarks; (iii) support for long and complex audio inputs up to 30 minutes; and (iv) Temporal Audio Chain-of-Thought, a new reasoning paradigm that explicitly grounds intermediate reasoning steps to timestamps in long audio, enabling fine-grained temporal alignment and improved interpretability. To enable these capabilities, we first conduct a systematic analysis of Audio Flamingo 3 to identify key gaps in audio understanding and reasoning. We then curate and scale new large-scale datasets totaling over 1 million hours to address these limitations and expand the existing AudioSkills-XL, LongAudio-XL, AF-Think and AF-Chat datasets. AF-Next is trained using a curriculum-based strategy spanning pre-training, mid-training and post-training stages. Extensive experiments across 20 audio understanding and reasoning benchmarks, including challenging long-audio tasks, show that AF-Next outperforms similarly sized open models by large margins and remains highly competitive with and sometimes surpasses, much larger open-weight and closed models. Beyond benchmark performance, AF-Next exhibits strong real-world utility and transfers well to unseen tasks, highlighting its robustness and generalization ability. In addition to all data, code and methods, we open-source 3 variants of AF-Next, including AF-Next-Instruct, AF-Next-Think and AF-Next-Captioner. △ Less

Submitted 12 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

Comments: Project website: https://afnext-umd-nvidia.github.io/

Nemotron-Cascade 2: Post-Training LLMs with Cascade RL and Multi-Domain On-Policy Distillation

Authors: Zhuolin Yang, Zihan Liu, Yang Chen, Wenliang Dai, Boxin Wang, Sheng-Chieh Lin, Chankyu Lee, Yangyi Chen, Dongfu Jiang, Jiafan He, Renjie Pi, Grace Lam, Nayeon Lee, Alexander Bukharin, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro, Wei Ping

Abstract: We introduce Nemotron-Cascade 2, an open 30B MoE model with 3B activated parameters that delivers best-in-class reasoning and strong agentic capabilities. Despite its compact size, its mathematical and coding reasoning performance approaches that of frontier open models. It is the second open-weight LLM, after DeepSeekV3.2-Speciale-671B-A37B, to achieve Gold Medal-level performance in the 2025 Int… ▽ More We introduce Nemotron-Cascade 2, an open 30B MoE model with 3B activated parameters that delivers best-in-class reasoning and strong agentic capabilities. Despite its compact size, its mathematical and coding reasoning performance approaches that of frontier open models. It is the second open-weight LLM, after DeepSeekV3.2-Speciale-671B-A37B, to achieve Gold Medal-level performance in the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), and the ICPC World Finals, demonstrating remarkably high intelligence density with 20x fewer parameters. In contrast to Nemotron-Cascade 1, the key technical advancements are as follows. After SFT on a meticulously curated dataset, we substantially expand Cascade RL to cover a much broader spectrum of reasoning and agentic domains. Furthermore, we introduce multi-domain on-policy distillation from the strongest intermediate teacher models for each domain throughout the Cascade RL process, allowing us to efficiently recover benchmark regressions and sustain strong performance gains along the way. We release the collection of model checkpoint and training data. △ Less

Submitted 21 March, 2026; v1 submitted 19 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Comments: We release the model and data at https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/nemotron-cascade-2

MMOU: A Massive Multi-Task Omni Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Long and Complex Real-World Videos

Authors: Arushi Goel, Sreyan Ghosh, Vatsal Agarwal, Nishit Anand, Kaousheik Jayakumar, Lasha Koroshinadze, Yao Xu, Katie Lyons, James Case, Karan Sapra, Kevin J. Shih, Siddharth Gururani, Abhinav Shrivastava, Ramani Duraiswami, Dinesh Manocha, Andrew Tao, Bryan Catanzaro, Mohammad Shoeybi, Wei Ping

Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown strong performance in visual and audio understanding when evaluated in isolation. However, their ability to jointly reason over omni-modal (visual, audio, and textual) signals in long and complex videos remains largely unexplored. We introduce MMOU, a new benchmark designed to systematically evaluate multimodal understanding and reasoning under t… ▽ More Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown strong performance in visual and audio understanding when evaluated in isolation. However, their ability to jointly reason over omni-modal (visual, audio, and textual) signals in long and complex videos remains largely unexplored. We introduce MMOU, a new benchmark designed to systematically evaluate multimodal understanding and reasoning under these challenging, real-world conditions. MMOU consists of 20,000 carefully curated questions paired with 11877 web-collected videos of varying length, spanning diverse domains and exhibiting rich, tightly coupled audio-visual content. The benchmark covers 13 fundamental skill categories, all of which require integrating evidence across modalities and time. All questions are manually annotated across multiple turns by professional annotators, ensuring high quality and reasoning fidelity. We evaluate 20+ state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary multimodal models on MMOU. The results expose substantial performance gaps: the best closed-source model achieves only 64.2% accuracy, while the strongest open-source model reaches just 46.8%. Our results highlight the challenges of long-form omni-modal understanding, revealing that current models frequently fail to apply even fundamental skills in long videos. Through detailed analysis, we further identify systematic failure modes and provide insights into where and why current models break. △ Less

Submitted 20 June, 2026; v1 submitted 14 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Comments: Project Page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/nvidia/MMOU

Scalable Training of Mixture-of-Experts Models with Megatron Core

Authors: Zijie Yan, Hongxiao Bai, Xin Yao, Dennis Liu, Tong Liu, Hongbin Liu, Pingtian Li, Evan Wu, Shiqing Fan, Li Tao, Robin Zhang, Yuzhong Wang, Shifang Xu, Jack Chang, Xuwen Chen, Kunlun Li, Yan Bai, Gao Deng, Nan Zheng, Vijay Anand Korthikanti, Abhinav Khattar, Ethan He, Soham Govande, Sangkug Lym, Zhongbo Zhu , et al. (20 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: Scaling Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) training introduces systems challenges absent in dense models. Because each token activates only a subset of experts, this sparsity allows total parameters to grow much faster than per-token computation, creating coupled constraints across memory, communication, and computation. Optimizing one dimension often shifts pressure to another, demanding co-design across t… ▽ More Scaling Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) training introduces systems challenges absent in dense models. Because each token activates only a subset of experts, this sparsity allows total parameters to grow much faster than per-token computation, creating coupled constraints across memory, communication, and computation. Optimizing one dimension often shifts pressure to another, demanding co-design across the full system stack. We address these challenges for MoE training through integrated optimizations spanning memory (fine-grained recomputation, offloading, etc.), communication (optimized dispatchers, overlapping, etc.), and computation (Grouped GEMM, fusions, CUDA Graphs, etc.). The framework also provides Parallel Folding for flexible multi-dimensional parallelism, low-precision training support for FP8 and NVFP4, and efficient long-context training. On NVIDIA GB300 and GB200, it achieves 1,233/1,048 TFLOPS/GPU for DeepSeek-V3-685B and 974/919 TFLOPS/GPU for Qwen3-235B. As a performant, scalable, and production-ready open-source solution, it has been used across academia and industry for training MoE models ranging from billions to trillions of parameters on clusters scaling up to thousands of GPUs. This report explains how these techniques work, their trade-offs, and their interactions at the systems level, providing practical guidance for scaling MoE models with Megatron Core. △ Less

Submitted 10 March, 2026; v1 submitted 8 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Comments: Technical Report. 88 pages. 42 figures

On Data Engineering for Scaling LLM Terminal Capabilities

Authors: Renjie Pi, Grace Lam, Mohammad Shoeybi, Pooya Jannaty, Bryan Catanzaro, Wei Ping

Abstract: Despite rapid recent progress in the terminal capabilities of large language models, the training data strategies behind state-of-the-art terminal agents remain largely undisclosed. We address this gap through a systematic study of data engineering practices for terminal agents, making two key contributions: (1) Terminal-Task-Gen, a lightweight synthetic task generation pipeline that supports seed… ▽ More Despite rapid recent progress in the terminal capabilities of large language models, the training data strategies behind state-of-the-art terminal agents remain largely undisclosed. We address this gap through a systematic study of data engineering practices for terminal agents, making two key contributions: (1) Terminal-Task-Gen, a lightweight synthetic task generation pipeline that supports seed-based and skill-based task construction, and (2) a comprehensive analysis of data and training strategies, including filtering, curriculum learning, long context training, and scaling behavior. Our pipeline yields Terminal-Corpus, a large-scale open-source dataset for terminal tasks. Using this dataset, we train Nemotron-Terminal, a family of models initialized from Qwen3(8B, 14B, 32B) that achieve substantial gains on Terminal-Bench 2.0: Nemotron-Terminal-8B improves from 2.5% to 13.0% Nemotron-Terminal-14B improves from 4.0% to 20.2%, and Nemotron-Terminal-32B improves from 3.4% to 27.4%, matching the performance of significantly larger models. To accelerate research in this domain, we open-source our model checkpoints and most of our synthetic datasets at https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/nemotron-terminal. △ Less

Submitted 24 February, 2026; originally announced February 2026.

LatentMoE: Toward Optimal Accuracy per FLOP and Parameter in Mixture of Experts

Authors: Venmugil Elango, Nidhi Bhatia, Roger Waleffe, Rasoul Shafipour, Tomer Asida, Abhinav Khattar, Nave Assaf, Maximilian Golub, Joey Guman, Tiyasa Mitra, Ritchie Zhao, Ritika Borkar, Ran Zilberstein, Mostofa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bita Rouhani

Abstract: Mixture of Experts (MoEs) have become a central component of many state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary large language models. Despite their widespread adoption, it remains unclear how close existing MoE architectures are to optimal with respect to inference cost, as measured by accuracy per floating-point operation and per parameter. In this work, we revisit MoE design from a hardware-soft… ▽ More Mixture of Experts (MoEs) have become a central component of many state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary large language models. Despite their widespread adoption, it remains unclear how close existing MoE architectures are to optimal with respect to inference cost, as measured by accuracy per floating-point operation and per parameter. In this work, we revisit MoE design from a hardware-software co-design perspective, grounded in empirical and theoretical considerations. We characterize key performance bottlenecks across diverse deployment regimes, spanning offline high-throughput execution and online, latency-critical inference. Guided by these insights, we introduce LatentMoE, a new model architecture resulting from systematic design exploration and optimized for maximal accuracy per unit of compute. Empirical design space exploration at scales of up to 95B parameters and over a 1T-token training horizon, together with supporting theoretical analysis, shows that LatentMoE consistently outperforms standard MoE architectures in terms of accuracy per FLOP and per parameter. Given its strong performance, the LatentMoE architecture has been adopted by the flagship Nemotron-3 Super and Ultra models and scaled to substantially larger regimes, including longer token horizons and larger model sizes, as reported in Nvidia et al. (arXiv:2512.20856). △ Less

Submitted 25 January, 2026; originally announced January 2026.

