SmolLM3

Table of Contents

1. Model Summary
2. How to use
3. Evaluation
4. Training
5. Limitations
6. License

Model Summary

SmolLM3 is a 3B parameter language model designed to push the boundaries of small models. It supports 6 languages, advanced reasoning and long context. SmolLM3 is a fully open model that offers strong performance at the 3B–4B scale.

SmolLM3-3B-Base is the base model after pretraining, you can find the instruct model at SmolLM3-3B.

The model is a decoder-only transformer using GQA and NoPE, it was pretrained on 11.2T tokens with a staged curriculum of web, code, math and reasoning data. Post-training included midtraining on 140B reasoning tokens followed by supervised fine-tuning and alignment via Anchored Preference Optimization (APO).

Key features

• Instruct model optimized for hybrid reasoning
• Fully open model: open weights + full training details including public data mixture and training configs
• Long context: Trained on 64k context and suppots up to 128k tokens using YARN extrapolation
• Multilingual: 6 natively supported (English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Portuguese)

For more details refer to our blog post: https://hf.co/blog/smollm3

How to use

The modeling code for SmolLM3 is available in transformers v4.53.0, so make sure to upgrade your transformers version. You can also load the model with the latest vllm which uses transformers as a backend.

pip install -U transformers

from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

checkpoint = "HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM3-3B"
device = "cuda" # for GPU usage or "cpu" for CPU usage
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(checkpoint)
# for multiple GPUs install accelerate and do `model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(checkpoint, device_map="auto")`
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(checkpoint).to(device)
inputs = tokenizer.encode("Gravity is", return_tensors="pt").to(device)
outputs = model.generate(inputs)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0]))

For local inference, you can use llama.cpp, ONNX, MLX and MLC. You can find quantized checkpoints in this collection (https://huggingface.co/collections/HuggingFaceTB/smollm3-686d33c1fdffe8e635317e23).

Long context processing

The current config.json is set for context length up to 65,536 tokens. To handle longer inputs (128k or 256k), we utilize YaRN you can change the max_position_embeddings and rope_scaling` to:

{
  ...,
  "rope_scaling": {
    "factor": 2.0, #2x65536=131 072
    "original_max_position_embeddings": 65536,
    "type": "yarn"
  }
}

Evaluation

In this section, we report the evaluation results of SmolLM3 model. All evaluations are zero-shot unless stated otherwise, and we use lighteval to run them.

We highlight the best score in bold and underline the second-best score.

Base Pre-Trained Model

English benchmarks

Note: All evaluations are zero-shot unless stated otherwise. For Ruler 64k evaluation, we apply YaRN to the Qwen models with 32k context to extrapolate the context length.

Multilingual benchmarks