LFM2

LFM2-1.2B

LFM2 is a new generation of hybrid models developed by Liquid AI, specifically designed for edge AI and on-device deployment. It sets a new standard in terms of quality, speed, and memory efficiency.

We're releasing the weights of four post-trained checkpoints with 350M, 700M, 1.2B, and 2.6B parameters. They provide the following key features to create AI-powered edge applications:

• Fast training & inference – LFM2 achieves 3x faster training compared to its previous generation. It also benefits from 2x faster decode and prefill speed on CPU compared to Qwen3.
• Best performance – LFM2 outperforms similarly-sized models across multiple benchmark categories, including knowledge, mathematics, instruction following, and multilingual capabilities.
• New architecture – LFM2 is a new hybrid Liquid model with multiplicative gates and short convolutions.
• Flexible deployment – LFM2 runs efficiently on CPU, GPU, and NPU hardware for flexible deployment on smartphones, laptops, or vehicles.

Find more information about LFM2 in our blog post.

📄 Model details

Due to their small size, we recommend fine-tuning LFM2 models on narrow use cases to maximize performance. They are particularly suited for agentic tasks, data extraction, RAG, creative writing, and multi-turn conversations. However, we do not recommend using them for tasks that are knowledge-intensive or require programming skills.

Supported languages: English, Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish.

Generation parameters: We recommend the following parameters:

• temperature=0.3
• min_p=0.15
• repetition_penalty=1.05

Chat template: LFM2 uses a ChatML-like chat template as follows:

You are a helpful assistant trained by Liquid AI.
What is C. elegans?
It's a tiny nematode that lives in temperate soil environments.

You can automatically apply it using the dedicated .apply_chat_template() function from Hugging Face transformers.

Tool use: It consists of four main steps:

1. Function definition: LFM2 takes JSON function definitions as input (JSON objects between and special tokens), usually in the system prompt
2. Function call: LFM2 writes Pythonic function calls (a Python list between and special tokens), as the assistant answer.
3. Function execution: The function call is executed and the result is returned (string between and special tokens), as a "tool" role.
4. Final answer: LFM2 interprets the outcome of the function call to address the original user prompt in plain text.

Here is a simple example of a conversation using tool use:

List of tools: [{"name": "get_candidate_status", "description": "Retrieves the current status of a candidate in the recruitment process", "parameters": {"type": "object", "properties": {"candidate_id": {"type": "string", "description": "Unique identifier for the candidate"}}, "required": ["candidate_id"]}}]
What is the current status of candidate ID 12345?
The candidate with ID 12345 is currently in the "Interview Scheduled" stage for the position of Clinical Research Associate, with an interview date set for 2023-11-20.

You can directly pass tools as JSON schema or Python functions with .apply_chat_template() as shown in this page to automatically format the system prompt.

Architecture: Hybrid model with multiplicative gates and short convolutions: 10 double-gated short-range convolution blocks and 6 grouped query attention (GQA) blocks.

Pre-training mixture: Approximately 75% English, 20% multilingual, and 5% code data sourced from the web and licensed materials.

Training approach:

• Knowledge distillation using LFM1-7B as teacher model
• Very large-scale SFT on 50% downstream tasks, 50% general domains
• Custom DPO with length normalization and semi-online datasets
• Iterative model