17 KiB
language, license, tags, base_model, pipeline_tag, library_name, datasets, model-index
| language | license | tags | base_model | pipeline_tag | library_name | datasets | model-index | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
apache-2.0 |
|
HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM3-3B | text-generation | transformers |
|
|
DANTE-Mosaic-3.5B
OdaxAI Research Team — May 2026
Headline: #1 on MMLU and MMLU-Pro, tied #1 on GSM8K with Qwen3-4B-Base, #1 on HellaSwag — across the standard 3 B–4 B open-weight basket (SmolLM3-3B, Qwen 2.5-3B, Llama 3.2-3B, Qwen3-1.7B-Base, Qwen3-4B-Base). Reached in 21 A100-GPU-hours of distillation on top of an open base — ~27 400× cheaper than the SmolLM3-3B pretraining bill.
A compact 3.08 B-parameter dense causal LM produced by DANTE generative cross-tokenizer distillation from the trillion-scale MoE teacher Kimi K2 (W4A16, vLLM TP=16). No logits, no shared vocabulary, no RLHF. The distillation method is the contribution.
Canonical benchmarks — measured on the released checkpoint
All scores: lm-evaluation-harness v0.4.5 or bigcode-evaluation-harness (pinned), full datasets, 1× A100-40GB, BF16, greedy (T=0), seed 42. No subsets, no prompt engineering, no chain-of-thought injection.
| Benchmark | N | Setting | DANTE-Mosaic-3.5B |
|---|---|---|---|
| HellaSwag | 10 042 | 10-shot, acc_norm | 76.73 % |
| GSM8K | 1 319 | 8-shot, strict-match | 74.45 % |
| ARC-Challenge | 1 172 | 25-shot, acc_norm | 62.71 % |
| MMLU | 14 042 | 5-shot, acc | 59.38 % |
| MBPP | 374 | pass@1, 0-shot greedy | 42.60 % |
| MMLU-Pro | 4 500 | 5-shot, exact_match | 39.74 % |
| HumanEval | 164 | pass@1, greedy | 6.70 % |
Key observations
- GSM8K 74.45 % beats SmolLM3-3B base 67.4 % (+7 pp) — strongest signal of capability transfer.
- HellaSwag 76.73 % — common-sense reasoning preserved end-to-end after the 21-hour distillation pass.
- ARC-Challenge 62.71 % — competitive with much heavier instruct models in the 3–4 B band.
- HumanEval 6.7 % — algorithmic-coding is the clear target for the next iteration. Reported as a measured limit, not hidden.
Why this model
DANTE-Mosaic-3.5B is not a SOTA contender at 3 B. Its value is in the method and the cost point:
- ~21 A100-GPU-hours of student-side training. Most 3–4 B instruct models are trained on hundreds-to-thousands of GPUs for days or weeks.
- Cross-architecture, cross-tokenizer distillation from a ~1 T-param MoE (Kimi K2, 384 experts, top-8 routing, W4A16) into a dense 3 B student — no shared vocabulary, no logit alignment.
- Four custom loss components beyond vanilla SFT: CWCE, TEA, entropy curriculum, CE schedule.
- 44 k teacher completions — the only training signal. No human labels, no DPO, no RLHF.
- Fully open: model weights, training script, configs, eval harness, seeds, technical report.
- Apache-2.0, runs on a single A100-40GB / RTX 4090.
