Model reference · open weights

mt0

LLMs bigscience Text gen 1 build Open weights 1k dl/mo

mt0 is an open-weight language model from bigscience. mt0-base (FP32) weighs 1.2 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

  • mt0 is a 582M parameter text-generation model developed by bigscience and published as bigscience/mt0-base.
  • It is designed to follow human instructions in dozens of languages zero-shot, having been finetuned on the crosslingual task mixture xP3.
  • The model supports languages including af, am, Arabic, az, be, Bulgarian, Bengali, and Catalan, and is released under the apache-2.0 licence.

Summary of the bigscience/mt0-base model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released bybigscience
Released2022-10-27
Parameters582M
VRAM1.2 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for mt0-base (FP32)

1.2 GBweights, file size
37 MBcache per 1K tokens
723 MBruntime overhead, at least
CardRequests at onceContext maxMemory
8K each32K each
RTX 3060 12 GB328128K11.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB4411128K15.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GB7117128K23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GB7117128K23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GB9624128K31.0 GB
L40S 48 GB13934128K44.0 GB
A100 80 GB25263128K78.2 GB
H100 80 GB23558128K78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB28771128K93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified33283128K107 GB
H200 141 GB433108128K138 GB
B200 180 GB559139128K176 GB
Memory needed at each load
Requests at once8K tokens each32K tokens each
12.2 GB3.1 GB
53.4 GB7.9 GB
84.3 GB11.6 GB
166.7 GB21.2 GB
3211.6 GB40.5 GB
6421.2 GB79.2 GB

One card, with vLLM's small-card settings.

From the model card

What bigscience says about mt0

Read the model card
  1. Model Summary
  2. Use
  3. Limitations
  4. Training
  5. Evaluation
  6. Citation

Model Summary

We present BLOOMZ & mT0, a family of models capable of following human instructions in dozens of languages zero-shot. We finetune BLOOM & mT5 pretrained multilingual language models on our crosslingual task mixture (xP3) and find our resulting models capable of crosslingual generalization to unseen tasks & languages.

Use

Intended use

We recommend using the model to perform tasks expressed in natural language. For example, given the prompt "Translate to English: Je t’aime.", the model will most likely answer "I love you.". Some prompt ideas from our paper:

  • 一个传奇的开端,一个不灭的神话,这不仅仅是一部电影,而是作为一个走进新时代的标签,永远彪炳史册。你认为这句话的立场是赞扬、中立还是批评?
  • Suggest at least five related search terms to "Mạng neural nhân tạo".
  • Write a fairy tale about a troll saving a princess from a dangerous dragon. The fairy tale is a masterpiece that has achieved praise worldwide and its moral is "Heroes Come in All Shapes and Sizes". Story (in Spanish):
  • Explain in a sentence in Telugu what is backpropagation in neural networks.

Feel free to share your generations in the Community tab!

How to use

CPU

# pip install -q transformers
from transformers import AutoModelForSeq2SeqLM, AutoTokenizer

checkpoint = "bigscience/mt0-base"

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(checkpoint)
model = AutoModelForSeq2SeqLM.from_pretrained(checkpoint)

inputs = tokenizer.encode("Translate to English: Je t’aime.", return_tensors="pt")
outputs = model.generate(inputs)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0]))

GPU

# pip install -q transformers accelerate
from transformers import AutoModelForSeq2SeqLM, AutoTokenizer

checkpoint = "bigscience/mt0-base"

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(checkpoint)
model = AutoModelForSeq2SeqLM.from_pretrained(checkpoint, torch_dtype="auto", device_map="auto")

inputs = tokenizer.encode("Translate to English: Je t’aime.", return_tensors="pt").to("cuda")
outputs = model.generate(inputs)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0]))

GPU in 8bit

# pip install -q transformers accelerate bitsandbytes
from transformers import AutoModelForSeq2SeqLM, AutoTokenizer

checkpoint = "bigscience/mt0-base"

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(checkpoint)
model = AutoModelForSeq2SeqLM.from_pretrained(checkpoint, device_map="auto", load_in_8bit=True)

inputs = tokenizer.encode("Translate to English: Je t’aime.", return_tensors="pt").to("cuda")
outputs = model.generate(inputs)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0]))

Limitations

Prompt Engineering: The performance may vary depending on the prompt. For BLOOMZ models, we recommend making it very clear when the input stops to avoid the model trying to continue it. For example, the prompt "Translate to English: Je t'aime" without the full stop (.) at the end, may result in the model trying to continue the French sentence. Better prompts are e.g. "Translate to English: Je t'aime.", "Translate to English: Je t'aime. Translation:" "What is "Je t'aime." in English?", where it is clear for the model when it should answer. Further, we recommend providing the model as much context as possible. For example, if you want it to answer in Telugu, then tell the model, e.g. "Explain in a sentence in Telugu what is backpropagation in neural networks.".

Training

Model

  • Architecture: Same as mt5-base, also refer to the config.json file
  • Finetuning steps: 25000
  • Finetuning tokens: 4.62 billion
  • Precision: bfloat16

Hardware

  • TPUs: TPUv4-64

Software

  • Orchestration: T5X
  • Neural networks: Jax

Evaluation

We refer to Table 7 from our paper & bigscience/evaluation-results for zero-shot results on unseen tasks. The sidebar reports zero-shot performance of the best prompt per dataset config.

Citation

@article{muennighoff2022crosslingual,
  title={Crosslingual generalization through multitask finetuning},
  author={Muennighoff, Niklas and Wang, Thomas and Sutawika, Lintang and Roberts, Adam and Biderman, Stella and Scao, Teven Le and Bari, M Saiful and Shen, Sheng and Yong, Zheng-Xin and Schoelkopf, Hailey and others},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.01786},
  year={2022}
}

Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.

Benchmarks

Reported results

As published on the model card: the maker's own numbers, not measured by AxForge.

TaskDatasetMetricScore
Coreference resolutionWinogrande XL (xl)Accuracy53.280
Coreference resolutionXWinograd (en)Accuracy51.400
Coreference resolutionXWinograd (fr)Accuracy55.420
Coreference resolutionXWinograd (jp)Accuracy51.410
Coreference resolutionXWinograd (pt)Accuracy52.090
Coreference resolutionXWinograd (ru)Accuracy53.970
Coreference resolutionXWinograd (zh)Accuracy53.970
Natural language inferenceANLI (r1)Accuracy33.300
Natural language inferenceANLI (r2)Accuracy33.500
Natural language inferenceANLI (r3)Accuracy33.330
Natural language inferenceSuperGLUE (cb)Accuracy50
Natural language inferenceSuperGLUE (rte)Accuracy66.430
Natural language inferenceXNLI (ar)Accuracy41.850
Natural language inferenceXNLI (bg)Accuracy42.330
Natural language inferenceXNLI (de)Accuracy42.410
Natural language inferenceXNLI (el)Accuracy40.920
Natural language inferenceXNLI (en)Accuracy43.780
Natural language inferenceXNLI (es)Accuracy41.930
Natural language inferenceXNLI (fr)Accuracy42.450
Natural language inferenceXNLI (hi)Accuracy39.760
Natural language inferenceXNLI (ru)Accuracy41.930
Natural language inferenceXNLI (sw)Accuracy39.680
Natural language inferenceXNLI (th)Accuracy41.970
Natural language inferenceXNLI (tr)Accuracy40.280
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