0% found this document useful (0 votes)
26 views24 pages

Llama-Nemotron: Open Efficient Reasoning Models

paper

Uploaded by

nareshbathala67
Copyright
© All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
0% found this document useful (0 votes)
26 views24 pages

Llama-Nemotron: Open Efficient Reasoning Models

paper

Uploaded by

nareshbathala67
Copyright
© All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

2025-7-2

Llama-Nemotron: Efficient Reasoning Models


NVIDIA

Abstract
We introduce the Llama-Nemotron series of models, an open family of heterogeneous reasoning
models that deliver exceptional reasoning capabilities, inference efficiency, and an open license for
enterprise use. The family comes in three sizes—Nano (8B), Super (49B), and Ultra (253B)—
and performs competitively with state of the art reasoning models such as DeepSeek-R1 while
offering superior inference throughput and memory efficiency. In this report, we discuss the training
procedure for these models, which entails using neural architecture search from Llama 3 models for
arXiv:2505.00949v4 [[Link]] 30 Jun 2025

accelerated inference, knowledge distillation, and continued pretraining, followed by a reasoning-


focused post-training stage consisting of two main parts: supervised fine-tuning and large scale
reinforcement learning. Llama-Nemotron models are the first open-source models to support a
dynamic reasoning toggle, allowing users to switch between standard chat and reasoning modes
during inference. To further support open research and facilitate model development:
• We release the Llama-Nemotron reasoning models—LN-Nano, LN-Super, and LN-Ultra—under
the commercially permissive NVIDIA Open Model License Agreement.
– Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Nano-8B-v1
– Llama-3.3-Nemotron-Super-49B-v1
– Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Ultra-253B-v1
– Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Ultra-253B-CPT-v1
• We release the complete post-training dataset.
– Llama-Nemotron-Post-Training-Dataset
• We also release our training codebases: NeMo, NeMo-Aligner, Megatron-LM.

Figure 1 | As of April 2025, our flagship model LN-Ultra is the most “intelligent” open model
according to Artificial Analysis.

© 2025 NVIDIA. All rights reserved.


Llama-Nemotron: Efficient Reasoning Models

100 97.3 97.0


95.0

90 89.2 88.8 89.5

79.8 80.8
80
76.0
73.7 74.1
71.5 72.5
Accuracy (%)

69.8 70.0
70 68.1
65.9 66.3 66.2

60 58.7

50 49.4 49.4

43.4 43.4 43.4

40

30 Scientific Reasoning Complex Math Complex Math Tool Calling Coding Coding Instruction Following Complex Math
(GPQA Diamond) (AIME 2024) (AIME 2025) (BFCLv2) (LiveCodeBench) (LiveCodeBench) (IFEval) (MATH 500)
24.08-25.02 24.10-25.02
Llama 3.1 405B Llama 4 Maverick Llama 4 Behemoth DeepSeek R1 671B Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Ultra-253B-v1

Figure 2 | LN-Ultra delivers leading performance among open models across a wide range of reasoning
and non-reasoning benchmarks.

1. Introduction
In recent years the pace of language model development has been increasing, leading to rapid
improvements in performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. Most
recently, the introduction of reasoning models such as OpenAI o1 (OpenAI, 2025) and DeepSeek-R1
(DeepSeek-AI et al., 2025) has marked a new phase of advancement, resulting in models that can
think deeply about problems before answering. A defining characteristic of these models is their
long responses, often containing long chains of thought, self-verification, reflection, and backtracking.
Such long responses enable them to achieve state-of-the-art performance across a wide variety of
tasks, including PhD-level STEM questions and competition-level math problems.
As reasoning capabilities increasingly depend on scaling at inference time, it has become essential
to design models that are efficient to run during inference. Inference efficiency is no longer just a
deployment concern—it is now a core limiting factor for overall model intelligence and the viability
of agentic pipelines. As such, maximizing inference efficiency is a primary optimization objective for
these models. Beyond raw inference efficiency, it is equally critical to expose control over reasoning
behavior to the end user. Not all queries benefit from detailed multi-step reasoning—such responses
may be unnecessarily verbose or even counterproductive in certain contexts. Granting users the
ability to toggle reasoning on or off ensures that inference resources are allocated judiciously and
that response styles remain appropriate to the task (Anthropic, 2025).
In this paper, we detail the training of the Llama-Nemotron (LN) family of models, an open family
of heterogeneous reasoning models that deliver exceptional reasoning capabilities, inference efficiency,
and an open license for enterprise use. The models come in three sizes— LN-Nano (8B), LN-Super
(49B), and LN-Ultra (253B). Notably, LN-Ultra outperforms DeepSeek-R1 while fitting on a single
8xH100 node and achieving higher inference throughput. These models are derived from Llama
3.1 and Llama 3.3 (Grattafiori et al., 2024), and are optimized for high-throughput inference while

2
Llama-Nemotron: Efficient Reasoning Models

delivering strong reasoning performance and a context length of 128K tokens. Each model supports
a reasoning toggle that lets users dynamically switch between standard chat and reasoning modes
at inference time using a lightweight system prompt: "detailed thinking on/off". This design
enables both cost-effective general-purpose use and detailed multi-step reasoning, without requiring
separate models or architectures.
The Llama-Nemotron models are constructed in five stages. The first stage consists of optimizing
inference efficiency with neural architecture search (NAS) from the Llama 3 series of models and
applying Feed-Forward Network (FFN) Fusion. The second stage includes recovery training with
knowledge distillation and continued pretraining. The third stage is supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on
a mix of standard instruction data and reasoning traces from strong teachers such as DeepSeek-R1,
which enables the model to perform multi-step reasoning. The fourth stage involves large-scale
reinforcement learning on complex mathematics and STEM datasets, a crucial step for enabling
the student model to surpass its teacher’s capabilities. For LN-Ultra, this phase yields a substantial
performance boost on the GPQA-D benchmark, cementing it as the best open-source model for
scientific reasoning. To enable such large-scale RL training, we develop a custom training framework
that contains a number of optimizations, most notably generation in FP8. The final stage is a short
alignment phase focused on instruction following and human preference.
As part of this release, we also open-source the Llama-Nemotron-Post-Training-Dataset, a carefully
curated dataset used during the supervised and reinforcement learning stages of training for LN-Nano,
LN-Super, and LN-Ultra. It is designed to target key capabilities such as mathematical reasoning,
coding, science, and instruction following, and consists of synthetic responses generated by a range
of open-source models. Prompts and responses are filtered for quality, correctness, and complexity
to provide strong training signals across a diverse set of tasks.
According to Artificial Analysis (shown in Figure 1), an independent benchmarking and analysis
company focused on evaluating artificial intelligence models and API providers, LN-Ultra is the
most intelligent open-sourced model as of April 2025. This release represents one of the largest
contributions to the open source community in support of developing reasoning models.

2. Creating Inference-Optimized Models


The LN-Super and LN-Ultra models are optimized for efficient inference using the Puzzle frame-
work (Bercovich et al., 2024). Puzzle is a neural architecture search (NAS) framework that transforms
large language models into hardware-efficient variants under real-world deployment constraints, as
illustrated in Figure 3. Starting from a Llama 3 Instruct model (Llama 3.3-70B-Instruct for LN-Super
and Llama 3.1-405B-Instruct for LN-Ultra), Puzzle applies block-wise local distillation to build a
library of alternative transformer blocks. Each block is trained independently and in parallel to
approximate the function of its parent block while improving computational properties such as
latency, memory usage, or throughput. This process allows each alternative block to approximate
the original behavior with a certain accuracy-efficiency tradeoff profile; that is, some blocks in the
library are more efficient but may incur some quality degradation—introducing an explicit tradeoff
between computational cost and model accuracy. The block variants include:

• Attention removal: Some blocks omit the attention mechanism entirely, reducing both
compute and KV-cache memory consumption.
• Variable FFN dimensions: The feed-forward network’s intermediate size is varied, enabling
compression at different granularity levels (e.g., 87%, 75%, 50%, down to 10% of the original
hidden size).

3
Llama-Nemotron: Efficient Reasoning Models

Linear

Linear

MHA
GQA

MQA

FFN
Linear
MHA
GQA

FFN
MQA

FFN

no-op
Linear
no-op
MHA

FFN
GQA

Step 1: Crafting the “puzzle pieces” Step 2: Assembling the puzzle architecture
Applying block-wise local distillation to every Utilizing Mixed-Integer-Programming to assemble
alternative subblock replacement in parallel and a heterogeneous architecture that optimizes
scoring its quality and inference cost to build a quality under constraints such as throughput,
“library” of blocks. latency and memory usage.

Figure 3 | Overview of the Puzzle framework.

While Puzzle supports additional operations—including grouped-query attention (GQA) (Ainslie


et al., 2023) with different numbers of key-value heads, linear alternatives to attention, and no-op
substitutions—empirical evaluation showed that attention removal and FFN compression were the
most effective for optimizing the LN-Super and LN-Ultra models in terms of overall throughput and
memory savings.
Once the block library is built, Puzzle assembles a complete model by selecting one block per layer.
This selection is governed by a mixed-integer programming (MIP) solver that identifies the most
efficient configuration under a given set of constraints, such as hardware compatibility, maximum
allowed latency, total memory budget, or desired inference throughput. Because Puzzle supports
multiple block variants per layer with different accuracy-efficiency tradeoff profiles, it enables users
to precisely target any point on the accuracy-efficiency Pareto frontier. For example, Puzzle can
generate models that meet specific constraints relevant to agentic systems or deployment pipelines –
such as bounded memory use or tight end-to-end response time.