NVIDIA Nemotron 3: Efficient and Open Intelligence

Authors: NVIDIA, :, Aaron Blakeman, Aaron Grattafiori, Aarti Basant, Abhibha Gupta, Abhinav Khattar, Adi Renduchintala, Aditya Vavre, Akanksha Shukla, Akhiad Bercovich, Aleksander Ficek, Aleksandr Shaposhnikov, Alex Kondratenko, Alexander Bukharin, Alexandre Milesi, Ali Taghibakhshi, Alisa Liu, Amelia Barton, Ameya Sunil Mahabaleshwarkar, Amir Klein, Amit Zuker, Amnon Geifman, Amy Shen, Anahita Bhiwandiwalla , et al. (334 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: We introduce the Nemotron 3 family of models - Nano, Super, and Ultra. These models deliver strong agentic, reasoning, and conversational capabilities. The Nemotron 3 family uses a Mixture-of-Experts hybrid Mamba-Transformer architecture to provide best-in-class throughput and context lengths of up to 1M tokens. Super and Ultra models are trained with NVFP4 and incorporate LatentMoE, a novel appro… ▽ More We introduce the Nemotron 3 family of models - Nano, Super, and Ultra. These models deliver strong agentic, reasoning, and conversational capabilities. The Nemotron 3 family uses a Mixture-of-Experts hybrid Mamba-Transformer architecture to provide best-in-class throughput and context lengths of up to 1M tokens. Super and Ultra models are trained with NVFP4 and incorporate LatentMoE, a novel approach that improves model quality. The two larger models also include MTP layers for faster text generation. All Nemotron 3 models are post-trained using multi-environment reinforcement learning enabling reasoning, multi-step tool use, and support granular reasoning budget control. Nano, the smallest model, outperforms comparable models in accuracy while remaining extremely cost-efficient for inference. Super is optimized for collaborative agents and high-volume workloads such as IT ticket automation. Ultra, the largest model, provides state-of-the-art accuracy and reasoning performance. Nano is released together with its technical report and this white paper, while Super and Ultra will follow in the coming months. We will openly release the model weights, pre- and post-training software, recipes, and all data for which we hold redistribution rights. △ Less

Submitted 23 December, 2025; originally announced December 2025.

Nemotron 3 Nano: Open, Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Model for Agentic Reasoning

Authors: NVIDIA, :, Aaron Blakeman, Aaron Grattafiori, Aarti Basant, Abhibha Gupta, Abhinav Khattar, Adi Renduchintala, Aditya Vavre, Akanksha Shukla, Akhiad Bercovich, Aleksander Ficek, Aleksandr Shaposhnikov, Alex Kondratenko, Alexander Bukharin, Alexandre Milesi, Ali Taghibakhshi, Alisa Liu, Amelia Barton, Ameya Sunil Mahabaleshwarkar, Amir Klein, Amit Zuker, Amnon Geifman, Amy Shen, Anahita Bhiwandiwalla , et al. (289 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: We present Nemotron 3 Nano 30B-A3B, a Mixture-of-Experts hybrid Mamba-Transformer language model. Nemotron 3 Nano was pretrained on 25 trillion text tokens, including more than 3 trillion new unique tokens over Nemotron 2, followed by supervised fine tuning and large-scale RL on diverse environments. Nemotron 3 Nano achieves better accuracy than our previous generation Nemotron 2 Nano while activa… ▽ More We present Nemotron 3 Nano 30B-A3B, a Mixture-of-Experts hybrid Mamba-Transformer language model. Nemotron 3 Nano was pretrained on 25 trillion text tokens, including more than 3 trillion new unique tokens over Nemotron 2, followed by supervised fine tuning and large-scale RL on diverse environments. Nemotron 3 Nano achieves better accuracy than our previous generation Nemotron 2 Nano while activating less than half of the parameters per forward pass. It achieves up to 3.3x higher inference throughput than similarly-sized open models like GPT-OSS-20B and Qwen3-30B-A3B-Thinking-2507, while also being more accurate on popular benchmarks. Nemotron 3 Nano demonstrates enhanced agentic, reasoning, and chat abilities and supports context lengths up to 1M tokens. We release both our pretrained Nemotron 3 Nano 30B-A3B Base and post-trained Nemotron 3 Nano 30B-A3B checkpoints on Hugging Face. △ Less

Submitted 23 December, 2025; originally announced December 2025.

Nemotron-Cascade: Scaling Cascaded Reinforcement Learning for General-Purpose Reasoning Models

Authors: Boxin Wang, Chankyu Lee, Nayeon Lee, Sheng-Chieh Lin, Wenliang Dai, Yang Chen, Yangyi Chen, Zhuolin Yang, Zihan Liu, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro, Wei Ping

Abstract: Building general-purpose reasoning models with reinforcement learning (RL) entails substantial cross-domain heterogeneity, including large variation in inference-time response lengths and verification latency. Such variability complicates the RL infrastructure, slows training, and makes training curriculum (e.g., response length extension) and hyperparameter selection challenging. In this work, we… ▽ More Building general-purpose reasoning models with reinforcement learning (RL) entails substantial cross-domain heterogeneity, including large variation in inference-time response lengths and verification latency. Such variability complicates the RL infrastructure, slows training, and makes training curriculum (e.g., response length extension) and hyperparameter selection challenging. In this work, we propose cascaded domain-wise reinforcement learning (Cascade RL) to develop Nemotron-Cascade, capable of operating in both instruct and deep thinking modes, without any performance gap relative to a thinking-only counterpart. Departing from conventional approaches that blend heterogeneous prompts from different domains, Cascade RL orchestrates sequential, domain-wise RL, reducing engineering complexity and delivering state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of benchmarks. Notably, RLHF for alignment, when used as a pre-step, boosts the model's reasoning ability far beyond mere preference optimization, and subsequent domain-wise RLVR stages rarely degrade the benchmark performance attained in earlier domains and may even improve it (see an illustration in Figure 1). Our 14B model, after RL, outperforms its SFT teacher, DeepSeek-R1-0528, on LiveCodeBench v5/v6/Pro and achieves silver-medal performance in the 2025 International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). We transparently share our training and data recipes. △ Less

Submitted 27 March, 2026; v1 submitted 15 December, 2025; originally announced December 2025.

Comments: We publicly release the Nemotron-Cascade models and the full collection of training data at: https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/nemotron-cascade

Nemotron Elastic: Towards Efficient Many-in-One Reasoning LLMs

Authors: Ali Taghibakhshi, Sharath Turuvekere Sreenivas, Saurav Muralidharan, Ruisi Cai, Marcin Chochowski, Ameya Sunil Mahabaleshwarkar, Yoshi Suhara, Oluwatobi Olabiyi, Daniel Korzekwa, Mostofa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, Jan Kautz, Bryan Catanzaro, Ashwath Aithal, Nima Tajbakhsh, Pavlo Molchanov

Abstract: Training a family of large language models targeting multiple scales and deployment objectives is prohibitively expensive, requiring separate training runs for each different size. Recent work on model compression through pruning and knowledge distillation has reduced this cost; however, this process still incurs hundreds of billions of tokens worth of training cost per compressed model. In this p… ▽ More Training a family of large language models targeting multiple scales and deployment objectives is prohibitively expensive, requiring separate training runs for each different size. Recent work on model compression through pruning and knowledge distillation has reduced this cost; however, this process still incurs hundreds of billions of tokens worth of training cost per compressed model. In this paper, we present Nemotron Elastic, a framework for building reasoning-oriented LLMs, including hybrid Mamba-Attention architectures, that embed multiple nested submodels within a single parent model, each optimized for different deployment configurations and budgets. Each of these submodels shares weights with the parent model and can be extracted zero-shot during deployment without additional training or fine-tuning. We enable this functionality through an end-to-end trained router, tightly coupled to a two-stage training curriculum designed specifically for reasoning models. We additionally introduce group-aware SSM elastification that preserves Mamba's structural constraints, heterogeneous MLP elastification, normalized MSE-based layer importance for improved depth selection, and knowledge distillation enabling simultaneous multi-budget optimization. We apply Nemotron Elastic to the Nemotron Nano V2 12B model, simultaneously producing a 9B and a 6B model using only 110B training tokens; this results in over 360x cost reduction compared to training model families from scratch, and around 7x compared to SoTA compression techniques. Each of the nested models performs on par or better than the SoTA in accuracy. Moreover, unlike other compression methods, the nested capability of our approach allows having a many-in-one reasoning model that has constant deployment memory against the number of models in the family. △ Less

Submitted 20 November, 2025; originally announced November 2025.

Music Flamingo: Scaling Music Understanding in Audio Language Models

Authors: Sreyan Ghosh, Arushi Goel, Lasha Koroshinadze, Sang-gil Lee, Zhifeng Kong, Joao Felipe Santos, Ramani Duraiswami, Dinesh Manocha, Wei Ping, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro

Abstract: We introduce Music Flamingo, a novel large audio-language model designed to advance music (including song) understanding in foundational audio models. While audio-language research has progressed rapidly, music remains challenging due to its dynamic, layered, and information-dense nature. Progress has been further limited by the difficulty of scaling open audio understanding models, primarily beca… ▽ More We introduce Music Flamingo, a novel large audio-language model designed to advance music (including song) understanding in foundational audio models. While audio-language research has progressed rapidly, music remains challenging due to its dynamic, layered, and information-dense nature. Progress has been further limited by the difficulty of scaling open audio understanding models, primarily because of the scarcity of high-quality music data and annotations. As a result, prior models are restricted to producing short, high-level captions, answering only surface-level questions, and showing limited generalization across diverse musical cultures. To address these challenges, we curate MF-Skills, a large-scale dataset labeled through a multi-stage pipeline that yields rich captions and question-answer pairs covering harmony, structure, timbre, lyrics, and cultural context. We fine-tune an enhanced Audio Flamingo 3 backbone on MF-Skills and further strengthen multiple skills relevant to music understanding. To improve the model's reasoning abilities, we introduce a post-training recipe: we first cold-start with MF-Think, a novel chain-of-thought dataset grounded in music theory, followed by GRPO-based reinforcement learning with custom rewards. Music Flamingo achieves state-of-the-art results across 10+ benchmarks for music understanding and reasoning, establishing itself as a generalist and musically intelligent audio-language model. Beyond strong empirical results, Music Flamingo sets a new standard for advanced music understanding by demonstrating how models can move from surface-level recognition toward layered, human-like perception of songs. We believe this work provides both a benchmark and a foundation for the community to build the next generation of models that engage with music as meaningfully as humans do. △ Less

Submitted 13 November, 2025; originally announced November 2025.

