NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning

Model Summary

Model Overview

Model Developer: NVIDIA Corporation

Model Dates: December 2025 - May 2026

Data Freshness:

• The pre-training data has a cutoff date of September 2025.
• The post-training data has a cutoff date of May 2026.

What is Nemotron?

NVIDIA Nemotron™ is a family of open models with open weights, training data, and recipes, delivering leading efficiency and accuracy for building specialized AI agents.

Description

NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-NVFP4 is a large language model (LLM) trained by NVIDIA.

The model employs a hybrid Mixture-of-Experts architecture, utilizing interleaved Mamba-2 and MoE layers, along with select Attention layers. The Lightning 3.5 model is released alongside a number of speculative decoding methods for faster text generation. The model has 3B active parameters and 30B parameters in total.

This model is ready for commercial use.

Quick Start

To get quickly started on DGX Spark (GB10) you can use the following command.

Grab the model:

export MODEL_CKPT=nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-NVFP4
export DSPARK_CKPT=nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-NVFP4-DSpark

Run it with vLLM — this recipe uses DSpark speculative decoding, tuned for DGX Spark. (vLLM version: vllm/vllm-openai:v0.27.1)

vllm serve --model $MODEL_CKPT \
  --moe-backend marlin \
  --kv-cache-dtype fp8 \
  --enable-prefix-caching \
  --gpu-memory-utilization 0.85 \
  --speculative_config.num_speculative_tokens 3 \
  --mamba-backend flashinfer \
  --mamba-cache-mode align \
  --reasoning-parser nemotron_v3 \
  --speculative_config.model $DSPARK_CKPT \
  --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder \
  --enable-auto-tool-choice

Validated context: 1M tokens (default).

For more details on how to deploy and use the model — see the Quick Start Guide below!

License/Terms of Use

Governing Download Terms: Use of this model is governed by the OpenMDW-1.1 model license.

Benchmarks

Reasoning Benchmark Evaluations

We evaluated our model on the following benchmarks:

Accuracy numbers measured by NVIDIA under a consistent harness (NeMo Gym / Nemo Evaluator SDK); they may differ from vendors' self-reported numbers.

For reproducibility, the evaluation recipes, installation instructions, and commands for NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning were collected and published in NeMo Gym. The reported results cover the release evaluation suite, including knowledge and reasoning, instruction following, coding, agentic, tool-use, and long-context. Most evaluations use NeMo Gym-native harnesses while a small subset, including SWE-Bench and Terminal-Bench, used NeMo Evaluator natively. The published recipes specify the benchmark-specific containers, prompts, inference parameters, parser configurations, and scoring settings used to produce the results.

These numbers were measured with and apply to the official NVFP4 checkpoint

Agentic Coding Benchmarks

Additional harness-level coding-agent results for SWE-Bench Verified and Terminal-Bench 2.1 are shown below.

Deployment Geography: Global

Use Case

NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-NVFP4 is a general purpose reasoning and chat model intended to be used in