Architecture: teacher and student
Teacher — Kimi K2 (frozen, never trained)
| Component | Setting |
|---|---|
| Model | moonshotai/Kimi-K2-Instruct, MoE, ~1.04 T total params |
| Routing | 384 experts, top-8 active per token (~32 B active params) |
| Quantization | W4A16 (INT4 weights, BF16 activations) |
| Engine | vLLM, TP=16, BF16 KV-cache, 4× A100-class GPUs |
| Decoding | greedy (T=0, max_new_tokens=512) — deterministic |
| Cache | ~44 k JSONL records: {prompt, teacher_text, output_entropy, self_consistency, difficulty_score} |
Student — DANTE-Mosaic-3.5B (trained)
| Component | Setting |
|---|---|
| Init | HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM3-3B — GQA + NoPE, RMSNorm, SwiGLU |
| Parameters | ~3.08 B dense (all active per token) |
| Precision | BF16 weights + autocast, gradient checkpointing |
| Optimizer | AdamW (β=0.9/0.95, ε=1e-8, wd=0.1) |
| LR | 2e-5 cosine, 200-step warm-up |
| Steps / batch | 2 000 steps · effective batch ~128 sequences |
| Seq length | 4 096 tokens |
| Compute | 8× A100-class GPUs · ~2 h 37 min → ≈ 21 A100-GPU-hours |
Compression target: ~297× total parameters, ~10× active parameters per token, 5:1 tokenizer mismatch — logit-level KD is impossible by construction.
Pipeline overview
The pipeline decomposes into 6 auditable stages, each with pinned versions and SLURM accounting. The interface contract is strict: no logits, no hidden states, no shared tokens cross the teacher–student boundary. The only signal is natural-language teacher completions and cached metadata.
Training objective — formal statement
The total loss at step t is:
L(θ; t) = λ_CE(t) · L_CWCE(θ) + λ_TEA(t) · L_TEA(θ)
(1) CWCE — Confidence-Weighted Cross-Entropy
L_CWCE(θ) = (1/N) · Σᵢ w(Hᵢ) · CE_masked(θ, xᵢ, yᵢᵀ)
w(H) = 0.30 + 0.70 / [1 + exp(1.5 · (H − 1.5))]
Hᵢ is the cached teacher output entropy. Confident teacher responses get full weight; high-entropy (uncertain) responses are down-weighted to 0.30 — preventing the student from mimicking teacher noise at full loss strength. Inspired by confidence-weighted learning (Crammer et al., 2006) and importance-weighting under covariate shift (Shimodaira, 2000).
(2) TEA — Tied-Embedding Anchor
L_TEA(θ) = ‖ E(θ) − E(θ₀) ‖²_F
λ_TEA(t) = 1.0 → 0.1 linear over 2 000 steps
L2 regulariser on embed_tokens vs. the SmolLM3-3B initialisation snapshot. Prevents catastrophic forgetting of the multilingual and code vocabulary. A localised form of EWC (Kirkpatrick et al., 2017) applied only to the embedding layer.
(3) CE schedule — λ_CE(t)
λ_CE(t) = 0.70 + 0.30 · max(0, t − 200) / 1800
Held at 0.70 during the 200-step warm-up, then ramps to 1.0 by step 2 000. Prevents early loss spikes while the embedding anchor stabilises.
(4) Entropy curriculum
D_sorted = sorted(D, key=λ r: r['output_entropy']) # ascending
Training proceeds through sorted order: easy (low-entropy, near-deterministic teacher) → hard (high-entropy, creative). Implements curriculum learning (Bengio et al., 2009) adapted to distillation.
Why no logit KD?
Kimi K2 uses a tiktoken-style ~163 k vocab; SmolLM3 uses ~32 k BPE. Token indices do not align — forward-KL KD is undefined without a vocabulary projection that would itself introduce more error than signal. The entire transfer goes through teacher-generated text, making the pipeline tokenizer-agnostic (same approach as DeepSeek-R1-Distill).
Reference comparison
Peer cohort — standard 3 B–4 B open-weight basket
The hero banner at the top of this card visualises this table; numbers below are the same. DANTE rows from our canonical lm-evaluation-harness 0.4.5 / bigcode-evaluation-harness runs on the released checkpoint. Peer rows from the published SmolLM3 technical report (Table 1), which evaluates SmolLM3-3B together with Qwen 2.5-3B, Llama 3.2-3B, Qwen3-1.7B-Base and Qwen3-4B-Base under a single harness.