Comments: Project Page: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/adlr/MF/

NVIDIA Nemotron Nano V2 VL

Authors: NVIDIA, :, Amala Sanjay Deshmukh, Kateryna Chumachenko, Tuomas Rintamaki, Matthieu Le, Tyler Poon, Danial Mohseni Taheri, Ilia Karmanov, Guilin Liu, Jarno Seppanen, Guo Chen, Karan Sapra, Zhiding Yu, Adi Renduchintala, Charles Wang, Peter Jin, Arushi Goel, Mike Ranzinger, Lukas Voegtle, Philipp Fischer, Timo Roman, Wei Ping, Boxin Wang, Zhuolin Yang , et al. (99 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: We introduce Nemotron Nano V2 VL, the latest model of the Nemotron vision-language series designed for strong real-world document understanding, long video comprehension, and reasoning tasks. Nemotron Nano V2 VL delivers significant improvements over our previous model, Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Nano-VL-8B, across all vision and text domains through major enhancements in model architecture, datasets, and… ▽ More We introduce Nemotron Nano V2 VL, the latest model of the Nemotron vision-language series designed for strong real-world document understanding, long video comprehension, and reasoning tasks. Nemotron Nano V2 VL delivers significant improvements over our previous model, Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Nano-VL-8B, across all vision and text domains through major enhancements in model architecture, datasets, and training recipes. Nemotron Nano V2 VL builds on Nemotron Nano V2, a hybrid Mamba-Transformer LLM, and innovative token reduction techniques to achieve higher inference throughput in long document and video scenarios. We are releasing model checkpoints in BF16, FP8, and FP4 formats and sharing large parts of our datasets, recipes and training code. △ Less

Submitted 6 November, 2025; v1 submitted 5 November, 2025; originally announced November 2025.

UALM: Unified Audio Language Model for Understanding, Generation and Reasoning

Authors: Jinchuan Tian, Sang-gil Lee, Zhifeng Kong, Sreyan Ghosh, Arushi Goel, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Wenliang Dai, Zihan Liu, Hanrong Ye, Shinji Watanabe, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro, Rafael Valle, Wei Ping

Abstract: Recent advances in the audio language modeling (ALM) domain tackle audio understanding and text-to-audio generation as separate tasks. Very few studies attempt to unify these tasks -- an essential step toward advanced multimodal reasoning. This paper introduces U}nified Audio Language Model (UALM), which aims to unify audio understanding, text-to-audio generation, and multimodal reasoning in a sin… ▽ More Recent advances in the audio language modeling (ALM) domain tackle audio understanding and text-to-audio generation as separate tasks. Very few studies attempt to unify these tasks -- an essential step toward advanced multimodal reasoning. This paper introduces U}nified Audio Language Model (UALM), which aims to unify audio understanding, text-to-audio generation, and multimodal reasoning in a single model. To achieve this goal, we first present UALM-Gen, a text-to-audio language model that directly predicts audio tokens and is comparable to state-of-the-art diffusion-based models. We then demonstrate, using proper data blending, training recipes, and inference techniques, that our single UALM model matches the quality of state-of-the-art specialized models in audio understanding, text-to-audio generation, and text reasoning. Furthermore, we present UALM-Reason, a multimodal reasoning model that utilizes both text and audio in the intermediate thinking steps to facilitate complex generation tasks. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration in audio research of cross-modal generative reasoning, with its effectiveness confirmed by subjective evaluations. △ Less

Submitted 13 October, 2025; originally announced October 2025.

Front-Loading Reasoning: The Synergy between Pretraining and Post-Training Data

Authors: Syeda Nahida Akter, Shrimai Prabhumoye, Eric Nyberg, Mostofa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, Yejin Choi, Bryan Catanzaro

Abstract: The prevailing paradigm for enhancing the reasoning abilities of LLMs revolves around post-training on high-quality, reasoning-intensive data. While emerging literature suggests that reasoning data is increasingly incorporated also during the mid-training stage-a practice that is relatively more proprietary and less openly characterized-the role of such data in pretraining remains unclear. In part… ▽ More The prevailing paradigm for enhancing the reasoning abilities of LLMs revolves around post-training on high-quality, reasoning-intensive data. While emerging literature suggests that reasoning data is increasingly incorporated also during the mid-training stage-a practice that is relatively more proprietary and less openly characterized-the role of such data in pretraining remains unclear. In particular, due to the opaqueness of pretraining corpora in most frontier models, the effect of reasoning data introduced at different phases of pre- and/or post-training is relatively less reported in the scientific literature. This raises several important questions: Is adding reasoning data earlier during pretraining any better than introducing it during post-training? Could earlier inclusion risk overfitting and harm generalization, or instead establish durable foundations that later fine-tuning cannot recover? We conduct the first systematic study of how reasoning data-varying in scale, diversity, and quality-affects LLM performance when introduced at different stages of training. We find that front-loading reasoning data into pretraining is critical (19% avg gain), establishing foundational capabilities that cannot be fully replicated by later-stage SFT, even with more data. We uncover an asymmetric principle for optimal data allocation: pretraining benefits most from broad diversity in reasoning patterns (11% avg gain), while SFT is more sensitive to data quality (15% avg gain). We show that high-quality pretraining data has latent effects, activated only after SFT, and that naively scaling SFT data can be detrimental, washing away the benefits of early reasoning injection. Our results challenge the conventional separation of language modeling and reasoning, providing a principled guide for strategically allocating data across the entire training pipeline to build more capable models. △ Less

Submitted 26 September, 2025; originally announced October 2025.

RLP: Reinforcement as a Pretraining Objective

Authors: Ali Hatamizadeh, Syeda Nahida Akter, Shrimai Prabhumoye, Jan Kautz, Mostofa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro, Yejin Choi

Abstract: The dominant paradigm for training large reasoning models starts with pre-training using next-token prediction loss on vast amounts of data. Reinforcement learning, while powerful in scaling reasoning, is introduced only as the very last phase of post-training, preceded by supervised fine-tuning. While dominant, is this an optimal way of training? In this paper, we present RLP, an information-driv… ▽ More The dominant paradigm for training large reasoning models starts with pre-training using next-token prediction loss on vast amounts of data. Reinforcement learning, while powerful in scaling reasoning, is introduced only as the very last phase of post-training, preceded by supervised fine-tuning. While dominant, is this an optimal way of training? In this paper, we present RLP, an information-driven reinforcement pretraining objective, that brings the core spirit of reinforcement learning -- exploration -- to the last phase of pretraining. The key idea is to treat chain-of-thought as an exploratory action, with rewards computed based on the information gain it provides for predicting future tokens. This training objective essentially encourages the model to think for itself before predicting what comes next, thus teaching an independent thinking behavior earlier in the pretraining. More concretely, the reward signal measures the increase in log-likelihood of the next token when conditioning on both context and a sampled reasoning chain, compared to conditioning on context alone. This approach yields a verifier-free dense reward signal, allowing for efficient training for the full document stream during pretraining. Specifically, RLP reframes reinforcement learning for reasoning as a pretraining objective on ordinary text, bridging the gap between next-token prediction and the emergence of useful chain-of-thought reasoning. Pretraining with RLP on Qwen3-1.7B-Base lifts the overall average across an eight-benchmark math-and-science suite by 19%. With identical post-training, the gains compound, with the largest improvements on reasoning-heavy tasks such as AIME25 and MMLU-Pro. Applying RLP to the Nemotron-Nano-12B-v2 increases the overall average from 42.81% to 61.32% and raises the average on scientific reasoning by 23%, demonstrating scalability across architectures and model sizes. △ Less

Submitted 1 March, 2026; v1 submitted 26 September, 2025; originally announced October 2025.

Comments: ICLR 2026 camera ready

Pretraining Large Language Models with NVFP4

Authors: NVIDIA, Felix Abecassis, Anjulie Agrusa, Dong Ahn, Jonah Alben, Stefania Alborghetti, Michael Andersch, Sivakumar Arayandi, Alexis Bjorlin, Aaron Blakeman, Evan Briones, Ian Buck, Bryan Catanzaro, Muya Chang, Jinhang Choi, Mike Chrzanowski, Eric Chung, Victor Cui, Steve Dai, Bita Darvish Rouhani, Carlo del Mundo, Deena Donia, Burc Eryilmaz, Henry Estela, Abhinav Goel , et al. (65 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) today are powerful problem solvers across many domains, and they continue to get stronger as they scale in model size, training set size, and training set quality, as shown by extensive research and experimentation across the industry. Training a frontier model today requires on the order of tens to hundreds of yottaflops, which is a massive investment of time, compute… ▽ More Large Language Models (LLMs) today are powerful problem solvers across many domains, and they continue to get stronger as they scale in model size, training set size, and training set quality, as shown by extensive research and experimentation across the industry. Training a frontier model today requires on the order of tens to hundreds of yottaflops, which is a massive investment of time, compute, and energy. Improving pretraining efficiency is therefore essential to enable the next generation of even more capable LLMs. While 8-bit floating point (FP8) training is now widely adopted, transitioning to even narrower precision, such as 4-bit floating point (FP4), could unlock additional improvements in computational speed and resource utilization. However, quantization at this level poses challenges to training stability, convergence, and implementation, notably for large-scale models trained on long token horizons. In this study, we introduce a novel approach for stable and accurate training of large language models (LLMs) using the NVFP4 format. Our method integrates Random Hadamard transforms (RHT) to bound block-level outliers, employs a two-dimensional quantization scheme for consistent representations across both the forward and backward passes, utilizes stochastic rounding for unbiased gradient estimation, and incorporates selective high-precision layers. We validate our approach by training a 12-billion-parameter model on 10 trillion tokens -- the longest publicly documented training run in 4-bit precision to date. Our results show that the model trained with our NVFP4-based pretraining technique achieves training loss and downstream task accuracies comparable to an FP8 baseline. These findings highlight that NVFP4, when combined with our training approach, represents a major step forward in narrow-precision LLM training algorithms. △ Less

Submitted 4 March, 2026; v1 submitted 29 September, 2025; originally announced September 2025.