Vertical Compression with FFN Fusion. For the LN-Ultra model, we introduce an additional
compression technique called FFN Fusion (Bercovich et al., 2025), designed to reduce sequential
depth and improve inference latency. This technique leverages a structural property that emerges
after Puzzle removes some attention layers: the model often contains consecutive FFN blocks.
FFN Fusion identifies such sequences and replaces them with fewer, wider FFN layers that can be
executed in parallel. This reduces the number of sequential steps without compromising expressivity,
and significantly improves compute utilization—especially on multi-GPU setups where inter-layer
communication overhead is non-negligible.

2.1. Deployment Constraints and Efficiency Targets

LN-Super is optimized to run efficiently on a single NVIDIA H100 GPU with tensor parallelism 1
(TP1). Using Puzzle, we produce a model that achieves a 5× throughput speedup over Llama 3.3-
70B-Instruct at batch size 256 and TP1. With one H100 GPU, even when Llama 3.3-70B-Instruct
is run at its optimal configuration with TP4, LN-Super at TP1 still delivers a ≥2.17× throughput
advantage. The model is also optimized under a constraint of approximately 300K cached tokens
(batch size × sequence length), measured at FP8 precision on a single H100 GPU. For instance, this
corresponds to processing batch size 16 and sequence length 18,750.

4
Llama-Nemotron: Efficient Reasoning Models

85
80 S2: 5000/500 S1 : 500/2000
GPQA-Diamond Accuracy (%)

75 LN-ULTRA LN-ULTRA
DeepSeek-R1 DeepSeek-R1
70
65
1.9x 4x
60
55
50
45 Llama 3.1 405B Llama 3.1 405B
40
500 1000 2000 4000 8000
Throughput (tokens/s)
Figure 4 | GPQA-Diamond Accuracy vs. Throughput. We measure on two settings, S1: 500/2000
(ISL/OSL); S2: 5000/500 (ISL/OSL). Both with 250 concurrent users. Models are served with FP8.
Note that we use 8×H100 for LN-Ultra and Llama 3.1 405B, but 8×H200 for Deepseek-R1 because
of its size.

LN-Ultra is optimized for a full H100 node (8 GPUs). During Puzzle’s architecture search phase,
the model is constrained to achieve at least a 1.5× latency reduction over Llama 3.1-405B-Instruct.
After applying FFN Fusion, the final model achieves a 1.71× latency improvement. LN-Ultra is also
optimized under cached tokens constraints, supporting up to 3M tokens at FP8 precision and 600K
tokens at BF16 precision on an H100 node.
Figure 4 illustrates the trade-off between GPQA-Diamond accuracy (%) and processing throughput
(tokens/s) for two settings. Notably, LN-Ultra consistently outperforms DeepSeek-R1 and Llama-3.1-
405B in both accuracy and efficiency across these settings, clearly positioning it as a superior choice
on the accuracy-throughput Pareto curve.

2.2. Post-NAS Training: Knowledge Distillation and Continued Pretraining

Following the NAS phase, both LN-Super and LN-Ultra undergo additional training to improve
inter-block compatibility and recover any quality loss introduced during blockwise substitution.

• LN-Super is trained for 40B tokens using a knowledge distillation objective over the Distillation
Mix dataset introduced by Bercovich et al. (2024).
• LN-Ultra is first trained with knowledge distillation for 65B tokens using the same distillation
dataset, followed by 88B tokens of continued training on the Nemotron-H phase 4 pretraining
dataset (NVIDIA et al., 2025).

This final pretraining step allows LN-Ultra to not only match but surpass the reference model
Llama 3.1-405B-Instruct in key benchmarks, demonstrating that aggressive architecture optimization
can be reconciled with high model performance through short distillation and pretraining (see
Table 1).

5
Llama-Nemotron: Efficient Reasoning Models

LN-Ultra Llama-3.3 Llama-3.1


Task
CPT 70B-Instruct 405B-Instruct
MMLU 88.1 81.4 88.6
MATH500 80.4 73.6 69.6
HumanEval 88.4 84.1 86.0
RULER 128K 83.2 52.2 73.7

Table 1 | Comparison of LN-Ultra after the continued pretraining phase (before supervised and
reinforcement learning) to Llama 3 models.

3. Synthetic Data
We curate both reasoning and non-reasoning data for supervised fine-tuning. For reasoning samples,
we include the system instruction "detailed thinking on", and for non-reasoning samples, we use
"detailed thinking off". This setup allows the model to learn to toggle reasoning behavior at
inference time based on the prompt. Below, we describe our focused data curation process for each
mode.

3.1. Reasoning on

3.1.1. Math

To construct the math reasoning portion of our data we used a pipeline described by Moshkov et al.
(2025). A high-level overview of this pipeline is provided below, with full details available in the
original publication.
We collect a large set of mathematical problems from Art of Problem Solving (AoPS) community
forums. We include all forum discussions except “Middle School Math” which was found to be too
easy and unhelpful for training in our early experiments. After retrieving forum discussions we
perform the following steps to extract problems and synthesize new solutions. We use Qwen2.5-32B-
Instruct (Qwen, 2024) for all steps in the pipeline unless noted otherwise.
Problem Extraction: We prompt an LLM to identify and extract all problems from the initial
forum posts. While most posts contain a single problem, some include multiple problems or none at
all.
Problem Classification: Each extracted problem is classified into the following categories:

• Proof problem or not


• Multiple choice question or not
• Binary question (yes-or-no answer) or not
• Valid problem or not. For example, problems that are lacking context or referring to other
problems are considered invalid.

We remove all proof problems, multiple-choice questions, binary questions, and invalid problems
from the final dataset.
Answer Extraction: We extract the final answer from forum discussions, without attempting to
extract full solutions. Only the final answer expression is extracted to enable automatic correctness
checking.
Benchmark Decontamination: Following Yang et al. (2023) we use an LLM-based comparison
to remove questions that closely resemble those in popular math benchmarks.

6
Llama-Nemotron: Efficient Reasoning Models

Solution generation: We prompt DeepSeek-R1 (DeepSeek-AI et al., 2025) and Qwen2.5-Math-7B-


Instruct (Qwen, 2024) to solve each problem multiple times producing “reasoning” and “non-reasoning”
solutions respectively. We use 16 generations per problem for DeepSeek-R1 and 64 generations per
problem for Qwen2.5-Math-7B-Instruct.
Solution Filtering: As the final filtering step, we remove any solutions that do not reach the
expected answer. Predicted and expected answers are compared by prompting Qwen2.5-32B-
Instruct (Qwen, 2024) to judge their equivalence in the context of the problem. For problems where
the final answer cannot be extracted, we treat the most common answer across all available solution
candidates as the ground truth.
All prompts and scripts necessary to run the above pipeline are available in NeMo-Skills.

3.1.2. Code

The code reasoning dataset is constructed via a multi-stage process involving question collection,
solution generation, and post-processing steps, as described by Ahmad et al. (2025).
Question Collection and Verification: We aggregate 28,904 unique competitive programming
questions from diverse sources including TACO (Li et al., 2023), APPS (Hendrycks et al., 2021a),
CodeContests (Li et al., 2022), and CodeForces (Penedo et al., 2025a), after performing exact-match
deduplication. To ensure evaluation integrity against benchmarks like (Jain et al., 2025; Li et al.,
2022; Chen et al., 2021; Austin et al., 2021), we rigorously check for contamination using the method
from Yang et al. (2023). This involves cosine similarity checks and semantic evaluation by LLM
judges (Llama-3.3-70B (Grattafiori et al., 2024), Qwen2.5-32B (Qwen, 2024)). Manual verification
confirms negligible overlap (< 0.3%), validating the question set.
Solution Generation: We employ DeepSeek-R1 (DeepSeek-AI et al., 2025) to generate multiple
solutions per question, primarily in Python, with C++ solutions also generated for specific benchmark
testing (Penedo et al., 2025b). Solutions are generated using Nucleus Sampling (Holtzman et al.,
2020) (temperature 0.6, top-p 0.95) via SGLang (Zheng et al., 2024), explicitly prompting for
reasoning steps enclosed in <think> tags.
Post-Processing and Refinement: We refine generated responses by verifying the presence of
reasoning traces, extracting solution code segments (demarcated by python...), removing samples
with code inside reasoning tags, and validating syntax using Tree Sitter (TreeSitter, 2013). This
process yields approximately 488K Python samples.
Data Scaling Insights: While some studies suggest small datasets suffice for inducing reasoning
(HuggingFace, 2025; Muennighoff et al., 2025; BespokeLabs, 2025; OpenThoughts, 2025), especially
in mathematics, our experiments indicate large-scale data is crucial for high performance on coding
benchmarks. An ablation study scaling the dataset from 25k to 736k samples showed continuous
improvement. Initial scaling (25k-100k) provides gains, but focusing generation on harder problems
from CodeContests before expanding to the full question set yields the most significant performance
boosts. The scaling curve does not plateau, emphasizing the importance of large, diverse, and
challenging problem sets for advancing code generation capabilities, suggesting a need for methods
to create or source more difficult problems at scale.

3.1.3. Science

We curate a diverse set of open-ended and multiple-choice questions (MCQs) from both in-house
and external sources. These include question-answer pairs extracted from StackOverflow (Stack
Exchange Data, 2024) and synthetically generated MCQ questions.

7
Llama-Nemotron: Efficient Reasoning Models

Synthetic Question Generation: To create synthetic questions, we define a broad set of


academic topics (e.g., physics, biology, chemistry) and their subtopics using Nemotron-4-340B-
Instruct (NVIDIA, 2024c). We specify multiple difficulty levels to ensure a diverse and scalable
dataset. We prompt Qwen2.5 models (Qwen, 2024) to generate MCQs conditioned on the topic,
subtopic, and difficulty level. Each question is verified for format compliance. Following the
OpenMathInstruct-2 (Toshniwal et al., 2025) pipeline, we augment the dataset by prompting
Qwen2.5 to generate variations of the original questions.
Benchmark Decontamination: To ensure fair evaluation, we perform decontamination on the
entire set of questions—both real and synthetic—against the test sets of major science benchmarks
such as GPQA (Rein et al., 2023), MMLU (Hendrycks et al., 2021b), and MMLU-Pro (Wang et al.,
2024), following the approach outlined in Yang et al. (2023).
Solution Generation: For all questions in the dataset, we use DeepSeek-R1 (DeepSeek-AI et al.,
2025) to generate multiple reasoning traces. For questions without ground-truth answers, we apply
majority voting across generated solutions to infer the most likely correct answer.