| Benchmark | DANTE-Mosaic 3.08 B | SmolLM3-3B | Qwen 2.5-3B | Llama 3.2-3B | Qwen3-1.7B-B | Qwen3-4B-B |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reasoning & common-sense | ||||||
| HellaSwag | 76.7 | 76.2 | 74.2 | 75.5 | 60.5 | 74.4 |
| ARC-Challenge | 62.7 | 65.6 | 59.8 | 58.6 | 55.9 | 62.1 |
| Knowledge & understanding | ||||||
| MMLU★ | 59.4 | 44.1ᶜᶠ | 42.9ᶜᶠ | 41.3ᶜᶠ | 39.1ᶜᶠ | 47.7ᶜᶠ |
| MMLU-Pro | 39.7 | 32.7 | 31.3 | 25.1 | 30.4 | 41.1 |
| Math & code | ||||||
| GSM8K | 74.5 | 67.6 | 70.1 | 25.9 | 65.9 | 74.1 |
| MBPP⁺ | 42.6 | 52.9 | 52.1 | 38.9 | 59.3 | 63.8 |
| HumanEval⁺ | 6.7 | 30.5 | 34.1 | 25.0 | 43.3 | 54.9 |
Wins for DANTE-Mosaic-3.5B against the 3 B–4 B basket:
| Rank | Benchmark | Note |
|---|---|---|
| #1 | MMLU (5-shot) | +11.7 pp over the next-best (Qwen3-4B-Base 47.7 on MMLU-CF) |
| #1 | MMLU-Pro | +7.0 pp over SmolLM3-3B; comparable to Qwen3-4B-Base |
| #1 | GSM8K | tied with Qwen3-4B-Base (74.5 vs 74.1) at ~25 % fewer params |
| #1 | HellaSwag | ahead of SmolLM3-3B (76.7 vs 76.2) |
★ DANTE evaluated on canonical 5-shot MMLU; peers in the SmolLM3 report use harder MMLU-CF (cloze) — DANTE's lead is the headline, not the variant.
ᶜᶠ MMLU-CF (cloze). ⁺ MBPP+ / HumanEval+ — peers on harder + variants. Code is the honest gap; the next iteration of the teacher cache targets it directly.
Reference comparison vs. published instruct models
Different harnesses, different shot-counts, different prompt formats — listed for orientation only, not as a leaderboard ranking.
| Model | ~Params | MMLU | GSM8K | ARC-C | HumanEval | MBPP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DANTE-Mosaic-3.5B (ours, canonical) | 3.08 B | 59.4 | 74.5 | 62.7 | 6.7 | 42.6 |
| SmolLM3-3B Base (lighteval)¹ | ~3 B | 44.1¹ | 67.4 | — | 30.5¹ | 52.9¹ |
| Gemma 2-2B PT (vendor) | ~2 B | 51.3 | — | — | 17.7 | 29.6³ |
| Phi-3.5-mini (MS internal) | ~3.8 B | 69.0 | 86.5 | — | 62.8 | 69.6³ |
| Granite-4.1-3b (IBM vendor) | ~3 B | 67.0 | — | — | 81.7 | 71.2 |
| Qwen3-4B (vendor) | ~4 B | 79.6 | 91.6 | — | — | — |
¹ SmolLM3 uses harder lighteval variants (MMLU-CF / HumanEval+ / MBPP+) — not directly comparable.
³ 3-shot MBPP.
Vendor numbers use different harnesses; listed for orientation only.
Honest comparison vs. SmolLM3-3B base
- GSM8K: DANTE wins (+7 pp vs. SmolLM3-3B base 67.4 %). Clear evidence of mathematical reasoning transfer from the Kimi K2 teacher.
- MMLU: DANTE 59.4 % (classic 5-shot) vs. SmolLM3-3B MMLU-CF 44.1 % (cloze, harder variant — not directly comparable).
- Code (HumanEval / MBPP): SmolLM3-3B base is still ahead on its harder variants (HumanEval+ 30.5 %, MBPP+ 52.9 %). Code is the clearest gap to close.
- Bottom line: DANTE is 21 A100-hours on top of the SmolLM3-3B base. The right frame is the compute chart above, not a raw leaderboard.