Comments: Update includes: (1) fixing a typo in eq. 2 (2) updating author list, and (3) adding a related work

Nemotron-CC-Math: A 133 Billion-Token-Scale High Quality Math Pretraining Dataset

Authors: Rabeeh Karimi Mahabadi, Sanjeev Satheesh, Shrimai Prabhumoye, Mostofa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro

Abstract: Pretraining large language models (LLMs) on high-quality, structured data such as mathematics and code substantially enhances reasoning capabilities. However, existing math-focused datasets built from Common Crawl suffer from degraded quality due to brittle extraction heuristics, lossy HTML-to-text conversion, and the failure to reliably preserve mathematical structure. In this work, we introduce… ▽ More Pretraining large language models (LLMs) on high-quality, structured data such as mathematics and code substantially enhances reasoning capabilities. However, existing math-focused datasets built from Common Crawl suffer from degraded quality due to brittle extraction heuristics, lossy HTML-to-text conversion, and the failure to reliably preserve mathematical structure. In this work, we introduce Nemotron-CC-Math, a large-scale, high-quality mathematical corpus constructed from Common Crawl using a novel, domain-agnostic pipeline specifically designed for robust scientific text extraction. Unlike previous efforts, our pipeline recovers math across various formats (e.g., MathJax, KaTeX, MathML) by leveraging layout-aware rendering with lynx and a targeted LLM-based cleaning stage. This approach preserves the structural integrity of equations and code blocks while removing boilerplate, standardizing notation into LaTeX representation, and correcting inconsistencies. We collected a large, high-quality math corpus, namely Nemotron-CC-Math-3+ (133B tokens) and Nemotron-CC-Math-4+ (52B tokens). Notably, Nemotron-CC-Math-4+ not only surpasses all prior open math datasets-including MegaMath, FineMath, and OpenWebMath-but also contains 5.5 times more tokens than FineMath-4+, which was previously the highest-quality math pretraining dataset. When used to pretrain a Nemotron-T 8B model, our corpus yields +4.8 to +12.6 gains on MATH and +4.6 to +14.3 gains on MBPP+ over strong baselines, while also improving general-domain performance on MMLU and MMLU-Stem. We present the first pipeline to reliably extract scientific content--including math--from noisy web-scale data, yielding measurable gains in math, code, and general reasoning, and setting a new state of the art among open math pretraining corpora. To support open-source efforts, we release our code and datasets. △ Less

Submitted 20 August, 2025; originally announced August 2025.

NVIDIA Nemotron Nano 2: An Accurate and Efficient Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Reasoning Model

Authors: NVIDIA, :, Aarti Basant, Abhijit Khairnar, Abhijit Paithankar, Abhinav Khattar, Adithya Renduchintala, Aditya Malte, Akhiad Bercovich, Akshay Hazare, Alejandra Rico, Aleksander Ficek, Alex Kondratenko, Alex Shaposhnikov, Alexander Bukharin, Ali Taghibakhshi, Amelia Barton, Ameya Sunil Mahabaleshwarkar, Amy Shen, Andrew Tao, Ann Guan, Anna Shors, Anubhav Mandarwal, Arham Mehta, Arun Venkatesan , et al. (192 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: We introduce Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2, a hybrid Mamba-Transformer language model designed to increase throughput for reasoning workloads while achieving state-of-the-art accuracy compared to similarly-sized models. Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2 builds on the Nemotron-H architecture, in which the majority of the self-attention layers in the common Transformer architecture are replaced with Mamba-2 layers, to achi… ▽ More We introduce Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2, a hybrid Mamba-Transformer language model designed to increase throughput for reasoning workloads while achieving state-of-the-art accuracy compared to similarly-sized models. Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2 builds on the Nemotron-H architecture, in which the majority of the self-attention layers in the common Transformer architecture are replaced with Mamba-2 layers, to achieve improved inference speed when generating the long thinking traces needed for reasoning. We create Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2 by first pre-training a 12-billion-parameter model (Nemotron-Nano-12B-v2-Base) on 20 trillion tokens using an FP8 training recipe. After aligning Nemotron-Nano-12B-v2-Base, we employ the Minitron strategy to compress and distill the model with the goal of enabling inference on up to 128k tokens on a single NVIDIA A10G GPU (22GiB of memory, bfloat16 precision). Compared to existing similarly-sized models (e.g., Qwen3-8B), we show that Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2 achieves on-par or better accuracy on reasoning benchmarks while achieving up to 6x higher inference throughput in reasoning settings like 8k input and 16k output tokens. We are releasing Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2, Nemotron-Nano12B-v2-Base, and Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2-Base checkpoints along with the majority of our pre- and post-training datasets on Hugging Face. △ Less

Submitted 2 September, 2025; v1 submitted 20 August, 2025; originally announced August 2025.

FusionFactory: Fusing LLM Capabilities with Multi-LLM Log Data

Authors: Tao Feng, Haozhen Zhang, Zijie Lei, Pengrui Han, Mostofa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro, Jiaxuan You

Abstract: The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has created a diverse landscape of models, each excelling at different tasks. This diversity drives researchers to employ multiple LLMs in practice, leaving behind valuable multi-LLM log data. This naturally leads to the question of whether such logs can be fully leveraged to fuse LLMs' complementary capabilities. Although prior work has explor… ▽ More The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has created a diverse landscape of models, each excelling at different tasks. This diversity drives researchers to employ multiple LLMs in practice, leaving behind valuable multi-LLM log data. This naturally leads to the question of whether such logs can be fully leveraged to fuse LLMs' complementary capabilities. Although prior work has explored various strategies for integrating multiple LLMs, we argue that practical fusion must meet two essential requirements: (1) compatibility with real-world serving scenarios (e.g., local and API-based serving), and (2) flexibility to operate at different stages of the LLM pipeline to meet varied user needs (e.g., fine-tuning and inference stages). To this end, we introduce LLMFusionBench, a large-scale benchmark for LLM fusion that spans 14 tasks across five domains, with responses from 20 open-source LLMs (8B--671B) totaling 103M tokens. Building on LLMFusionBench, we propose FusionFactory, a systematic framework with three elaborated levels: (1) query-level fusion via tailored LLM routers, (2) thought-level fusion leveraging retrieved abstract reasoning templates, and (3) model-level fusion via distillation from top-ranked responses. Experiments show that FusionFactory consistently outperforms the best individual LLM across all 14 benchmarks, with the optimal fusion configuration varying across benchmarks, highlighting the promise of multi-LLM log data as a practical foundation for fusing diverse LLM capabilities. △ Less

Submitted 1 July, 2026; v1 submitted 14 July, 2025; originally announced July 2025.

Journal ref: TMLR 2026

AceReason-Nemotron 1.1: Advancing Math and Code Reasoning through SFT and RL Synergy

Authors: Zihan Liu, Zhuolin Yang, Yang Chen, Chankyu Lee, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro, Wei Ping

Abstract: In this work, we investigate the synergy between supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) in developing strong reasoning models. We begin by curating the SFT training data through two scaling strategies: increasing the number of collected prompts and the number of generated responses per prompt. Both approaches yield notable improvements in reasoning performance, with scaling t… ▽ More In this work, we investigate the synergy between supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) in developing strong reasoning models. We begin by curating the SFT training data through two scaling strategies: increasing the number of collected prompts and the number of generated responses per prompt. Both approaches yield notable improvements in reasoning performance, with scaling the number of prompts resulting in more substantial gains. We then explore the following questions regarding the synergy between SFT and RL: (i) Does a stronger SFT model consistently lead to better final performance after large-scale RL training? (ii) How can we determine an appropriate sampling temperature during RL training to effectively balance exploration and exploitation for a given SFT initialization? Our findings suggest that (i) holds true, provided effective RL training is conducted, particularly when the sampling temperature is carefully chosen to maintain the temperature-adjusted entropy around 0.3, a setting that strikes a good balance between exploration and exploitation. Notably, the performance gap between initial SFT models narrows significantly throughout the RL process. Leveraging a strong SFT foundation and insights into the synergistic interplay between SFT and RL, our AceReason-Nemotron-1.1 7B model significantly outperforms AceReason-Nemotron-1.0 and achieves new state-of-the-art performance among Qwen2.5-7B-based reasoning models on challenging math and code benchmarks, thereby demonstrating the effectiveness of our post-training recipe. We release the model and data at: https://huggingface.co/nvidia/AceReason-Nemotron-1.1-7B △ Less

Submitted 16 June, 2025; originally announced June 2025.