3.1.4. General

For general domain data, we follow the generation pipeline established in NVIDIA (2024c). We
generate synthetic prompts covering various tasks such as open QA, closed QA, extraction, and brain-
storming. We also source real-world user prompts from publicly available datasets with permissive
licenses. For responses, we prompt DeepSeek-R1 (DeepSeek-AI et al., 2025) for multiple generations
and perform rejection sampling using the Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B reward model (NVIDIA, 2024b).
This ensures that the responses are of high quality.

3.2. Reasoning off

To train the model to follow the reasoning toggle instruction, we construct paired data where each
prompt has both a reasoning response and a non-reasoning response. Specifically, we randomly sample
prompts from the reasoning dataset in Section 3.1 and generate corresponding non-reasoning responses
using Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct (NVIDIA, 2024a) for general domain prompts and Llama-3.3-
70B-Instruct for others. Each response is tagged with the appropriate system instruction—“detailed
thinking on” for reasoning and “detailed thinking off” for non-reasoning. This pairing enables
the model to learn to modulate its reasoning behavior based on the system prompt.
Responses are then filtered according to ground truth answers or reward models. We also leverage
public permissive datasets on function calling and safety, augmenting them to train the model and
improve its capabilities in these areas. To further improve performance on general tasks, we use a
feedback-edit system, described in Section 3.2.1.

3.2.1. General-Domain Open-ended Inference-Time Scaling

To generate high-quality general-domain open-ended responses, we employ Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-


Instruct (NVIDIA, 2024a) in conjunction with a novel Feedback-Edit Inference-Time-Scaling system,
described by Wang et al. (2025b). The process begins with 20k first-turn prompts sourced from
ShareGPT (RyokoAI, 2023) and WildChat-1M (Zhao et al., 2024). We use Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-
Instruct to generate multiple initial responses for each prompt. These responses are refined through
a three-stage process: a dedicated Feedback model identifies areas for improvement, a dedicated Edit
model makes targeted edits based on the feedback, and a dedicated Select model chooses the best
edited response. The resulting dataset comprises 20k first-turn prompts and their corresponding
high-quality responses.

8
Llama-Nemotron: Efficient Reasoning Models

Domain / Split Samples % of total


Math 22,066,397 66.8%
Reasoning on 2,225,427 6.7%
Reasoning off 19,840,970 60.1%
Code 10,108,883 30.6%
Reasoning on 991,706 3.0%
Reasoning off 9,117,177 27.6%
Science 708,920 2.1%
Reasoning on 708,920 2.1%
Reasoning off 0 0.0%
Chat 39,792 0.12%
Reasoning on 8,574 0.03%
Reasoning off 31,218 0.09%
Instruction Following 56,339 0.17%
Safety 31,426 0.10%
Total 33,011,757 100%

Table 2 | Synthetic data by domain with reasoning splits.

4. Supervised Fine-Tuning
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) plays a critical role in transferring reasoning capabilities into the
Llama-Nemotron models. While prior stages such as NAS and CPT focus on architectural efficiency
and broad knowledge transfer, SFT helps distill reasoning behavior from strong teacher models
like DeepSeek-R1 (DeepSeek-AI et al., 2025) by training on task-specific reasoning traces. It
also establishes fine-grained control over response style using the "detailed thinking on/off"
instruction. Recent studies (DeepSeek-AI et al., 2025; OpenThoughts, 2025; BespokeLabs, 2025;
Wen et al., 2025) have shown that this reasoning SFT can substantially improve performance on
complex reasoning tasks. Our results confirm these findings, highlighting the importance of training
on large-scale, high-quality reasoning traces during SFT for eliciting robust reasoning abilities in
downstream usage. This section builds upon the synthetic data described in Section 3 and provides
further implementation details specific to each model.

4.1. General Methodology

All models are trained using a token-level cross-entropy loss over the instruction-tuning data. For
most settings, training batches mix reasoning and non-reasoning data, where prompts are paired
with responses conditioned on the respective system instruction— "detailed thinking on/off".
We observe that models require higher learning rates to effectively learn from long reasoning
traces, especially due to sequence-length-dependent token loss averaging. Extended training over
multiple epochs improves performance, particularly for smaller models, a trend also observed in prior
work (Wen et al., 2025). We use Adam optimizer for training all models. Using a cosine learning
rate decay with linear warmup to around 10% of total steps helps with stability of training, which
was crucial for LN-Ultra.

9
Llama-Nemotron: Efficient Reasoning Models

4.2. Model-Specific Training

LN-Nano differently from other models below, undergoes a three-stage SFT pipeline using a global
batch size of 256 using sequence packing with effective sequence length of 32k tokens. In the first
stage, the model is fine-tuned exclusively on reasoning data from code, math, and science domains
(Section 3.1) with a learning rate of 1e−4 for four epochs. This prevents failure modes such as
repetitive completions. In the second stage, we introduce non-reasoning data (Section 3.2) mixed
with reasoning samples, allowing the model to learn reasoning control. In the final stage, a smaller
blend focused on chat, instruction-following, and tool-calling is used.

LN-Super is trained on the full SFT dataset for a single epoch using a fixed learning rate of 5e−6,
sequence length of 16k and a global batch size of 256. Smaller-scale runs suggested that performance
improves up to 3–4 epochs with larger learning rates (5e−5), but training was constrained by
computational and time limits. Recent works (Wen et al., 2025) show that rejection fine-tuning can
further improve performance; however, it does not yield gains in our experiments and is therefore
omitted.

LN-Ultra is trained on the full dataset using sequence packing with effective sequence length of 24k
and a global batch size of 256 to maximize token throughput—an essential strategy when fine-tuning
large models with long-context reasoning data. Initial ablation runs indicated that higher learning
rates such as 5e−5 generally improve outcomes, but consistently high learning rates caused training
instability, including gradient explosions. To mitigate this, we implement a linear warmup to 1e−5,
followed by cosine decay to 1e−6 with a warmup ratio of 10%. Despite these measures, training
encountered gradient explosions and numerical instability after the first epoch. This required training
resumption with reinitialized optimizer states, after which successful convergence was achieved.

5. RL for Reasoning
As described in Section 4 and illustrated in Table 5, models can acquire strong capabilities through
supervised fine-tuning by distilling knowledge from powerful teachers. However, distillation inherently
sets an upper bound on the student’s performance, particularly when the student’s base model is more
capable than the teacher’s. Using supervised fine-tuning, LN-Ultra can approach the performance of
DeepSeek-R1 but not exceed it. To enable student to surpass their teacher, large-scale reinforcement
learning is an essential approach, as it allows the model to continually explore new possibilities and
engage in self-learning. Consistent with the findings of DeepSeek-AI et al. (2025), our preliminary
experiments indicate that reinforcement learning (RL) yields suboptimal results for smaller models
compared to distillation. Given these observations and resource constraints, we apply reasoning RL
exclusively to LN-Ultra, enabling it to surpass its teacher model and setting a new state-of-the-art
on GPQA amoung open models.

5.1. Training Procedure

For LN-Ultra, we enhance the model’s scientific reasoning capabilities through large-scale reinforcement
learning, leveraging the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm (Shao et al., 2024).
We use a rollout prompt size of 72 and sample 16 responses per prompt with 𝑡𝑒𝑚𝑝𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑒 = 1
and 𝑡𝑜𝑝_𝑝 = 1. During training, we set global batch size as 576 and conduct 2 gradient updates
per rollout. We train our model until it achieves convergence on reasoning tasks. Figure 5 shows
the accuracy score on GPQA-Diamond as our training progresses. With our optimized training

10
Llama-Nemotron: Efficient Reasoning Models

infrastructure (see Section 5.2), the whole training takes approximately 140k H100 hours.

0.750

0.725
GPQA-D Avg@4

0.700

0.675

0.650

0.625

0.600
0 100 200 300 400 500
Training Steps

Figure 5 | Accuracy on GPQA-Diamond throughout the reasoning RL training for LN-Ultra

In this training phase, we leverage two types of rewards:


Accuracy rewards: For each training example, a ground truth answer (a number, a sentence, or a
paragraph) is provided. We serve the Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct model to judge whether the policy’s
predictions match the ground truth answer.
Format rewards: Following DeepSeek-AI et al. (2025), we employ a format reward to ensure the
model puts its thinking process between "<think>" and "</think>" tags when using "detailed
thinking on" mode. We also check for the non-existence of thinking tags when using "detailed
thinking off" mode.
To ensure that the model is adequately challenged, we preprocess the data by independently
generating 8 responses per question using LN-Super, calculating the pass rate, and then intentionally
discarding prompts with a pass rate of 0.75 or higher, thereby increasing the difficulty of the training
data. Besides data filtering, we also find curriculum training to be helpful, as it allows the model to
gradually learn from a progression of tasks with increasing difficulty. Specifically, we implement a
progressive batching strategy leveraging pre-calculated pass rate as a difficulty metric. Given a fixed
batch size, the core of our approach involves dynamically calculating a target distribution of pass
rates for each sequential batch. This distribution is modeled using a Gaussian function centered on
a difficulty level that progresses from high pass rates (easier examples) for initial batches to low pass
rates (harder examples) for later batches. Samples are allocated to each batch primarily based on
this target distribution, considering the available count for each pass rate, with any remaining batch
capacity filled by prioritizing pass rates with the largest remaining sample pools. This ensures a
controlled, gradual increase in average sample difficulty across batches, while samples inside a batch
are randomly shuffled. Figure 6 demonstrates the effectiveness of our curriculum strategy, which
stabilizes the training process and achieves higher accuracy.