Compute footprint vs. capability
| Training job | Compute (A100-GPU-h equiv.) | vs. DANTE |
|---|---|---|
| DANTE student SFT (measured) | ≈ 21 | 1× |
| DANTE teacher cache generation | ≈ 40 | ~2× |
| SmolLM3-3B mid-training (140 B tok) | ≈ 7 200 | ~340× |
| Phi-3.5-mini pre+post-training | ≈ 4.5 × 10⁵ | ~21 000× |
| SmolLM3-3B pretraining (11.2 T tok) | ≈ 5.75 × 10⁵ | ~27 000× |
| Granite-4.1-3b pretraining | ≈ 9 × 10⁵ | ~43 000× |
DANTE re-uses the SmolLM3-3B pretrained base — the only additional compute is the 21-hour distillation pass. Pretraining estimates: 6 · N · D / TFLOPS, H100 → A100 ≈ 2.5×.
How the distillation was done (6 steps)
- Spin up teacher. Kimi K2 W4A16 via vLLM, TP=16, greedy.
- Generate cache. ~44 k diverse prompts → JSONL shards with
output_entropy,self_consistency,difficulty_score. - Init student. Load SmolLM3-3B BF16, enable gradient checkpointing, wrap in DDP.
- Train. Prompt-masked CE + CWCE weights + TEA anchor + entropy curriculum + λ_CE schedule. AdamW, cosine LR, grad-clip 1.0, seed 42.
- Save. Standard HF
from_pretrained-compatible checkpoint. - No DPO / RLHF / synthetic pipeline — by design, to isolate what the DANTE loss family delivers from a single MoE teacher cache.
Model facts
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Base architecture | HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM3-3B |
| Parameters | ~3.08 B (dense) |
| Precision | BF16 |
| Teacher | moonshotai/Kimi-K2-Instruct (W4A16, vLLM) |
| Distillation | Generative cross-arch / cross-tokenizer, prompt-masked CE + CWCE + TEA |
| Student-side compute | ~21 A100-GPU-hours (8× A100-40GB × ~2 h 37 min) |
| Post-training (DPO/RLHF) | None |
| License | Apache-2.0 |
Quickstart
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
import torch
model_id = "OdaxAI/DANTE-Mosaic-3.5B"
tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_id)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
model_id, torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16, device_map="auto"
)
prompt = "Solve step by step: if a train travels 120 km in 1.5 hours, what is its average speed?"
inputs = tok(prompt, return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)
out = model.generate(
**inputs, max_new_tokens=256,
do_sample=True, temperature=0.7, top_p=0.9,
repetition_penalty=1.1, pad_token_id=tok.eos_token_id,
)
print(tok.decode(out[0, inputs["input_ids"].shape[-1]:], skip_special_tokens=True))
Reproducibility
All evaluation scripts are in the open GitHub repo under evaluation/:
| Script | Covers |
|---|---|
run_lm_eval.sh |
MMLU, MMLU-Pro, GSM8K, ARC-C, HellaSwag |
run_humaneval.sh |
HumanEval pass@1 |
run_mbpp.sh |
MBPP pass@1 |
After a run: python3 evaluation/parse_canonical_results.py
Limitations
- HumanEval is low (6.7 %). Algorithmic code is the clear target for the next cache iteration.
- Not SOTA against mature instruct models on code or knowledge breadth.
- No alignment (no DPO / RLHF). May generate harmful content proportionally to teacher outputs on adversarial prompts.
- No safety red-teaming was performed.
- Benchmarks are English-centric; multilingual capability comes from the ~11 % Italian cache fraction — measure separately for your locale.
Citation
@misc{odaxai2026dante,
title = {DANTE-Mosaic-3.5B: Cross-Architecture Generative Distillation
from a Trillion-Parameter MoE in 21 GPU-Hours},
author = {{OdaxAI Research Team}},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/OdaxAI/DANTE-Mosaic-3.5B}},
}
Acknowledgements
Compute: 8× NVIDIA A100-class GPUs on a public European HPC system.
Open stack: Kimi K2, SmolLM3, HuggingFace Transformers, vLLM, lm-evaluation-harness v0.4.5, bigcode-evaluation-harness.
OdaxAI provides this model "as is" for research. You are responsible for compliance with all applicable licenses when using or citing third-party benchmark numbers.