Comments: The AceReason-Nemotron collection: https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/acereason-682f4e1261dc22f697fd1485

Prismatic Synthesis: Gradient-based Data Diversification Boosts Generalization in LLM Reasoning

Authors: Jaehun Jung, Seungju Han, Ximing Lu, Skyler Hallinan, David Acuna, Shrimai Prabhumoye, Mostafa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro, Yejin Choi

Abstract: Effective generalization in language models depends critically on the diversity of their training data. Yet existing diversity metrics often fall short of this goal, relying on surface-level heuristics that are decoupled from model behavior. This motivates us to ask: What kind of diversity in training data actually drives generalization in language models -- and how can we measure and amplify it?… ▽ More Effective generalization in language models depends critically on the diversity of their training data. Yet existing diversity metrics often fall short of this goal, relying on surface-level heuristics that are decoupled from model behavior. This motivates us to ask: What kind of diversity in training data actually drives generalization in language models -- and how can we measure and amplify it? Through large-scale empirical analyses spanning over 300 training runs, carefully controlled for data scale and quality, we show that data diversity can be a strong predictor of generalization in LLM reasoning -- as measured by average model performance on unseen out-of-distribution benchmarks. We introduce G-Vendi, a metric that quantifies diversity via the entropy of model-induced gradients. Despite using a small off-the-shelf proxy model for gradients, G-Vendi consistently outperforms alternative measures, achieving strong correlation (Spearman's $ρ\approx 0.9$) with out-of-distribution (OOD) performance on both natural language inference (NLI) and math reasoning tasks. Building on this insight, we present Prismatic Synthesis, a framework for generating diverse synthetic data by targeting underrepresented regions in gradient space. Experimental results show that Prismatic Synthesis consistently improves model performance as we scale synthetic data -- not just on in-distribution test but across unseen, out-of-distribution benchmarks -- significantly outperforming state-of-the-art models that rely on 20 times larger data generator than ours. For example, PrismMath-7B, our model distilled from a 32B LLM, outperforms R1-Distill-Qwen-7B -- the same base model trained on proprietary data generated by 671B R1 -- on 6 out of 7 challenging benchmarks. △ Less

Submitted 18 July, 2026; v1 submitted 26 May, 2025; originally announced May 2025.

AceReason-Nemotron: Advancing Math and Code Reasoning through Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Yang Chen, Zhuolin Yang, Zihan Liu, Chankyu Lee, Peng Xu, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro, Wei Ping

Abstract: Despite recent progress in large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) for reasoning, the training recipe for building high-performing reasoning models remains elusive. Key implementation details of frontier models, such as DeepSeek-R1, including data curation strategies and RL training recipe, are often omitted. Moreover, recent research indicates distillation remains more effective than RL for small… ▽ More Despite recent progress in large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) for reasoning, the training recipe for building high-performing reasoning models remains elusive. Key implementation details of frontier models, such as DeepSeek-R1, including data curation strategies and RL training recipe, are often omitted. Moreover, recent research indicates distillation remains more effective than RL for smaller models. In this work, we demonstrate that large-scale RL can significantly enhance the reasoning capabilities of strong, small- and mid-sized models, achieving results that surpass those of state-of-the-art distillation-based models. We systematically study the RL training process through extensive ablations and propose a simple yet effective approach: first training on math-only prompts, then on code-only prompts. Notably, we find that math-only RL not only significantly enhances the performance of strong distilled models on math benchmarks (e.g., +14.6% / +17.2% on AIME 2025 for the 7B / 14B models), but also code reasoning tasks (e.g., +6.8% / +5.8% on LiveCodeBench for the 7B / 14B models). In addition, extended code-only RL iterations further improve performance on code benchmarks with minimal or no degradation in math results. We develop a robust data curation pipeline to collect challenging prompts with high-quality, verifiable answers and test cases to enable verification-based RL across both domains. Finally, we identify key experimental insights, including curriculum learning with progressively increasing response lengths and the stabilizing effect of on-policy parameter updates. We find that RL not only elicits the foundational reasoning capabilities acquired during pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (e.g., distillation), but also pushes the limits of the model's reasoning ability, enabling it to solve problems that were previously unsolvable. △ Less

Submitted 5 June, 2025; v1 submitted 22 May, 2025; originally announced May 2025.

Comments: Add pass@1024 evaluation results for LiveCodeBench v6. We release the models at: https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/acereason-682f4e1261dc22f697fd1485

MoE Parallel Folding: Heterogeneous Parallelism Mappings for Efficient Large-Scale MoE Model Training with Megatron Core

Authors: Dennis Liu, Zijie Yan, Xin Yao, Tong Liu, Vijay Korthikanti, Evan Wu, Shiqing Fan, Gao Deng, Hongxiao Bai, Jianbin Chang, Ashwath Aithal, Michael Andersch, Mohammad Shoeybi, Jiajie Yao, Chandler Zhou, David Wu, Xipeng Li, June Yang

Abstract: Mixture of Experts (MoE) models enhance neural network scalability by dynamically selecting relevant experts per input token, enabling larger model sizes while maintaining manageable computation costs. However, efficient training of large-scale MoE models across thousands of GPUs presents significant challenges due to limitations in existing parallelism strategies. We introduce an end-to-end train… ▽ More Mixture of Experts (MoE) models enhance neural network scalability by dynamically selecting relevant experts per input token, enabling larger model sizes while maintaining manageable computation costs. However, efficient training of large-scale MoE models across thousands of GPUs presents significant challenges due to limitations in existing parallelism strategies. We introduce an end-to-end training framework for large-scale MoE models that utilizes five-dimensional hybrid parallelism: Tensor Parallelism, Expert Parallelism, Context Parallelism, Data Parallelism, and Pipeline Parallelism. Central to our approach is MoE Parallel Folding, a novel strategy that decouples the parallelization of attention and MoE layers in Transformer models, allowing each layer type to adopt optimal parallel configurations. Additionally, we develop a flexible token-level dispatcher that supports both token-dropping and token-dropless MoE training across all five dimensions of parallelism. This dispatcher accommodates dynamic tensor shapes and coordinates different parallelism schemes for Attention and MoE layers, facilitating complex parallelism implementations. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements in training efficiency and scalability. We achieve up to 49.3% Model Flops Utilization (MFU) for the Mixtral 8x22B model and 39.0% MFU for the Qwen2-57B-A14B model on H100 GPUs, outperforming existing methods. The framework scales efficiently up to 1,024 GPUs and maintains high performance with sequence lengths up to 128K tokens, validating its effectiveness for large-scale MoE model training. The code is available in Megatron-Core. △ Less

Submitted 2 March, 2026; v1 submitted 21 April, 2025; originally announced April 2025.

Nemotron-CrossThink: Scaling Self-Learning beyond Math Reasoning

Authors: Syeda Nahida Akter, Shrimai Prabhumoye, Matvei Novikov, Seungju Han, Ying Lin, Evelina Bakhturina, Eric Nyberg, Yejin Choi, Mostofa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong reasoning capabilities, particularly when enhanced through Reinforcement Learning (RL). While prior work has successfully applied RL to mathematical reasoning -- where rules and correctness are well-defined -- generalizing these methods to broader reasoning domains remains challenging due to limited data, the lack of verifiable reward structures, and… ▽ More Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong reasoning capabilities, particularly when enhanced through Reinforcement Learning (RL). While prior work has successfully applied RL to mathematical reasoning -- where rules and correctness are well-defined -- generalizing these methods to broader reasoning domains remains challenging due to limited data, the lack of verifiable reward structures, and diverse task requirements. In this work, we propose NEMOTRON-CROSSTHINK, a framework that systematically incorporates multi-domain corpora, including both synthetic and real-world question-answer pairs, into RL training to improve generalization across diverse reasoning tasks. NEMOTRON-CROSSTHINK addresses key challenges by (1) incorporating data from varied sources spanning STEM, humanities, social sciences, etc.; (2) applying structured templates (e.g., multiple-choice and open-ended) to control answer-space complexity; (3) filtering for verifiable answers; and (4) optimizing data blending strategies that utilizes data from multiple sources effectively. Our approach enables scalable and verifiable reward modeling beyond mathematics and demonstrates improved accuracies on both math (MATH-500: +30.1%, AMC23:+27.5%) and non-math reasoning benchmarks (MMLU-PRO: +12.8%, GPQA-DIAMOND: +11.3%, AGIEVAL: +15.1%, SUPERGPQA: +3.8%). Moreover, NEMOTRON-CROSSTHINK exhibits significantly improved response efficiency -- using 28% fewer tokens for correct answers -- highlighting more focused and effective reasoning. Through NEMOTRON-CROSSTHINK, we demonstrate that integrating multi-domain, multi-format data in RL leads to more accurate, efficient, and generalizable LLMs. △ Less

Submitted 15 March, 2026; v1 submitted 15 April, 2025; originally announced April 2025.

Comments: 19 pages, 10 figures

Minitron-SSM: Efficient Hybrid Language Model Compression through Group-Aware SSM Pruning

Authors: Ali Taghibakhshi, Sharath Turuvekere Sreenivas, Saurav Muralidharan, Marcin Chochowski, Yashaswi Karnati, Raviraj Joshi, Ameya Sunil Mahabaleshwarkar, Zijia Chen, Yoshi Suhara, Oluwatobi Olabiyi, Daniel Korzekwa, Mostofa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, Jan Kautz, Bryan Catanzaro, Ashwath Aithal, Nima Tajbakhsh, Pavlo Molchanov

Abstract: Hybrid LLM architectures that combine Attention and State Space Models (SSMs) achieve state-of-the-art accuracy and runtime performance. Recent work has demonstrated that applying compression and distillation to Attention-only models yields smaller, more accurate models at a fraction of the training cost. In this work, we explore the effectiveness of compressing Hybrid architectures. We introduce… ▽ More Hybrid LLM architectures that combine Attention and State Space Models (SSMs) achieve state-of-the-art accuracy and runtime performance. Recent work has demonstrated that applying compression and distillation to Attention-only models yields smaller, more accurate models at a fraction of the training cost. In this work, we explore the effectiveness of compressing Hybrid architectures. We introduce a novel group-aware pruning strategy that preserves the structural integrity of SSM blocks and their sequence modeling capabilities. Furthermore, we demonstrate the necessity of such SSM pruning to achieve improved accuracy and inference speed compared to traditional approaches. Our compression recipe combines SSM, FFN, embedding dimension, and layer pruning, followed by knowledge distillation-based retraining, similar to the MINITRON technique. Using this approach, we compress the Nemotron-H 8B Hybrid model down to 4B parameters with up to 40x fewer training tokens. The resulting model surpasses the accuracy of similarly-sized models while achieving 2x faster inference, significantly advancing the Pareto frontier. △ Less

Submitted 31 October, 2025; v1 submitted 15 April, 2025; originally announced April 2025.