5.2. Infrastructure

5.2.1. Overview

We primarily use NeMo-Aligner (Shen et al., 2024) to perform RL training, where we use a
development branch that implements GRPO and heterogeneous model support. We implements the

11
Llama-Nemotron: Efficient Reasoning Models

0.725 Curriculum
Random
0.700

0.675
GPQA-D Avg@4

0.650

0.625

0.600

0.575

0.550
0 25 50 75 100 125 150 175 200
Training Steps
Figure 6 | Ablation on curriculum vs non-curriculum.

generation stage using vLLM (Kwon et al., 2023) and the training stage using Megatron-LM (Shoeybi
et al., 2020). The training and inference stages are co-located on the same GPUs.
The total GPU count used was 72 nodes of 8xH100. The training model parallelism used was: tensor
parallel=8 with sequence parallel, context parallel=2, pipeline parallel=18, and data parallel=2.
The generation model parallelism was tensor parallel=8, and data parallel=72. The details of how
this parallelization strategy is chosen is explained in 5.2.2. Generation was performed in FP8, and
training in BF16 with FP32 optimizer states.
Each stage maintains its own set of model weights, which are synced at the start of each step. First,
all training weights are all-gathered over the training pipeline parallel dimension, converted into
vLLM format, and written into shared memory. Then all training stage memory is released or
offloaded to host. Next, vLLM is awoken from sleep mode, loads the newly saved model weights
from shared memory, and begins generating. After generations have finished, vLLM GPU memory
is released using sleep mode=2, and all training memory is reloaded.

5.2.2. Memory Profiling and Optimizations

One of the major challenges in enabling the GRPO training of the LN-Ultra is memory management.
The training jobs are scheduled to a shared cluster environment. In the cluster, each node has 8
H100 GPUs, dual socket 32-core CPUs, and 2TB CPU DRAM. On the other hand, the model in
BF16 type takes 253 × 2 ≈ 500𝐺𝐵 memory. Moreover, as mentioned in Section 5.2.1, in order to
improve GPU utilization, we determine to stack training and inference stages on the same set of
nodes. Without careful memory management, it is very easy to encounter out-of-memory errors in
both GPU and CPU memory allocations.
In order to better track the memory usage over the course of training, we have developed three simple
memory profiling tools to monitor the memory usage: GPU memory utilization using PyTorch, CPU
memory utilization using psutil, and /dev/shm utilization using the df command. The GPU/CPU
memory profilers help us track the GPU/CPU memory usage at different code pointers. The
/dev/shm profiler is needed as we use /dev/shm to pass the weights from the trainer to the vLLM
server, and the host is configured to allocate up to 1TB for the /dev/shm space.
With the help of these profiling tools, we are able to pinpoint the specific memory allocations that
cause out-of-memory errors, and then design solutions to overcome the issues. The first challenge is

12
Llama-Nemotron: Efficient Reasoning Models

weight preparation. When we all-gather training weights across pipeline parallel stages, we have
encountered extremely big tensors due to the heterogeneous architecture. One of the tensors has
13B elements, and occupies 26B GPU memory in the BF16 type. We need to release unused GPU
memory periodically, and move some of the tensor conversion operations to CPU in order to control
the GPU memory usage in this stage. The second challenge is the vLLM GPU memory utilization.
With tensor parallel equal to 8, we expect each GPU to keep 500/8 ≈ 62𝐺𝐵 from the weights in
BF16. Considering KV cache, activations, and GPU memory occupied by the trainer, we have a very
tight budget for the vLLM. We have to disable the cudagraph feature to avoid GPU out-of-memory
in vLLM. However, when we enable FP8 inference generation as explained in 5.2.3, GPU memory
budget becomes a lot looser, and we get to enable the cudagraph feature again. The final challenge
is the GPU and CPU memory usage in the trainer. Tensor parallelism = 8 is a natural choice to
partition the full model into the 8xH100 GPUs available in the same node. As the model architecture
is heterogeneous, we need to insert identity layers in order to balance the pipeline stages in the
pipeline parallelism. We want to have enough pipeline parallelism to avoid training OOM in GPU
and checkpoint saving OOM in CPU. On the other hand, we also want to reduce the number of
pipeline stages to reduce the communication costs. With all of the trade-offs, we find that the best
pipeline parallelism setting is 18. The activations also consume a lot of memory, and we need to
keep 18 micro-batches in the case when pipeline parallelism is 18. We end up using context parallel
= 2 and sequence parallel to reduce the activation memory consumption to prevent GPU OOM in
training. With all these tuning, we finally choose tensor parallel=8 with sequence parallel, context
parallel=2, pipeline parallel=18, and data parallel=2 to achieve > 90% utilization of the GPUs while
avoiding any hosts from encountering GPU or CPU out-of-memory errors.

5.2.3. FP8 Inference Generation

We identify the generation stage as the dominant component of the step time. In order to improve
performance, we implement a path to support the use of vLLM’s online FP8 generation mode, which
executes all GEMMs in FP8 using per token activation scaling factors and per tensor weight scaling
factors. We implement custom vLLM weight loaders capable of loading BF16 weights supplied by
the training stage, and casting to FP8 weights and scaling factors at runtime. Because vLLM does
not support directly initializing models in FP8, we also implement meta-weight tensor initialization
to avoid materializing the full BF16 inference engine, which would cause an out-of-memory error in
the GPU.
In all, we observe a peak FP8 generation throughput of 32 tokens/s/GPU/prompt, a 1.8x generation
speedup against BF16, and to our knowledge the highest decoding throughput observed in reasoning
training at this scale. We observe a 1.4x speedup from FP8 generation alone, and an additional 0.4x
from the reduction in memory usage, which allows us to enable vLLM’s cudagraph feature.

6. RL for Preference Optimization

6.1. Instruction Following

After training for scientific reasoning, we do a short RL run optimizing instruction following
capabilities for the LN-Super and LN-Ultra. We use a similar verification setup as Zhou et al.
(2023), and generate synthetic instruction following prompts that contain from one to ten detailed
instructions. We run RL with the RLOO algorithm (Ahmadian et al., 2024) for less than 120 steps
using our instruction following verifier as a reward, with a batch size of 128 prompts. We find such
training boosts performance on conventional instruction following benchmarks as well as reasoning
benchmarks.

13
Llama-Nemotron: Efficient Reasoning Models

6.2. RLHF

We use RLHF to improve the model on general helpfulness and chat capabilities while carefully
maintaining its proficiency in other areas. As shown in Table 4, LN-Super, a 49B model, achieves an
Arena Hard score of 88.3, beating proprietary models such as Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4o-2024-
05-13 as well as much larger open models such as Llama-3.1-405b-instruct and Mistral-large-2407.
To achieve this, we use iterative online RPO (NVIDIA, 2024c; Sun et al., 2025) to maximize
the reward predicted by Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Reward (NVIDIA, 2024b) over prompts from
HelpSteer2 (Wang et al., 2025a). For each iteration, we use a learning rate 𝛼 of 4e-7, KL penalty 𝛽
of 1e-5, reward scale 𝜂 of 3.0, and batch size of 64, training for 500 steps. Two iterations of online
RPO increase the Arena Hard score from 69.1 to 88.1. More interestingly, this process also improves
the model’s performance on all other adopted benchmarks except IFEval. Since neither the dataset
nor the reward model is optimized for math, coding, science, or function calling, we speculate that
RLHF helps the model better utilize its existing knowledge and skills.
We follow the same process for LN-Ultra, except that GRPO is employed. For each prompt, we
sample 8 responses. We train the model for 30 steps, using a learning rate of 3e-7, batch size of 288,
and KL penalty 𝛽 of 1e-3.
For LN-Nano, we conduct two rounds of offline RPO with on-policy data. We use a mixture of
reasoning and non-reasoning data with appropriate system prompts in the first round of RPO
to improve reasoning control, followed by a second round with on-policy generations targeting
instruction following improvements. For each RPO round we train up to 400 steps with a learning
rate 𝛼 of 7e-7, KL penalty 𝛽 of 3e-2, and batch size of 512.

7. Evaluations on Reasoning and Chat Benchmarks

7.1. Benchmarks

We evaluate all Llama-Nemotron models across two benchmark categories: reasoning and non-
reasoning.

Reasoning Benchmarks. These include the American Invitational Mathematics Examination for
years 2024 (AIME24) and 2025(AIME25), GPQA-Diamond (Rein et al., 2024), LiveCodeBench (Jain
et al., 2024), and MATH500 (Lightman et al., 2023). AIME25 is split into two parts: AIME25-I
and AIME25-II, each containing 15 problems. For LN-Nano, we use AIME25-I only; for LN-Super
and LN-Ultra, we evaluate on the full 30-question set. As AIME25 was released recently, it is less
likely to overlap with training data. Thus, stronger performance on this benchmark is indicative of
better generalization, especially on math problems outside the training distribution. LiveCodeBench
contains questions indexed by date, and we report results on two specific ranges—(2408–2502) and
(2410–2502)—to enable fair comparison with previously reported baselines.

