SmolLM3 3B

Summary

Introduction
Evaluation
Parameters
Usage for developers
Reference
License
Citation

Introduction

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

The model is a decoder-only transformer using GQA and NoPE (with a 3:1 ratio). 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 supports up to 128k tokens using YARN extrapolation
Multilingual: 6 natively supported (English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Portuguese)

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.

Instruction Model

No Extended Thinking

Evaluation results of non-reasoning models and reasoning models in no-thinking mode. We highlight the best score in bold and underline the second-best score.

Category	Metric	SmolLM3-3B	Qwen2.5-3B	Llama3.1-3B	Qwen3-1.7B	Qwen3-4B
High school math competition	AIME 2025	9.3	2.9	0.3	8.0	17.1
Math problem-solving	GSM-Plus	72.8	74.1	59.2	68.3	82.1
Competitive programming	LiveCodeBench v4	15.2	10.5	3.4	15.0	24.9
Graduate-level reasoning	GPQA Diamond	35.7	32.2	29.4	31.8	44.4
Instruction following	IFEval	76.7	65.6	71.6	74.0	68.9
Alignment	MixEval Hard	26.9	27.6	24.9	24.3	31.6
Tool Calling	BFCL	92.3	-	92.3 *	89.5	95.0
Multilingual Q&A	Global MMLU	53.5	50.54	46.8	49.5	65.1

(*): this is a tool calling finetune

Extended Thinking

Evaluation results in reasoning mode for SmolLM3 and Qwen3 models:

Category	Metric	SmolLM3-3B	Qwen3-1.7B	Qwen3-4B
High school math competition	AIME 2025	36.7	30.7	58.8
Math problem-solving	GSM-Plus	83.4	79.4	88.2
Competitive programming	LiveCodeBench v4	30.0	34.4	52.9
Graduate-level reasoning	GPQA Diamond	41.7	39.9	55.3
Instruction following	IFEval	71.2	74.2	85.4
Alignment	MixEval Hard	30.8	33.9	38.0
Tool Calling	BFCL	88.8	88.8	95.5
Multilingual Q&A	Global MMLU	64.1	62.3	73.3

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.

Category	Metric	SmolLM3-3B	Qwen2.5-3B	Llama3-3.2B	Qwen3-1.7B-Base	Qwen3-4B-Base
Reasoning & Commonsense	HellaSwag	76.15	74.19	75.52	60.52	74.37
	ARC-CF (Average)	65.61	59.81	58.58	55.88	62.11
	Winogrande	58.88	61.41	58.72	57.06	59.59
	CommonsenseQA	55.28	49.14	60.60	48.98	52.99
Knowledge & Understanding	MMLU-CF (Average)	44.13	42.93	41.32	39.11	47.65
	MMLU Pro CF	19.61	16.66	16.42	18.04	24.92
	MMLU Pro MCF	32.70	31.32	25.07	30.39	41.07
	PIQA	78.89	78.35	78.51	75.35	77.58
	OpenBookQA	40.60	40.20	42.00	36.40	42.40
	BoolQ	78.99	73.61	75.33	74.46	74.28
Math & Code
Coding & math	HumanEval+	30.48	34.14	25.00	43.29	54.87
	MBPP+	52.91	52.11	38.88	59.25	63.75
	MATH (4-shot)	46.10	40.10	7.44	41.64	51.20
	GSM8k (5-shot)	67.63	70.13	25.92	65.88	74.14
Long context
	Ruler 32k	76.35	75.93	77.58	70.63	83.98
	Ruler 64k	67.85	64.90	72.93	57.18	60.29
	Ruler 128k	61.03	62.23	71.30	43.03	47.23