From 128K to 4M: Efficient Training of Ultra-Long Context Large Language Models

Authors: Chejian Xu, Wei Ping, Peng Xu, Zihan Liu, Boxin Wang, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bo Li, Bryan Catanzaro

Abstract: Long-context capabilities are essential for a wide range of applications, including document and video understanding, in-context learning, and inference-time scaling, all of which require models to process and reason over long sequences of text and multimodal data. In this work, we introduce a efficient training recipe for building ultra-long context LLMs from aligned instruct model, pushing the b… ▽ More Long-context capabilities are essential for a wide range of applications, including document and video understanding, in-context learning, and inference-time scaling, all of which require models to process and reason over long sequences of text and multimodal data. In this work, we introduce a efficient training recipe for building ultra-long context LLMs from aligned instruct model, pushing the boundaries of context lengths from 128K to 1M, 2M, and 4M tokens. Our approach leverages efficient continued pretraining strategies to extend the context window and employs effective instruction tuning to maintain the instruction-following and reasoning abilities. Our UltraLong-8B, built on Llama3.1-Instruct with our recipe, achieves state-of-the-art performance across a diverse set of long-context benchmarks. Importantly, models trained with our approach maintain competitive performance on standard benchmarks, demonstrating balanced improvements for both long and short context tasks. We further provide an in-depth analysis of key design choices, highlighting the impacts of scaling strategies and data composition. Our findings establish a robust framework for efficiently scaling context lengths while preserving general model capabilities. We release all model weights at: https://ultralong.github.io/. △ Less

Submitted 8 April, 2025; originally announced April 2025.

Retro-Search: Exploring Untaken Paths for Deeper and Efficient Reasoning

Authors: Ximing Lu, Seungju Han, David Acuna, Hyunwoo Kim, Jaehun Jung, Shrimai Prabhumoye, Niklas Muennighoff, Mostofa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro, Yejin Choi

Abstract: Large reasoning models exhibit remarkable reasoning capabilities via long, elaborate reasoning trajectories. Supervised fine-tuning on such reasoning traces, also known as distillation, can be a cost-effective way to boost reasoning capabilities of student models. However, empirical observations reveal that these reasoning trajectories are often suboptimal, switching excessively between different… ▽ More Large reasoning models exhibit remarkable reasoning capabilities via long, elaborate reasoning trajectories. Supervised fine-tuning on such reasoning traces, also known as distillation, can be a cost-effective way to boost reasoning capabilities of student models. However, empirical observations reveal that these reasoning trajectories are often suboptimal, switching excessively between different lines of thought, resulting in under-thinking, over-thinking, and even degenerate responses. We introduce Retro-Search, an MCTS-inspired search algorithm, for distilling higher quality reasoning paths from large reasoning models. Retro-Search retrospectively revises reasoning paths to discover better, yet shorter traces, which can then lead to student models with enhanced reasoning capabilities with shorter, thus faster inference. Our approach can enable two use cases: self-improvement, where models are fine-tuned on their own Retro-Search-ed thought traces, and weak-to-strong improvement, where a weaker model revises stronger model's thought traces via Retro-Search. For self-improving, R1-distill-7B, fine-tuned on its own Retro-Search-ed traces, reduces the average reasoning length by 31.2% while improving performance by 7.7% across seven math benchmarks. For weak-to-strong improvement, we retrospectively revise R1-671B's traces from the OpenThoughts dataset using R1-distill-32B as the Retro-Search-er, a model 20x smaller. Qwen2.5-32B, fine-tuned on this refined data, achieves performance comparable to R1-distill-32B, yielding an 11.3% reduction in reasoning length and a 2.4% performance improvement compared to fine-tuning on the original OpenThoughts data. Our work counters recently emergent viewpoints that question the relevance of search algorithms in the era of large reasoning models, by demonstrating that there are still opportunities for algorithmic advancements, even for frontier models. △ Less

Submitted 15 April, 2025; v1 submitted 6 April, 2025; originally announced April 2025.

Comments: Code and data will be publicly released upon internal approval

Nemotron-H: A Family of Accurate and Efficient Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Models

Authors: NVIDIA, :, Aaron Blakeman, Aarti Basant, Abhinav Khattar, Adithya Renduchintala, Akhiad Bercovich, Aleksander Ficek, Alexis Bjorlin, Ali Taghibakhshi, Amala Sanjay Deshmukh, Ameya Sunil Mahabaleshwarkar, Andrew Tao, Anna Shors, Ashwath Aithal, Ashwin Poojary, Ayush Dattagupta, Balaram Buddharaju, Bobby Chen, Boris Ginsburg, Boxin Wang, Brandon Norick, Brian Butterfield, Bryan Catanzaro, Carlo del Mundo , et al. (176 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: As inference-time scaling becomes critical for enhanced reasoning capabilities, it is increasingly becoming important to build models that are efficient to infer. We introduce Nemotron-H, a family of 8B and 56B/47B hybrid Mamba-Transformer models designed to reduce inference cost for a given accuracy level. To achieve this goal, we replace the majority of self-attention layers in the common Transf… ▽ More As inference-time scaling becomes critical for enhanced reasoning capabilities, it is increasingly becoming important to build models that are efficient to infer. We introduce Nemotron-H, a family of 8B and 56B/47B hybrid Mamba-Transformer models designed to reduce inference cost for a given accuracy level. To achieve this goal, we replace the majority of self-attention layers in the common Transformer model architecture with Mamba layers that perform constant computation and require constant memory per generated token. We show that Nemotron-H models offer either better or on-par accuracy compared to other similarly-sized state-of-the-art open-sourced Transformer models (e.g., Qwen-2.5-7B/72B and Llama-3.1-8B/70B), while being up to 3$\times$ faster at inference. To further increase inference speed and reduce the memory required at inference time, we created Nemotron-H-47B-Base from the 56B model using a new compression via pruning and distillation technique called MiniPuzzle. Nemotron-H-47B-Base achieves similar accuracy to the 56B model, but is 20% faster to infer. In addition, we introduce an FP8-based training recipe and show that it can achieve on par results with BF16-based training. This recipe is used to train the 56B model. We are releasing Nemotron-H base model checkpoints with support in Hugging Face and NeMo. △ Less

Submitted 5 September, 2025; v1 submitted 4 April, 2025; originally announced April 2025.

Maximize Your Data's Potential: Enhancing LLM Accuracy with Two-Phase Pretraining

Authors: Steven Feng, Shrimai Prabhumoye, Kezhi Kong, Dan Su, Mostofa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro

Abstract: Pretraining large language models effectively requires strategic data selection, blending and ordering. However, key details about data mixtures especially their scalability to longer token horizons and larger model sizes remain underexplored due to limited disclosure by model developers. To address this, we formalize the concept of two-phase pretraining and conduct an extensive systematic study o… ▽ More Pretraining large language models effectively requires strategic data selection, blending and ordering. However, key details about data mixtures especially their scalability to longer token horizons and larger model sizes remain underexplored due to limited disclosure by model developers. To address this, we formalize the concept of two-phase pretraining and conduct an extensive systematic study on how to select and mix data to maximize model accuracies for the two phases. Our findings illustrate that a two-phase approach for pretraining outperforms random data ordering and natural distribution of tokens by 3.4% and 17% on average accuracies. We provide in-depth guidance on crafting optimal blends based on quality of the data source and the number of epochs to be seen. We propose to design blends using downsampled data at a smaller scale of 1T tokens and then demonstrate effective scaling of our approach to larger token horizon of 15T tokens and larger model size of 25B model size. These insights provide a series of steps practitioners can follow to design and scale their data blends. △ Less

Submitted 18 December, 2024; originally announced December 2024.

AceMath: Advancing Frontier Math Reasoning with Post-Training and Reward Modeling

Authors: Zihan Liu, Yang Chen, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro, Wei Ping

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce AceMath, a suite of frontier math models that excel in solving complex math problems, along with highly effective reward models capable of evaluating generated solutions and reliably identifying the correct ones. To develop the instruction-tuned math models, we propose a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) process that first achieves competitive performance across general doma… ▽ More In this paper, we introduce AceMath, a suite of frontier math models that excel in solving complex math problems, along with highly effective reward models capable of evaluating generated solutions and reliably identifying the correct ones. To develop the instruction-tuned math models, we propose a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) process that first achieves competitive performance across general domains, followed by targeted fine-tuning for the math domain using a carefully curated set of prompts and synthetically generated responses. The resulting model, AceMath-72B-Instruct greatly outperforms Qwen2.5-Math-72B-Instruct, GPT-4o and Claude-3.5 Sonnet. To develop math-specialized reward model, we first construct AceMath-RewardBench, a comprehensive and robust benchmark for evaluating math reward models across diverse problems and difficulty levels. After that, we present a systematic approach to build our math reward models. The resulting model, AceMath-72B-RM, consistently outperforms state-of-the-art reward models. Furthermore, when combining AceMath-72B-Instruct with AceMath-72B-RM, we achieve the highest average rm@8 score across the math reasoning benchmarks. We release model weights, training data, and evaluation benchmarks at: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/adlr/acemath △ Less

Submitted 17 January, 2025; v1 submitted 19 December, 2024; originally announced December 2024.

Nemotron-CC: Transforming Common Crawl into a Refined Long-Horizon Pretraining Dataset

Authors: Dan Su, Kezhi Kong, Ying Lin, Joseph Jennings, Brandon Norick, Markus Kliegl, Mostofa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro

Abstract: Recent English Common Crawl datasets like FineWeb-Edu and DCLM achieved significant benchmark gains via aggressive model-based filtering, but at the cost of removing 90% of data. This limits their suitability for long token horizon training, such as 15T tokens for Llama 3.1. In this paper, we show how to achieve better trade-offs between accuracy and data quantity by a combination of classifier en… ▽ More Recent English Common Crawl datasets like FineWeb-Edu and DCLM achieved significant benchmark gains via aggressive model-based filtering, but at the cost of removing 90% of data. This limits their suitability for long token horizon training, such as 15T tokens for Llama 3.1. In this paper, we show how to achieve better trade-offs between accuracy and data quantity by a combination of classifier ensembling, synthetic data rephrasing, and reduced reliance on heuristic filters. When training 8B parameter models for 1T tokens, using a high-quality subset of our data improves MMLU by 5.6 over DCLM, demonstrating the efficacy of our methods for boosting accuracies over a relatively short token horizon. Furthermore, our full 6.3T token dataset matches DCLM on MMLU, but contains four times more unique real tokens than DCLM. This unlocks state-of-the-art training over a long token horizon: an 8B parameter model trained for 15T tokens, of which 7.2T came from our dataset, is better than the Llama 3.1 8B model: +5 on MMLU, +3.1 on ARC-Challenge, and +0.5 on average across ten diverse tasks. The dataset is available at https://data.commoncrawl.org/contrib/Nemotron/Nemotron-CC/index.html △ Less

Submitted 30 May, 2025; v1 submitted 3 December, 2024; originally announced December 2024.