Non-Reasoning Benchmarks. These include IFEval(Strict-Instruction) (Zhou et al., 2023)


for instruction following, BFCL V2 Live (Yan et al., 2024) for tool use via function calling, and
Arena-Hard (Li et al., 2024) for evaluating alignment with human conversational preferences.
All evaluations are conducted at 32k context length, even though training was performed with
a maximum context length of 16k for LN-Super and 24k for LN-Ultra. We observed consistent
improvements when evaluating at expanded context lengths, as shorter limits can truncate long
reasoning traces and lead to incomplete generations—particularly on benchmarks that require multi-
step reasoning. We use temperature 0.6 and top-p 0.95 for reasoning-on evaluations, and temperature

14
Llama-Nemotron: Efficient Reasoning Models

LN-Nano-SFT LN-Nano DeepSeek-R1 Llama-3.1 DeepSeek-R1


Task Reasoning Reasoning Distilled-Llama-8B 8B-Instruct Distilled
on | off on | off Qwen-7B

GPQA-Diamond 53.5 | 33.3 54.1 | 39.4 49.0 25.3 49.1


AIME24 62.5 | 3.3 61.3 | 3.0 50.4 10.0 55.6
AIME25-I 51.6 | 6.6 47.1 | 0.0 40.0 10.0 41.7
MATH500 94.4 | 38.0 95.4 | 36.6 89.1 50.4 92.8
BFCL V2 Live 62.9 | 62.6 63.9 | 63.6 37.8 44.3 39.2
LiveCodeBench (2408–2502) −|− 46.6 | − 39.6 11.8 37.6
IFEval 69.9 | 69.9 79.29 | 82.1 73.4 81.8 67.6

Table 3 | LN-Nano and LN-Nano-SFT versus comparably sized models, split by Reasoning mode.

0 (greedy decoding) for reasoning-off. We generate up to 16 completions per prompt and report
average pass@1 accuracy. Checkpoints are selected based on performance on a subset of reasoning
benchmarks. As observed in prior works (Moshkov et al., 2025), evaluation on reasoning-heavy
tasks such as AIME can exhibit high variance due to small dataset size and generation randomness.
Reported numbers may vary across repeated runs or sampling strategies.

7.2. LN-Nano

Table 3 shows that LN-Nano achieves strong performance across all reasoning benchmarks, including
AIME25-I and LiveCodeBench, despite its small size. This demonstrates the effectiveness of our
SFT pipeline and curated reasoning datasets in transferring structured reasoning to compact models.
For LN-Nano, carefully balancing data-distribution across math, coding, and stem areas has been
important to achieve near state-of-the-art accuracies at the SFT stage. For example, our early
experiments showed worse accuracies especially in chemistry related questions, one of the major areas
in GPQA-D. Upsampling chemistry related data samples in the STEM subset of the overall SFT
blend helped to achieve higher GPQA-D accuracies. The RPO stages at the end of the post-training
pipeline mainly targeted IFEval accuracy improvement as shown in Table 3.

7.3. LN-Super

Table 4 compares LN-Super to other models in its weight class where it performs competitively
across both reasoning and non-reasoning tasks. In reasoning-off mode, LN-Super performs on par
with Llama-3.3-70B, the model it based on. In reasoning-on mode, it outperforms competing
models such as DeepSeek-R1-Distilled-Llama-70B, providing strong reasoning capabilities without
sacrificing instruction following. These results show that this single model offers the strengths of
both reasoning-optimized and non-reasoning models, making it effective for general assistant and
structured reasoning use cases. Additionally, as shown in Table 4, reasoning-focused SFT causes a
noticeable drop in IFEval scores. To recover instruction-following capabilities, we apply a dedicated
IFEval RL run (see Section 6.1) to ensure that strong reasoning does not come at the cost of
degraded general assistant behavior. Our experimental results reveal another trade-off: optimizing
for instruction following (as measured by IFEval) can compromise conversationality (as measured by
Arena-Hard), and conversely, prioritizing conversationality may detract from instruction following
performance. To address this, we applied model merging to LN-Super, selecting a checkpoint from
the Pareto frontier that balances these objectives. Due to mixed outcomes, we did not adopt this
approach for other models. The only area where LN-Super underperforms is on LiveCodeBench,
which is attributable to its SFT phase being conducted on an earlier version of the dataset, unlike
LN-Nano and LN-Ultra. We plan to address this and improve coding-related reasoning performance

15
Llama-Nemotron: Efficient Reasoning Models

LN-Super-SFT LN-Super DeepSeek-R1- Llama-3.3


Task Reasoning Reasoning Distilled-Llama-70B
QwQ-32B
70B-Instruct
on | off on | off

GPQA-Diamond 63.8 | 46.6 66.7 | 50.0 65.2 58.8 50.5


AIME24 63.3 | 17.5 67.5 | 16.7 70.0 79.5 25.8
AIME25 50.0 | 6.7 60.0 | 16.7 55.0 65.8 6.7
MATH500 93.2 | 76.8 96.6 | 74.0 94.5 96.2 73.8
BFCL V2 Live 73.3 | 62.5 73.7 | 73.9 65.5 71.6 60.4
LiveCodeBench (2408–2502) 40.9 | 28.7 45.5 | 29.7 57.5 63.4 -
IFEval 81.9 | 83.0 89.2 | 89.0 85.1 86.3 92.1
Arena Hard −|− 88.3 | − 65.4 90.5 72.9

Table 4 | LN-Super versus comparably sized models, split by Reasoning mode.

in a future model refresh.

7.4. LN-Ultra

Table 5 and Figure 2 show that LN-Ultra matches or outperforms all existing open-weight models
across reasoning and non-reasoning benchmarks. It achieves state-of-the-art performance on GPQA
among open models, demonstrating the efficacy of our large-scale reinforcement learning training.
Unlike prior state-of-the-art models such as DeepSeek-R1, which require 8×H200, LN-Ultra is
optimized to run efficiently on a single 8×H100 node, offering improved inference throughput and
deployment efficiency.
From Table 5, we observe that the LN-Ultra-SFT model approaches the performance of DeepSeek-R1
on several reasoning benchmarks, including GPQA and AIME. However, the RL stage is critical for
surpassing DeepSeek-R1, particularly on GPQA. This highlights the complementary strengths of
SFT and RL: SFT builds a strong foundation by distilling reasoning behavior from teacher models,
while RL is essential for surpassing teacher performance and further enhancing reasoning capabilities.
We also find that there is a trade-off between the extent of SFT training and the success likelihood
of subsequent RL. Although we had access to SFT checkpoints with higher benchmark scores, we
initialized RL from an earlier checkpoint to improve final RL outcomes.

LN-Ultra-SFT LN-Ultra DeepSeek Llama-4 Llama-4 Llama-3.1


Task Reasoning Reasoning R1 Behemoth Maverick 405B-Instruct
on | off on | off

GPQA-Diamond 66.4 | 46.0 76.0 | 56.6 71.5 73.7 69.8 43.4


AIME24 74.6 | 46.7 80.8 | 20.0 79.8 – – 20.0
AIME25 60.4 | 16.7 72.5 | 16.7 70.0 – – 0.0
MATH500 96.6 | 84.4 97.0 | 80.4 97.3 95.0 – 66.2
BFCL V2 Live 74.6 | 74.9 74.1 | 73.6 – – – 58.7
LiveCodeBench (2408–2502) 60.6 | 30.1 66.3 | 29.0 65.9 – – –
LiveCodeBench (2410–2502) 61.8 | − 68.1 | − – 49.4 43.4 –
IFEval 83.2 | 79.4 88.9 | 89.5 88.8 – – 89.2
Arena Hard −|− 87.0 | − 92.0 – – 66.2

Table 5 | LN-Ultra versus the strongest open-weight models, split by reasoning mode.

16
Llama-Nemotron: Efficient Reasoning Models

8. Evaluations on Judging Capability


In addition to reasoning and chat capabilities where the models are trained for, we evaluate our models
on an out-of-distribution task, LLM-as-a-Judge, to further assess their performance. Specifically, we
test them on JudgeBench (Tan et al., 2025), where the task is to differentiate between high-quality
and low-quality responses. As shown in Table 6, our models outperform top proprietary and open-
source models. Notably, LN-Ultra emerges as the best open-source model, significantly surpassing
DeepSeek-R1 and trailing only behind o3-mini(high). Furthermore, LN-Super also outperforms
o1-mini, demonstrating that our models exhibit strong generalization capabilities across diverse
tasks.

Model Knowledge Reasoning Math Coding Overall


o1-preview 66.23 79.59 85.71 85.71 75.43
o1-mini 58.44 62.24 82.14 78.57 65.71
o3-mini(low) 62.99 69.39 83.93 83.33 70.57
o3-mini(medium) 62.34 86.73 85.71 92.86 76.57
o3-mini(high) 67.53 89.80 87.50 100.0 80.86
DeepSeek-R1 59.09 82.65 80.36 92.86 73.14
LN-Super 64.94 67.35 76.79 83.33 69.71
LN-Ultra 70.13 81.63 89.29 92.86 79.14

Table 6 | Llama-Nemotron models demonstrate strong performance on JudgeBench.

9. Conclusions
We present the Llama-Nemotron series of models. The models are released under a permissive
license and we open-source the weights, training data, and code. The Llama-Nemotron series of
models perform competitively with state-of-the-art reasoning models, while having low memory
requirements and efficient inference capabilities.
We find that in the presence of a strong reasoning teacher, supervised fine-tuning on high-quality
synthetic data generated by such teacher is very effective in adding reasoning capabilities to smaller
models. However, to push reasoning capabilities beyond what is possible from a teacher reasoning
model alone, it is necessary to run large-scale, curriculum-driven reinforcement learning from verifiable
rewards training.
We also show that to produce a great all-around model, e.g. a model which performs well on a wide
variety of benchmarks, it is necessary to have several stages in the post-training pipeline.