Multilingual benchmarks

Category	Metric	SmolLM3 3B Base	Qwen2.5-3B	Llama3.2 3B	Qwen3 1.7B Base	Qwen3 4B Base
Main supported languages
French	MLMM Hellaswag	63.94	57.47	57.66	51.26	61.00
	Belebele	51.00	51.55	49.22	49.44	55.00
	Global MMLU (CF)	38.37	34.22	33.71	34.94	41.80
	Flores-200 (5-shot)	62.85	61.38	62.89	58.68	65.76
Spanish	MLMM Hellaswag	65.85	58.25	59.39	52.40	61.85
	Belebele	47.00	48.88	47.00	47.56	50.33
	Global MMLU (CF)	38.51	35.84	35.60	34.79	41.22
	Flores-200 (5-shot)	48.25	50.00	44.45	46.93	50.16
German	MLMM Hellaswag	59.56	49.99	53.19	46.10	56.43
	Belebele	48.44	47.88	46.22	48.00	53.44
	Global MMLU (CF)	35.10	33.19	32.60	32.73	38.70
	Flores-200 (5-shot)	56.60	50.63	54.95	52.58	50.48
Italian	MLMM Hellaswag	62.49	53.21	54.96	48.72	58.76
	Belebele	46.44	44.77	43.88	44.00	48.78
	Global MMLU (CF)	36.99	33.91	32.79	35.37	39.26
	Flores-200 (5-shot)	52.65	54.87	48.83	48.37	49.11
Portuguese	MLMM Hellaswag	63.22	57.38	56.84	50.73	59.89
	Belebele	47.67	49.22	45.00	44.00	49.00
	Global MMLU (CF)	36.88	34.72	33.05	35.26	40.66
	Flores-200 (5-shot)	60.93	57.68	54.28	56.58	63.43

The model has also been trained on Arabic (standard), Chinese and Russian data, but has seen fewer tokens in these languages compared to the 6 above. We report the performance on these langages for information.

Category	Metric	SmolLM3 3B Base	Qwen2.5-3B	Llama3.2 3B	Qwen3 1.7B Base	Qwen3 4B Base
Other supported languages
Arabic	Belebele	40.22	44.22	45.33	42.33	51.78
	Global MMLU (CF)	28.57	28.81	27.67	29.37	31.85
	Flores-200 (5-shot)	40.22	39.44	44.43	35.82	39.76
Chinese	Belebele	43.78	44.56	49.56	48.78	53.22
	Global MMLU (CF)	36.16	33.79	39.57	38.56	44.55
	Flores-200 (5-shot)	29.17	33.21	31.89	25.70	32.50
Russian	Belebele	47.44	45.89	47.44	45.22	51.44
	Global MMLU (CF)	36.51	32.47	34.52	34.83	38.80
	Flores-200 (5-shot)	47.13	48.74	50.74	54.70	60.53

Parameters

Inputs

prompt - (text): User-provided input can be a question, a request, or the context to be addressed. The system uses the prompt to analyze, infer, and generate a corresponding response.

Output

output - (text): The content generated after the token is the final answer that the model returns to the user.

Usage for developers

Please find below the details to track the information and access the code for processing the model on our platform.

Requirements

pip install -r requirements.txt

Code based on AIOZ structure

import os
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

...


def do_ai_task(
        prompt: Union[str, Path],
        model_storage_directory: Union[str, Path],
        device: Literal["cpu", "cuda", "gpu"] = "cpu",
        *args, **kwargs) -> Any:
    """Define AI task: load model, pre-process, post-process, etc ..."""
    # Define AI task workflow. Below is an example
    model_weights = os.path.join(model_storage_directory, "SmolLM3-3B")

    # load the tokenizer and the model
    tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_weights)
    model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
        model_weights,
    ).to(device)

    # Get and decode the output
    output_ids = generated_ids[0][len(model_inputs.input_ids[0]) :]
    output = tokenizer.decode(output_ids, skip_special_tokens=True)
    return output

Reference

This repository is based on and inspired by the SmolLM team's work, including their open weights, training code, and public data mixture. We sincerely appreciate their generosity in sharing the model and full training details.

License

SmolLM3-3B is released under the Apache License 2.0, which permits use, modification, and redistribution for both commercial and non-commercial purposes. AIOZ AI redistributes this model in accordance with those terms. A full copy of the license is included in the LICENSE file, and attribution is provided in the NOTICE file.

Citation

@misc{bakouch2025smollm3,
  title={{SmolLM3: smol, multilingual, long-context reasoner}},
  author={Bakouch, Elie and Ben Allal, Loubna and Lozhkov, Anton and Tazi, Nouamane and Tunstall, Lewis and Patiño, Carlos Miguel and Beeching, Edward and Roucher, Aymeric and Reedi, Aksel Joonas and Gallouédec, Quentin and Rasul, Kashif and Habib, Nathan and Fourrier, Clémentine and Kydlicek, Hynek and Penedo, Guilherme and Larcher, Hugo and Morlon, Mathieu and Srivastav, Vaibhav and Lochner, Joshua and Nguyen, Xuan-Son and Raffel, Colin and von Werra, Leandro and Wolf, Thomas},
  year={2025},
  howpublished={\url{https://huggingface.co/blog/smollm3}}
}