Comments: ACL 2025

MM-Embed: Universal Multimodal Retrieval with Multimodal LLMs

Authors: Sheng-Chieh Lin, Chankyu Lee, Mohammad Shoeybi, Jimmy Lin, Bryan Catanzaro, Wei Ping

Abstract: State-of-the-art retrieval models typically address a straightforward search scenario, in which retrieval tasks are fixed (e.g., finding a passage to answer a specific question) and only a single modality is supported for both queries and retrieved results. This paper introduces techniques for advancing information retrieval with multimodal large language models (MLLMs), enabling a broader search… ▽ More State-of-the-art retrieval models typically address a straightforward search scenario, in which retrieval tasks are fixed (e.g., finding a passage to answer a specific question) and only a single modality is supported for both queries and retrieved results. This paper introduces techniques for advancing information retrieval with multimodal large language models (MLLMs), enabling a broader search scenario, termed universal multimodal retrieval, where multiple modalities and diverse retrieval tasks are accommodated. To this end, we first study fine-tuning an MLLM as a bi-encoder retriever on 10 datasets with 16 retrieval tasks. Our empirical results show that the fine-tuned MLLM retriever is capable of understanding challenging queries, composed of both text and image, but it underperforms compared to a smaller CLIP retriever in cross-modal retrieval tasks due to the modality bias exhibited by MLLMs. To address the issue, we propose modality-aware hard negative mining to mitigate the modality bias exhibited by MLLM retrievers. Second, we propose continuously fine-tuning the universal multimodal retriever to enhance its text retrieval capability while preserving multimodal retrieval capability. As a result, our model, MM-Embed, achieves state-of-the-art performance on the multimodal retrieval benchmark M-BEIR, which spans multiple domains and tasks, while also surpassing the state-of-the-art text retrieval model, NV-Embed-v1, on the MTEB retrieval benchmark. We also explore prompting the off-the-shelf MLLMs as zero-shot rerankers to refine the ranking of the candidates from the multimodal retriever. We find that, through prompt-and-reranking, MLLMs can further improve multimodal retrieval when the user queries (e.g., text-image composed queries) are more complex and challenging to understand. These findings also pave the way for advancing universal multimodal retrieval in the future. △ Less

Submitted 22 February, 2025; v1 submitted 4 November, 2024; originally announced November 2024.

Comments: Accepted at ICLR 2025. We release the model weights at: https://huggingface.co/nvidia/MM-Embed

MIND: Math Informed syNthetic Dialogues for Pretraining LLMs

Authors: Syeda Nahida Akter, Shrimai Prabhumoye, John Kamalu, Sanjeev Satheesh, Eric Nyberg, Mostofa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro

Abstract: The utility of synthetic data to enhance pretraining data quality and hence to improve downstream task accuracy has been widely explored in recent large language models (LLMs). Yet, these approaches fall inadequate in complex, multi-hop and mathematical reasoning tasks as the synthetic data typically fails to add complementary knowledge to the existing raw corpus. In this work, we propose a novel… ▽ More The utility of synthetic data to enhance pretraining data quality and hence to improve downstream task accuracy has been widely explored in recent large language models (LLMs). Yet, these approaches fall inadequate in complex, multi-hop and mathematical reasoning tasks as the synthetic data typically fails to add complementary knowledge to the existing raw corpus. In this work, we propose a novel large-scale and diverse Math Informed syNthetic Dialogue (MIND) generation method that improves the mathematical reasoning ability of LLMs. Specifically, using MIND, we generate synthetic conversations based on OpenWebMath (OWM), resulting in a new math corpus, MIND-OWM. Our experiments with different conversational settings reveal that incorporating knowledge gaps between dialog participants is essential for generating high-quality math data. We further identify an effective way to format and integrate synthetic and raw data during pretraining to maximize the gain in mathematical reasoning, emphasizing the need to restructure raw data rather than use it as-is. Compared to pretraining just on raw data, a model pretrained on MIND-OWM shows significant boost in mathematical reasoning (GSM8K: +13.42%, MATH: +2.30%), including superior performance in specialized knowledge (MMLU: +4.55%, MMLU-STEM: +4.28%) and general purpose reasoning tasks (GENERAL REASONING: +2.51%). △ Less

Submitted 24 April, 2025; v1 submitted 15 October, 2024; originally announced October 2024.

Comments: 31 pages, 5 figures, 14 tables

Upcycling Large Language Models into Mixture of Experts

Authors: Ethan He, Abhinav Khattar, Ryan Prenger, Vijay Korthikanti, Zijie Yan, Tong Liu, Shiqing Fan, Ashwath Aithal, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro

Abstract: Upcycling pre-trained dense language models into sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) models is an efficient approach to increase the model capacity of already trained models. However, optimal techniques for upcycling at scale remain unclear. In this work, we conduct an extensive study of upcycling methods and hyperparameters for billion-parameter scale language models. We propose a novel "virtual grou… ▽ More Upcycling pre-trained dense language models into sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) models is an efficient approach to increase the model capacity of already trained models. However, optimal techniques for upcycling at scale remain unclear. In this work, we conduct an extensive study of upcycling methods and hyperparameters for billion-parameter scale language models. We propose a novel "virtual group" initialization scheme and weight scaling approach to enable upcycling into fine-grained MoE architectures. Through ablations, we find that upcycling outperforms continued dense model training. In addition, we show that softmax-then-topK expert routing improves over topK-then-softmax approach and higher granularity MoEs can help improve accuracy. Finally, we upcycled Nemotron-4 15B on 1T tokens and compared it to a continuously trained version of the same model on the same 1T tokens: the continuous trained model achieved 65.3% MMLU, whereas the upcycled model achieved 67.6%. Our results offer insights and best practices to effectively leverage upcycling for building MoE language models. Code is available. △ Less

Submitted 15 June, 2025; v1 submitted 9 October, 2024; originally announced October 2024.

NVLM: Open Frontier-Class Multimodal LLMs

Authors: Wenliang Dai, Nayeon Lee, Boxin Wang, Zhuolin Yang, Zihan Liu, Jon Barker, Tuomas Rintamaki, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro, Wei Ping

Abstract: We introduce NVLM 1.0, a family of frontier-class multimodal large language models (LLMs) that achieve state-of-the-art results on vision-language tasks, rivaling the leading proprietary models (e.g., GPT-4o) and open-access models (e.g., Llama 3-V 405B and InternVL 2). Remarkably, NVLM 1.0 shows improved text-only performance over its LLM backbone after multimodal training. In terms of model desi… ▽ More We introduce NVLM 1.0, a family of frontier-class multimodal large language models (LLMs) that achieve state-of-the-art results on vision-language tasks, rivaling the leading proprietary models (e.g., GPT-4o) and open-access models (e.g., Llama 3-V 405B and InternVL 2). Remarkably, NVLM 1.0 shows improved text-only performance over its LLM backbone after multimodal training. In terms of model design, we perform a comprehensive comparison between decoder-only multimodal LLMs (e.g., LLaVA) and cross-attention-based models (e.g., Flamingo). Based on the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches, we propose a novel architecture that enhances both training efficiency and multimodal reasoning capabilities. Furthermore, we introduce a 1-D tile-tagging design for tile-based dynamic high-resolution images, which significantly boosts performance on multimodal reasoning and OCR-related tasks. Regarding training data, we meticulously curate and provide detailed information on our multimodal pretraining and supervised fine-tuning datasets. Our findings indicate that dataset quality and task diversity are more important than scale, even during the pretraining phase, across all architectures. Notably, we develop production-grade multimodality for the NVLM-1.0 models, enabling them to excel in vision-language tasks while maintaining and even improving text-only performance compared to their LLM backbones. To achieve this, we craft and integrate a high-quality text-only dataset into multimodal training, alongside a substantial amount of multimodal math and reasoning data, leading to enhanced math and coding capabilities across modalities. To advance research in the field, we release the model weights at https://huggingface.co/nvidia/NVLM-D-72B and will open-source the training code for the community soon. △ Less

Submitted 22 October, 2024; v1 submitted 17 September, 2024; originally announced September 2024.

Comments: Fixed the typos. For more information, please visit our project page at: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/adlr/NVLM-1

LLM Pruning and Distillation in Practice: The Minitron Approach

Authors: Sharath Turuvekere Sreenivas, Saurav Muralidharan, Raviraj Joshi, Marcin Chochowski, Ameya Sunil Mahabaleshwarkar, Gerald Shen, Jiaqi Zeng, Zijia Chen, Yoshi Suhara, Shizhe Diao, Chenhan Yu, Wei-Chun Chen, Hayley Ross, Oluwatobi Olabiyi, Ashwath Aithal, Oleksii Kuchaiev, Daniel Korzekwa, Pavlo Molchanov, Mostofa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, Jan Kautz, Bryan Catanzaro

Abstract: We present a comprehensive report on compressing the Llama 3.1 8B and Mistral NeMo 12B models to 4B and 8B parameters, respectively, using pruning and distillation. We explore two distinct pruning strategies: (1) depth pruning and (2) joint hidden/attention/MLP (width) pruning, and evaluate the results on common benchmarks from the LM Evaluation Harness. The models are then aligned with NeMo Align… ▽ More We present a comprehensive report on compressing the Llama 3.1 8B and Mistral NeMo 12B models to 4B and 8B parameters, respectively, using pruning and distillation. We explore two distinct pruning strategies: (1) depth pruning and (2) joint hidden/attention/MLP (width) pruning, and evaluate the results on common benchmarks from the LM Evaluation Harness. The models are then aligned with NeMo Aligner and tested in instruct-tuned versions. This approach produces a compelling 4B model from Llama 3.1 8B and a state-of-the-art Mistral-NeMo-Minitron-8B (MN-Minitron-8B for brevity) model from Mistral NeMo 12B. We found that with no access to the original data, it is beneficial to slightly fine-tune teacher models on the distillation dataset. We open-source our base model weights on Hugging Face with a permissive license. △ Less

Submitted 9 December, 2024; v1 submitted 21 August, 2024; originally announced August 2024.