Contributors
We thank the following people for their invaluable contributions to the Llama-Nemotron effort.
NAS, Distillation and Continued Pretraining
Akhiad Bercovich*, Itay Levy*, Izik Golan*, Mohammad Dabbah*, Ran El-Yaniv*, Omri Puny, Ido
Galil, Zach Moshe, Tomer Ronen, Najeeb Nabwani, Ido Shahaf, Oren Tropp, Ehud Karpas, Ran
Zilberstein
Post-training
Jiaqi Zeng*, Soumye Singhal*, Alexander Bukharin*, Yian Zhang*, Tugrul Konuk*, Gerald Shen*,

17
Llama-Nemotron: Efficient Reasoning Models

Ameya Sunil Mahabaleshwarkar*, Bilal Kartal*, Yoshi Suhara*, Olivier Delalleau, Zijia Chen, Zhilin
Wang, David Mosallanezhad, Adi Renduchintala, Haifeng Qian, Dima Rekesh, Fei Jia
Data
Somshubra Majumdar, Vahid Noroozi, Wasi Uddin Ahmad, Sean Narenthiran, Aleksander Ficek,
Mehrzad Samadi, Jocelyn Huang, Siddhartha Jain, Igor Gitman, Ivan Moshkov, Wei Du, Shub-
ham Toshniwal, George Armstrong, Branislav Kisacanin, Matvei Novikov, Daria Gitman, Evelina
Bakhturina, Jiaqi Zeng, Zhilin Wang, Tugrul Konuk, Ameya Sunil Mahabaleshwarkar, Bilal Kartal,
Yoshi Suhara, Prasoon Varshney, Makesh Narsimhan, Jane Polak Scowcroft, John Kamalu, Dan Su,
Kezhi Kong, Markus Kliegl, Rabeeh Karimi, Ying Lin, Sanjeev Satheesh, Jupinder Parmar, Pritam
Gundecha, Brandon Norick, Joseph Jennings, Shrimai Prabhumoye, Syeda Nahida Akter, Mostofa
Patwary, Abhinav Khattar, Deepak Narayanan, Roger Waleffe
Infrastructure
Jimmy Zhang*, Bor-Yiing Su*, Guyue Huang*, Terry Kong, Parth Chadha, Sahil Jain, Christine
Harvey, Elad Segal, Jining Huang, Sergey Kashirsky, Robert McQueen
Inference
Izzy Putterman*, George Lam, Arun Venkatesan, Sherry Wu, Vinh Nguyen, Manoj Kilaru, Andrew
Wang, Anna Warno, Abhilash Somasamudramath, Sandip Bhaskar, Maka Dong, Nave Assaf, Shahar
Mor, Omer Ullman Argov, Scot Junkin, Oleksandr Romanenko, Pedro Larroy, Monika Katariya,
Marco Rovinelli, Viji Balas, Nicholas Edelman, Anahita Bhiwandiwalla, Muthu Subramaniam, Smita
Ithape, Karthik Ramamoorthy, Yuting Wu, Suguna Varshini Velury, Omri Almog, Joyjit Daw
Evaluations and Safety
Soumye Singhal*, Denys Fridman, Erick Galinkin, Michael Evans, Shaona Ghosh, Katherine Luna,
Leon Derczynski, Nikki Pope, Eileen Long, Seth Schneider, Guillermo Siman, Tomasz Grzegorzek,
Pablo Ribalta, Monika Katariya, Chris Alexiuk
Program management
Joey Conway*, Ehud Karpas*, Trisha Saar*, Ann Guan, Krzysztof Pawelec, Shyamala Prayaga
Leadership
Tugrul Konuk*, Oleksii Kuchaiev*, Boris Ginsburg*, Oluwatobi Olabiyi*, Kari Briski*, Jonathan
Cohen*, Bryan Catanzaro*, Jonah Alben, Yonatan Geifman, Eric Chung
* Core contributor

18
Llama-Nemotron: Efficient Reasoning Models

References
Wasi Uddin Ahmad, Sean Narenthiran, Somshubra Majumdar, Aleksander Ficek, Siddhartha Jain,
Jocelyn Huang, Vahid Noroozi, and Boris Ginsburg. OpenCodeReasoning: Advancing Data
Distillation for Competitive Coding, 2025. URL [Link]

Arash Ahmadian, Chris Cremer, Matthias Gallé, Marzieh Fadaee, Julia Kreutzer, Olivier Pietquin,
Ahmet Üstün, and Sara Hooker. Back to basics: Revisiting reinforce style optimization for learning
from human feedback in llms. arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.14740, 2024.

Joshua Ainslie, James Lee-Thorp, Michiel de Jong, Yury Zemlyanskiy, Federico Lebrón, and Sumit
Sanghai. GQA: training generalized multi-query transformer models from multi-head checkpoints.
In Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, and Kalika Bali (eds.), Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on
Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2023, Singapore, December 6-10,
2023, pp. 4895–4901. Association for Computational Linguistics, 2023. doi: 10.18653/V1/2023.
EMNLP-MAIN.298. URL [Link]

Anthropic. Claude 3.7 sonnet and claude code. [Link]


claude-3-7-sonnet, February 2025. Accessed: 2025-04-26.

Jacob Austin, Augustus Odena, Maxwell Nye, Maarten Bosma, Henryk Michalewski, David Dohan,
Ellen Jiang, Carrie Cai, Michael Terry, Quoc Le, and Charles Sutton. Program Synthesis with
Large Language Models, 2021. URL [Link]

Akhiad Bercovich, Tomer Ronen, Talor Abramovich, Nir Ailon, Nave Assaf, Mohammad Dabbah,
Ido Galil, Amnon Geifman, Yonatan Geifman, Izhak Golan, Netanel Haber, Ehud Karpas, Roi
Koren, Itay Levy, Pavlo Molchanov, Shahar Mor, Zach Moshe, Najeeb Nabwani, Omri Puny,
Ran Rubin, Itamar Schen, Ido Shahaf, Oren Tropp, Omer Ullman Argov, Ran Zilberstein, and
Ran El-Yaniv. Puzzle: Distillation-Based NAS for Inference-Optimized LLMs, 2024. URL
[Link]

Akhiad Bercovich, Mohammad Dabbah, Omri Puny, Ido Galil, Amnon Geifman, Yonatan Geifman,
Izhak Golan, Ehud Karpas, Itay Levy, Zach Moshe, Najeeb Nabwani, Tomer Ronen, Itamar Schen,
Elad Segal, Ido Shahaf, Oren Tropp, Ran Zilberstein, and Ran El-Yaniv. Ffn fusion: Rethinking
sequential computation in large language models, 2025. URL [Link]
18908.

BespokeLabs. Bespoke-stratos: The unreasonable effectiveness of reasoning distilla-


tion. [Link]/blog/bespoke-stratos-the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-reasoning-
distillation, 2025. Accessed: 2025-01-22.

Mark Chen, Jerry Tworek, Heewoo Jun, Qiming Yuan, Henrique Ponde De Oliveira Pinto, Jared
Kaplan, Harri Edwards, Yuri Burda, Nicholas Joseph, Greg Brockman, et al. Evaluating large
language models trained on code. arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.03374, 2021.

DeepSeek-AI, Daya Guo, Dejian Yang, Haowei Zhang, Junxiao Song, Ruoyu Zhang, Runxin Xu,
Qihao Zhu, Shirong Ma, Peiyi Wang, Xiao Bi, Xiaokang Zhang, Xingkai Yu, Yu Wu, Z. F. Wu,
Zhibin Gou, Zhihong Shao, Zhuoshu Li, Ziyi Gao, Aixin Liu, Bing Xue, Bingxuan Wang, Bochao
Wu, Bei Feng, Chengda Lu, Chenggang Zhao, Chengqi Deng, Chenyu Zhang, Chong Ruan,
Damai Dai, Deli Chen, Dongjie Ji, Erhang Li, Fangyun Lin, Fucong Dai, Fuli Luo, Guangbo Hao,
Guanting Chen, Guowei Li, H. Zhang, Han Bao, Hanwei Xu, Haocheng Wang, Honghui Ding,
Huajian Xin, Huazuo Gao, Hui Qu, Hui Li, Jianzhong Guo, Jiashi Li, Jiawei Wang, Jingchang
Chen, Jingyang Yuan, Junjie Qiu, Junlong Li, J. L. Cai, Jiaqi Ni, Jian Liang, Jin Chen, Kai Dong,

19
Llama-Nemotron: Efficient Reasoning Models

Kai Hu, Kaige Gao, Kang Guan, Kexin Huang, Kuai Yu, Lean Wang, Lecong Zhang, Liang Zhao,
Litong Wang, Liyue Zhang, Lei Xu, Leyi Xia, Mingchuan Zhang, Minghua Zhang, Minghui Tang,
Meng Li, Miaojun Wang, Mingming Li, Ning Tian, Panpan Huang, Peng Zhang, Qiancheng Wang,
Qinyu Chen, Qiushi Du, Ruiqi Ge, Ruisong Wang, Ruizhe Pan, Runji Wang, R. J. Chen, R. L.
Jin, Ruyi Chen, Shanghao Lu, Shangyan Zhou, Shanhuang Chen, Shengfeng Ye, Shiyu Wang,
Shuiping Yu, Shunfeng Zhou, Shuting Pan, S. S. Li, Shuang Zhou, Shaoqing Wu, Shengfeng Ye,
Tao Yun, Tian Pei, Tianyu Sun, T. Wang, Wangding Zeng, Wanjia Zhao, Wen Liu, Wenfeng
Liang, Wenjun Gao, Wenqin Yu, Wentao Zhang, W. L. Xiao, Wei An, Xiaodong Liu, Xiaohan
Wang, Xiaokang Chen, Xiaotao Nie, Xin Cheng, Xin Liu, Xin Xie, Xingchao Liu, Xinyu Yang,
Xinyuan Li, Xuecheng Su, Xuheng Lin, X. Q. Li, Xiangyue Jin, Xiaojin Shen, Xiaosha Chen,
Xiaowen Sun, Xiaoxiang Wang, Xinnan Song, Xinyi Zhou, Xianzu Wang, Xinxia Shan, Y. K. Li,
Y. Q. Wang, Y. X. Wei, Yang Zhang, Yanhong Xu, Yao Li, Yao Zhao, Yaofeng Sun, Yaohui Wang,
Yi Yu, Yichao Zhang, Yifan Shi, Yiliang Xiong, Ying He, Yishi Piao, Yisong Wang, Yixuan Tan,
Yiyang Ma, Yiyuan Liu, Yongqiang Guo, Yuan Ou, Yuduan Wang, Yue Gong, Yuheng Zou, Yujia
He, Yunfan Xiong, Yuxiang Luo, Yuxiang You, Yuxuan Liu, Yuyang Zhou, Y. X. Zhu, Yanhong
Xu, Yanping Huang, Yaohui Li, Yi Zheng, Yuchen Zhu, Yunxian Ma, Ying Tang, Yukun Zha,
Yuting Yan, Z. Z. Ren, Zehui Ren, Zhangli Sha, Zhe Fu, Zhean Xu, Zhenda Xie, Zhengyan Zhang,
Zhewen Hao, Zhicheng Ma, Zhigang Yan, Zhiyu Wu, Zihui Gu, Zijia Zhu, Zijun Liu, Zilin Li,
Ziwei Xie, Ziyang Song, Zizheng Pan, Zhen Huang, Zhipeng Xu, Zhongyu Zhang, and Zhen Zhang.
DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning, 2025.
URL [Link]

Aaron Grattafiori, Abhimanyu Dubey, Abhinav Jauhri, Abhinav Pandey, Abhishek Kadian, Ahmad
Al-Dahle, Aiesha Letman, Akhil Mathur, Alan Schelten, Alex Vaughan, et al. The llama 3 herd of
models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.21783, 2024.

Dan Hendrycks, Steven Basart, Saurav Kadavath, Mantas Mazeika, Akul Arora, Ethan Guo, Collin
Burns, Samir Puranik, Horace He, Dawn Song, and Jacob Steinhardt. Measuring Coding Challenge
Competence With APPS. NeurIPS, 2021a.

Dan Hendrycks, Collin Burns, Steven Basart, Andy Zou, Mantas Mazeika, Dawn Song, and
Jacob Steinhardt. Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding, 2021b. URL https:
//[Link]/abs/2009.03300.

Ari Holtzman, Jan Buys, Li Du, Maxwell Forbes, and Yejin Choi. The curious case of neural
text degeneration. In International Conference on Learning Representations, 2020. URL https:
//[Link]/forum?id=rygGQyrFvH.

HuggingFace. Open R1: A fully open reproduction of DeepSeek-R1, January 2025. URL https:
//[Link]/huggingface/open-r1.

Naman Jain, King Han, Alex Gu, Wen-Ding Li, Fanjia Yan, Tianjun Zhang, Sida Wang, Armando
Solar-Lezama, Koushik Sen, and Ion Stoica. Livecodebench: Holistic and contamination free
evaluation of large language models for code. arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.07974, 2024.

Naman Jain, King Han, Alex Gu, Wen-Ding Li, Fanjia Yan, Tianjun Zhang, Sida Wang, Armando
Solar-Lezama, Koushik Sen, and Ion Stoica. Livecodebench: Holistic and contamination free
evaluation of large language models for code. In The Thirteenth International Conference on
Learning Representations, 2025. URL [Link]

Woosuk Kwon, Zhuohan Li, Siyuan Zhuang, Ying Sheng, Lianmin Zheng, Cody Hao Yu, Joseph E.
Gonzalez, Hao Zhang, and Ion Stoica. Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model

20
Llama-Nemotron: Efficient Reasoning Models

Serving with PagedAttention. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGOPS 29th Symposium on Operating
Systems Principles, 2023.

Rongao Li, Jie Fu, Bo-Wen Zhang, Tao Huang, Zhihong Sun, Chen Lyu, Guang Liu, Zhi Jin, and
Ge Li. TACO: Topics in Algorithmic COde generation dataset. arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.14852,
2023.

Tianle Li, Wei-Lin Chiang, Evan Frick, Lisa Dunlap, Banghua Zhu, Joseph E. Gonzalez, and Ion
Stoica. From Live Data to High-Quality Benchmarks: The Arena-Hard Pipeline, April 2024. URL
[Link]

Yujia Li, David Choi, Junyoung Chung, Nate Kushman, Julian Schrittwieser, Rémi Leblond, Tom
Eccles, James Keeling, Felix Gimeno, Agustin Dal Lago, Thomas Hubert, Peter Choy, Cyprien
de Masson d’Autume, Igor Babuschkin, Xinyun Chen, Po-Sen Huang, Johannes Welbl, Sven Gowal,
Alexey Cherepanov, James Molloy, Daniel Mankowitz, Esme Sutherland Robson, Pushmeet Kohli,
Nando de Freitas, Koray Kavukcuoglu, and Oriol Vinyals. Competition-Level Code Generation
with AlphaCode. arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.07814, 2022.

Hunter Lightman, Vineet Kosaraju, Yura Burda, Harri Edwards, Bowen Baker, Teddy Lee, Jan
Leike, John Schulman, Ilya Sutskever, and Karl Cobbe. Let’s Verify Step by Step. arXiv preprint
arXiv:2305.20050, 2023.

Ivan Moshkov, Darragh Hanley, Ivan Sorokin, Shubham Toshniwal, Christof Henkel, Benedikt
Schifferer, Wei Du, and Igor Gitman. AIMO-2 Winning Solution: Building State-of-the-Art
Mathematical Reasoning Models with OpenMathReasoning dataset, 2025. URL [Link]
org/abs/2504.16891.

Niklas Muennighoff, Zitong Yang, Weijia Shi, Xiang Lisa Li, Li Fei-Fei, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Luke
Zettlemoyer, Percy Liang, Emmanuel Candès, and Tatsunori Hashimoto. s1: Simple test-time
scaling, 2025. URL [Link]

NVIDIA. Llama-3.1-nemotron-70b-instruct. [Link]


1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct, 2024a.

NVIDIA. Llama-3.1-nemotron-70b-reward. [Link]


1-Nemotron-70B-Reward-HF, 2024b.

NVIDIA. Nemotron-4 340B Technical Report, 2024c. URL [Link]

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, Chengyu Dong, Christine Harvey,
Christopher Parisien, Dan Su, Daniel Korzekwa, Danny Yin, Daria Gitman, David Mosallanezhad,
Deepak Narayanan, Denys Fridman, Dima Rekesh, Ding Ma, Dmytro Pykhtar, Dong Ahn, Duncan
Riach, Dusan Stosic, Eileen Long, Elad Segal, Ellie Evans, Eric Chung, Erick Galinkin, Evelina
Bakhturina, Ewa Dobrowolska, Fei Jia, Fuxiao Liu, Gargi Prasad, Gerald Shen, Guilin Liu,
Guo Chen, Haifeng Qian, Helen Ngo, Hongbin Liu, Hui Li, Igor Gitman, Ilia Karmanov, Ivan
Moshkov, Izik Golan, Jan Kautz, Jane Polak Scowcroft, Jared Casper, Jarno Seppanen, Jason
Lu, Jason Sewall, Jiaqi Zeng, Jiaxuan You, Jimmy Zhang, Jing Zhang, Jining Huang, Jinze Xue,
Jocelyn Huang, Joey Conway, John Kamalu, Jon Barker, Jonathan Cohen, Joseph Jennings,
Jupinder Parmar, Karan Sapra, Kari Briski, Kateryna Chumachenko, Katherine Luna, Keshav

21
Llama-Nemotron: Efficient Reasoning Models

Santhanam, Kezhi Kong, Kirthi Sivamani, Krzysztof Pawelec, Kumar Anik, Kunlun Li, Lawrence
McAfee, Leon Derczynski, Lindsey Pavao, Luis Vega, Lukas Voegtle, Maciej Bala, Maer Rodrigues
de Melo, Makesh Narsimhan Sreedhar, Marcin Chochowski, Markus Kliegl, Marta Stepniewska-
Dziubinska, Matthieu Le, Matvei Novikov, Mehrzad Samadi, Michael Andersch, Michael Evans,
Miguel Martinez, Mike Chrzanowski, Mike Ranzinger, Mikolaj Blaz, Misha Smelyanskiy, Mo-
hamed Fawzy, Mohammad Shoeybi, Mostofa Patwary, Nayeon Lee, Nima Tajbakhsh, Ning Xu,
Oleg Rybakov, Oleksii Kuchaiev, Olivier Delalleau, Osvald Nitski, Parth Chadha, Pasha Shamis,
Paulius Micikevicius, Pavlo Molchanov, Peter Dykas, Philipp Fischer, Pierre-Yves Aquilanti,
Piotr Bialecki, Prasoon Varshney, Pritam Gundecha, Przemek Tredak, Rabeeh Karimi, Rahul
Kandu, Ran El-Yaniv, Raviraj Joshi, Roger Waleffe, Ruoxi Zhang, Sabrina Kavanaugh, Sahil
Jain, Samuel Kriman, Sangkug Lym, Sanjeev Satheesh, Saurav Muralidharan, Sean Narenthi-
ran, Selvaraj Anandaraj, Seonmyeong Bak, Sergey Kashirsky, Seungju Han, Shantanu Acharya,
Shaona Ghosh, Sharath Turuvekere Sreenivas, Sharon Clay, Shelby Thomas, Shrimai Prabhumoye,
Shubham Pachori, Shubham Toshniwal, Shyamala Prayaga, Siddhartha Jain, Sirshak Das, Slawek
Kierat, Somshubra Majumdar, Song Han, Soumye Singhal, Sriharsha Niverty, Stefania Alborghetti,
Suseella Panguluri, Swetha Bhendigeri, Syeda Nahida Akter, Szymon Migacz, Tal Shiri, Terry
Kong, Timo Roman, Tomer Ronen, Trisha Saar, Tugrul Konuk, Tuomas Rintamaki, Tyler Poon,
Ushnish De, Vahid Noroozi, Varun Singh, Vijay Korthikanti, Vitaly Kurin, Wasi Uddin Ahmad,
Wei Du, Wei Ping, Wenliang Dai, Wonmin Byeon, Xiaowei Ren, Yao Xu, Yejin Choi, Yian Zhang,
Ying Lin, Yoshi Suhara, Zhiding Yu, Zhiqi Li, Zhiyu Li, Zhongbo Zhu, Zhuolin Yang, and Zijia
Chen. Nemotron-h: A family of accurate and efficient hybrid mamba-transformer models, 2025.
URL [Link]

OpenAI. Learning to Reason with LLMs, 2025. URL [Link]


learning-to-reason-with-llms/.