Comments: v4: Update author order

Compact Language Models via Pruning and Knowledge Distillation

Authors: Saurav Muralidharan, Sharath Turuvekere Sreenivas, Raviraj Joshi, Marcin Chochowski, Mostofa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro, Jan Kautz, Pavlo Molchanov

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) targeting different deployment scales and sizes are currently produced by training each variant from scratch; this is extremely compute-intensive. In this paper, we investigate if pruning an existing LLM and then re-training it with a fraction (<3%) of the original training data can be a suitable alternative to repeated, full retraining. To this end, we develop a set o… ▽ More Large language models (LLMs) targeting different deployment scales and sizes are currently produced by training each variant from scratch; this is extremely compute-intensive. In this paper, we investigate if pruning an existing LLM and then re-training it with a fraction (<3%) of the original training data can be a suitable alternative to repeated, full retraining. To this end, we develop a set of practical and effective compression best practices for LLMs that combine depth, width, attention and MLP pruning with knowledge distillation-based retraining; we arrive at these best practices through a detailed empirical exploration of pruning strategies for each axis, methods to combine axes, distillation strategies, and search techniques for arriving at optimal compressed architectures. We use this guide to compress the Nemotron-4 family of LLMs by a factor of 2-4x, and compare their performance to similarly-sized models on a variety of language modeling tasks. Deriving 8B and 4B models from an already pretrained 15B model using our approach requires up to 40x fewer training tokens per model compared to training from scratch; this results in compute cost savings of 1.8x for training the full model family (15B, 8B, and 4B). Minitron models exhibit up to a 16% improvement in MMLU scores compared to training from scratch, perform comparably to other community models such as Mistral 7B, Gemma 7B and Llama-3 8B, and outperform state-of-the-art compression techniques from the literature. We have open-sourced Minitron model weights on Huggingface, with corresponding supplementary material including example code available on GitHub. △ Less

Submitted 4 November, 2024; v1 submitted 19 July, 2024; originally announced July 2024.

ChatQA 2: Bridging the Gap to Proprietary LLMs in Long Context and RAG Capabilities

Authors: Peng Xu, Wei Ping, Xianchao Wu, Chejian Xu, Zihan Liu, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro

Abstract: In this work, we introduce ChatQA 2, an Llama 3.0-based model with a 128K context window, designed to bridge the gap between open-source LLMs and leading proprietary models (e.g., GPT-4-Turbo-2024-04-09) in long context understanding and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) capabilities. These two capabilities are complementary to each other and essential for LLMs to process large volumes of infor… ▽ More In this work, we introduce ChatQA 2, an Llama 3.0-based model with a 128K context window, designed to bridge the gap between open-source LLMs and leading proprietary models (e.g., GPT-4-Turbo-2024-04-09) in long context understanding and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) capabilities. These two capabilities are complementary to each other and essential for LLMs to process large volumes of information that cannot fit into a single prompt. We present a detailed continued training recipe to extend the context window of Llama3-70B-base from 8K to 128K tokens, along with a three-stage instruction tuning process to enhance the model's instruction-following, RAG performance, and long-context understanding capabilities. Our results demonstrate that the Llama3-ChatQA-2-70B model outperforms most existing state-of-the-art models, including GPT-4-Turbo-2024-04-09, Qwen2-72B-Instruct, and Llama3.1-70B-Instruct, on ultra-long tasks beyond 100K tokens, as well as on the RAG benchmark using only a 4K context window, showing the strong long context capability across varying sequence lengths. We further provide extensive comparisons between direct long-context and RAG solutions using the same state-of-the-art long-context LLMs. Interestingly, we find that the performance of strong long-context LLMs using RAG improves when retrieving a larger number of chunks. With a large set of top-k chunks, RAG consistently outperforms direct long-context solution using the same state-of-the-art long-context models (e.g., Llama3-ChatQA-2-70B and Qwen2-72B-Instruct) on both 32K and 128K benchmarks. We open-source the model weights, training data, and the evaluation setup for the for the community: https://chatqa2-project.github.io/ △ Less

Submitted 14 February, 2025; v1 submitted 19 July, 2024; originally announced July 2024.

Comments: Accepted at ICLR 2025

Reuse, Don't Retrain: A Recipe for Continued Pretraining of Language Models

Authors: Jupinder Parmar, Sanjev Satheesh, Mostofa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro

Abstract: As language models have scaled both their number of parameters and pretraining dataset sizes, the computational cost for pretraining has become intractable except for the most well-resourced teams. This increasing cost makes it ever more important to be able to reuse a model after it has completed pretraining; allowing for a model's abilities to further improve without needing to train from scratc… ▽ More As language models have scaled both their number of parameters and pretraining dataset sizes, the computational cost for pretraining has become intractable except for the most well-resourced teams. This increasing cost makes it ever more important to be able to reuse a model after it has completed pretraining; allowing for a model's abilities to further improve without needing to train from scratch. In this work, we detail a set of guidelines that cover how to design efficacious data distributions and learning rate schedules for continued pretraining of language models. When applying these findings within a continued pretraining run on top of a well-trained 15B parameter model, we show an improvement of 9\% in average model accuracy compared to the baseline of continued training on the pretraining set. The resulting recipe provides a practical starting point with which to begin developing language models through reuse rather than retraining. △ Less

Submitted 9 July, 2024; originally announced July 2024.

Comments: Preprint. Under review

Data, Data Everywhere: A Guide for Pretraining Dataset Construction

Authors: Jupinder Parmar, Shrimai Prabhumoye, Joseph Jennings, Bo Liu, Aastha Jhunjhunwala, Zhilin Wang, Mostofa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro

Abstract: The impressive capabilities of recent language models can be largely attributed to the multi-trillion token pretraining datasets that they are trained on. However, model developers fail to disclose their construction methodology which has lead to a lack of open information on how to develop effective pretraining sets. To address this issue, we perform the first systematic study across the entire p… ▽ More The impressive capabilities of recent language models can be largely attributed to the multi-trillion token pretraining datasets that they are trained on. However, model developers fail to disclose their construction methodology which has lead to a lack of open information on how to develop effective pretraining sets. To address this issue, we perform the first systematic study across the entire pipeline of pretraining set construction. First, we run ablations on existing techniques for pretraining set development to identify which methods translate to the largest gains in model accuracy on downstream evaluations. Then, we categorize the most widely used data source, web crawl snapshots, across the attributes of toxicity, quality, type of speech, and domain. Finally, we show how such attribute information can be used to further refine and improve the quality of a pretraining set. These findings constitute an actionable set of steps that practitioners can use to develop high quality pretraining sets. △ Less

Submitted 19 October, 2024; v1 submitted 8 July, 2024; originally announced July 2024.

Comments: Accepted as an oral presentation at EMNLP 2024

RankRAG: Unifying Context Ranking with Retrieval-Augmented Generation in LLMs

Authors: Yue Yu, Wei Ping, Zihan Liu, Boxin Wang, Jiaxuan You, Chao Zhang, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) typically utilize the top-k contexts from a retriever in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). In this work, we propose a novel instruction fine-tuning framework RankRAG, which instruction-tunes a single LLM for the dual purpose of context ranking and answer generation in RAG. In particular, the instruction-tuned LLMs work surprisingly well by adding a small fraction o… ▽ More Large language models (LLMs) typically utilize the top-k contexts from a retriever in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). In this work, we propose a novel instruction fine-tuning framework RankRAG, which instruction-tunes a single LLM for the dual purpose of context ranking and answer generation in RAG. In particular, the instruction-tuned LLMs work surprisingly well by adding a small fraction of ranking data into the training blend, and outperform existing expert ranking models, including the same LLM exclusively fine-tuned on a large amount of ranking data. For generation, we compare our model with many strong baselines, including GPT-4-0613, GPT-4-turbo-2024-0409, and ChatQA-1.5, an open-sourced model with the state-of-the-art performance on RAG benchmarks. Specifically, our Llama3-RankRAG significantly outperforms Llama3-ChatQA-1.5 and GPT-4 models on nine knowledge-intensive benchmarks. In addition, it also performs comparably to GPT-4 on five RAG benchmarks in the biomedical domain without instruction fine-tuning on biomedical data, demonstrating its superb capability for generalization to new domains. △ Less

Submitted 2 July, 2024; originally announced July 2024.

Nemotron-4 340B Technical Report

Authors: Nvidia, :, Bo Adler, Niket Agarwal, Ashwath Aithal, Dong H. Anh, Pallab Bhattacharya, Annika Brundyn, Jared Casper, Bryan Catanzaro, Sharon Clay, Jonathan Cohen, Sirshak Das, Ayush Dattagupta, Olivier Delalleau, Leon Derczynski, Yi Dong, Daniel Egert, Ellie Evans, Aleksander Ficek, Denys Fridman, Shaona Ghosh, Boris Ginsburg, Igor Gitman, Tomasz Grzegorzek , et al. (58 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: We release the Nemotron-4 340B model family, including Nemotron-4-340B-Base, Nemotron-4-340B-Instruct, and Nemotron-4-340B-Reward. Our models are open access under the NVIDIA Open Model License Agreement, a permissive model license that allows distribution, modification, and use of the models and its outputs. These models perform competitively to open access models on a wide range of evaluation be… ▽ More We release the Nemotron-4 340B model family, including Nemotron-4-340B-Base, Nemotron-4-340B-Instruct, and Nemotron-4-340B-Reward. Our models are open access under the NVIDIA Open Model License Agreement, a permissive model license that allows distribution, modification, and use of the models and its outputs. These models perform competitively to open access models on a wide range of evaluation benchmarks, and were sized to fit on a single DGX H100 with 8 GPUs when deployed in FP8 precision. We believe that the community can benefit from these models in various research studies and commercial applications, especially for generating synthetic data to train smaller language models. Notably, over 98% of data used in our model alignment process is synthetically generated, showcasing the effectiveness of these models in generating synthetic data. To further support open research and facilitate model development, we are also open-sourcing the synthetic data generation pipeline used in our model alignment process. △ Less

Submitted 6 August, 2024; v1 submitted 17 June, 2024; originally announced June 2024.