OpenThoughts. Open Thoughts. [Link] February 2025.

Guilherme Penedo, Anton Lozhkov, Hynek Kydlíček, Loubna Ben Allal, Edward Beeching, Agustín Pi-
queres Lajarín, Quentin Gallouédec, Nathan Habib, Lewis Tunstall, and Leandro von Werra.
CodeForces. [Link] 2025a.

Guilherme Penedo, Anton Lozhkov, Hynek Kydlíček, Loubna Ben Allal, Edward Beeching, Agustín Pi-
queres Lajarín, Quentin Gallouédec, Nathan Habib, Lewis Tunstall, and Leandro von Werra. IOI.
[Link] 2025b.

Qwen. Qwen2.5: A Party of Foundation Models, September 2024. URL [Link]


io/blog/qwen2.5/.

David Rein, Betty Li Hou, Asa Cooper Stickland, Jackson Petty, Richard Yuanzhe Pang, Julien
Dirani, Julian Michael, and Samuel R. Bowman. Gpqa: A graduate-level google-proof q&a
benchmark, 2023.

David Rein, Betty Li Hou, Asa Cooper Stickland, Jackson Petty, Richard Yuanzhe Pang, Julien
Dirani, Julian Michael, and Samuel R. Bowman. GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A
Benchmark. In COLM, 2024.

RyokoAI. RyokoAI/ShareGPT52K. [Link]


2023.

Zhihong Shao, Peiyi Wang, Qihao Zhu, Runxin Xu, Junxiao Song, Xiao Bi, Haowei Zhang, Mingchuan
Zhang, Y. K. Li, Y. Wu, and Daya Guo. DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical
Reasoning in Open Language Models, 2024. URL [Link]

22
Llama-Nemotron: Efficient Reasoning Models

Gerald Shen, Zhilin Wang, Olivier Delalleau, Jiaqi Zeng, Yi Dong, Daniel Egert, Shengyang Sun,
Jimmy J. Zhang, Sahil Jain, Ali Taghibakhshi, Markel Sanz Ausin, Ashwath Aithal, and Oleksii
Kuchaiev. NeMo-Aligner: Scalable toolkit for efficient model alignment. In First Conference on
Language Modeling, 2024. URL [Link]

Mohammad Shoeybi, Mostofa Patwary, Raul Puri, Patrick LeGresley, Jared Casper, and Bryan
Catanzaro. Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model
Parallelism, 2020. URL [Link]

Stack Exchange Data. Dump 2024-04-02. [Link]


20240402_bis, 2024.

Shengyang Sun, Yian Zhang, Alexander Bukharin, David Mosallanezhad, Jiaqi Zeng, Soumye Singhal,
Gerald Shen, Adithya Renduchintala, Tugrul Konuk, Yi Dong, Zhilin Wang, Dmitry Chichkov,
Olivier Delalleau, and Oleksii Kuchaiev. Reward-aware preference optimization: A unified
mathematical framework for model alignment, 2025. URL [Link]

Sijun Tan, Siyuan Zhuang, Kyle Montgomery, William Y Tang, Alejandro Cuadron, Chenguang
Wang, Raluca Ada Popa, and Ion Stoica. JudgeBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLM-Based
Judges. In ICLR, 2025.

Shubham Toshniwal, Wei Du, Ivan Moshkov, Branislav Kisacanin, Alexan Ayrapetyan, and Igor
Gitman. OpenMathInstruct-2: Accelerating AI for Math with Massive Open-Source Instruction
Data. In ICLR, 2025.

TreeSitter. Tree sitter. [Link] 2013.

Yubo Wang, Xueguang Ma, Ge Zhang, Yuansheng Ni, Abhranil Chandra, Shiguang Guo, Weiming
Ren, Aaran Arulraj, Xuan He, Ziyan Jiang, Tianle Li, Max Ku, Kai Wang, Alex Zhuang, Rongqi
Fan, Xiang Yue, and Wenhu Chen. MMLU-Pro: A More Robust and Challenging Multi-Task
Language Understanding Benchmark, 2024. URL [Link]

Zhilin Wang, Yi Dong, Olivier Delalleau, Jiaqi Zeng, Gerald Shen, Daniel Egert, Jimmy J Zhang,
Makesh Narsimhan Sreedhar, and Oleksii Kuchaiev. HelpSteer2: Open-source dataset for training
top-performing reward models. In ICLR, 2025a.

Zhilin Wang, Jiaqi Zeng, Olivier Delalleau, Daniel Egert, Ellie Evans, Hoo-Chang Shin, Felipe Soares,
Yi Dong, and Oleksii Kuchaiev. Dedicated feedback and edit models empower inference-time
scaling for open-ended general-domain tasks, 2025b. URL [Link]

Liang Wen, Yunke Cai, Fenrui Xiao, Xin He, Qi An, Zhenyu Duan, Yimin Du, Junchen Liu,
Lifu Tang, Xiaowei Lv, Haosheng Zou, Yongchao Deng, Shousheng Jia, and Xiangzheng Zhang.
Light-r1: Curriculum sft, dpo and rl for long cot from scratch and beyond, 2025. URL https:
//[Link]/abs/2503.10460.

Fanjia Yan, Huanzhi Mao, Charlie Cheng-Jie Ji, Tianjun Zhang, Shishir G. Patil, Ion Stoica, and
Joseph E. Gonzalez. Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard. 2024.

Shuo Yang, Wei-Lin Chiang, Lianmin Zheng, Joseph E. Gonzalez, and Ion Stoica. Rethinking
Benchmark and Contamination for Language Models with Rephrased Samples. 2023.

Wenting Zhao, Xiang Ren, Jack Hessel, Claire Cardie, Yejin Choi, and Yuntian Deng. Wildchat: 1m
chatgpt interaction logs in the wild, 2024. URL [Link]

23
Llama-Nemotron: Efficient Reasoning Models

Lianmin Zheng, Liangsheng Yin, Zhiqiang Xie, Chuyue Sun, Jeff Huang, Cody Hao Yu, Shiyi Cao,
Christos Kozyrakis, Ion Stoica, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Clark Barrett, and Ying Sheng. SGLang:
Efficient execution of structured language model programs. In The Thirty-eighth Annual Conference
on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2024. URL [Link]
VqkAKQibpq.

Jeffrey Zhou, Tianjian Lu, Swaroop Mishra, Siddhartha Brahma, Sujoy Basu, Yi Luan, Denny
Zhou, and Le Hou. Instruction-following evaluation for large language models. arXiv preprint
arXiv:2311.07911, 2023.

24

Common questions

Powered by AI

Evaluating with an expanded context length (32k) allows LN-Ultra to process more extensive reasoning traces without truncation, leading to more complete and accurate discourse generation, particularly for multi-step reasoning tasks .

Smaller models often yield suboptimal results with RL compared to distillation because RL relies heavily on self-learning and exploration, which may not be as effective or efficient for models with limited initial capabilities .

The improved performance on the Arena-Hard benchmark implies that the reinforcement learning techniques employed not only fine-tune LN-Ultra’s reasoning capabilities but also enhance its broader generalization and adaptability in varied contexts, highlighting the potential of RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) to harness existing model knowledge effectively .

Reinforcement learning is favored because it enables LN-Ultra to continually explore and engage in self-learning, allowing it to surpass its teacher model, unlike traditional methods that approach but do not exceed the teacher's performance .

A diverse set of reasoning benchmarks ensures comprehensive evaluation of LN-Ultra across various domains and problem types, further validating its generalization capabilities and robustness outside the training distribution .

System prompts such as "detailed thinking on" for reasoning and "detailed thinking off" for non-reasoning help LN-Ultra learn to toggle reasoning behavior at inference time. This differentiation allows the model to adapt its processing style based on the task requirement .

LN-Ultra consistently achieves higher accuracy and efficiency compared to DeepSeek-R1 and Llama-3.1-405B across various settings, making it a superior choice on the accuracy-throughput Pareto curve .

The GRPO (Group Relative Policy Optimization) algorithm enhances LN-Ultra's reasoning capabilities by optimizing training through sampling and rolling out multiple responses per prompt, ultimately leading to improved convergence on reasoning tasks .

LN-Ultra undergoes knowledge distillation for 65B tokens and continued pretraining for 88B tokens on the Nemotron-H phase 4 dataset. This strategy allows it to match and even surpass Llama 3.1-405B-Instruct on key benchmarks, suggesting that architecture optimization can be reconciled with high model performance through this mixed training approach .

The training setup ensures LN-Ultra is challenged by filtering data with a pass rate of 0.75 or higher, employing curriculum training strategies, and progressively increasing task difficulty. Each rollout includes preprocessing steps and difficulty metrics that gradually introduce more complex tasks .

You might also like