---
library_name: transformers
license: llama3.1
language:
- et
- en
base_model:
  - tartuNLP/Llama-3.1-EstLLM-8B-Instruct-0825
  - meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct
tags:
  - merge
pipeline_tag: text-generation
datasets:
- nvidia/HelpSteer3
- allenai/tulu-3-sft-mixture
- utter-project/EuroBlocks-SFT-Synthetic-1124
---

![image/png](assets/logo-sinine.png)

# Llama 3.1 EstLLM 8B 1125 Instruct


`Llama-3.1-EstLLM-8B-Instruct-1125` is obtained by applying the chat-vector merge approach
to [tartuNLP/Llama-3.1-EstLLM-8B-Instruct-0825](https://huggingface.co/tartuNLP/Llama-3.1-EstLLM-8B-Instruct-0825).

The model underwent continuous pre-training starting from [meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B](https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B) on approximately 35B tokens,
which resulted in [tartuNLP/Llama-3.1-EstLLM-8B-0525](https://huggingface.co/tartuNLP/Llama-3.1-EstLLM-8B-0525),
then supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization were applied.

## Use with transformers

```python
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
import torch

model_name = "tartuNLP/Llama-3.1-EstLLM-8B-Instruct-1125"

model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    model_name,
    dtype="auto",
    device_map="auto"
)

# to use on apple silicon, load the following way
# model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
#     model_name,
#     dtype=torch.float16,
#     device_map="mps",
# )

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name)

messages = [
    {"role": "user", "content": "Kas sa räägid eesti keelt?"}
]

text = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(
    messages,
    tokenize=False,
    add_generation_prompt=True
)

model_inputs = tokenizer(text, return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)

generated_ids = model.generate(
    **model_inputs,
    max_new_tokens=128,
    do_sample=True,
    temperature=0.4,
    # specify eos token to stop at the end of the assistant response
    eos_token_id=tokenizer.eos_token_id,
)

# generated_ids include the input tokens as well, so we only decode new tokens
response = tokenizer.decode(
    generated_ids[0][model_inputs["input_ids"].shape[1]:],
    skip_special_tokens=True,
)

print(response)
```

## Model Details

### Model Description

- **Developed by:** [TartuNLP](https://huggingface.co/tartuNLP) and [TalTechNLP](https://huggingface.co/TalTechNLP) research groups
- **Funded by:** Estonian Ministry of Education and Research, “Estonian Language Technology Program 2018-2027”
- **Model type:** Causal Language Model, Instruction-following
- **Language(s) (NLP):** Estonian, English
- **License:** Llama 3.1 Community License Agreement
- **Finetuned from model:** [tartuNLP/Llama-3.1-EstLLM-8B-0525](https://huggingface.co/tartuNLP/Llama-3.1-EstLLM-8B-0525)

### Continued Pre-Training

Continued Pre-Training was performed for a single epoch on:
- Estonian National Corpus (8.6B tokens)
- Python-Edu (3.3B tokens)
- FineMath4-Plus (9.5B tokens)
- General Instruction-Augmented Corpora (7.4B tokens)
- Cosmopedia v2 (6.9B tokens)
  
### Supervised Fine-Tuning

Approximately 764k examples were used for Supervised Fine-Tuning. The examples mainly come from [the Tulu 3 SFT mixture](https://huggingface.co/datasets/allenai/tulu-3-sft-mixture) and [EuroBlocks](https://huggingface.co/datasets/utter-project/EuroBlocks-SFT-Synthetic-1124).
Additional data provided by the Institute of Estonian Language (EKI) was also used. In total about 80% of examples are in English. More details TBA.

### Direct Preference Optimization


English-only [HelpSteer3](https://huggingface.co/datasets/nvidia/HelpSteer3) was used as is in the Direct Preference Optimization step, as [previous research on Poro 2 models](https://rocm.blogs.amd.com/artificial-intelligence/multilingual-continued-pretraining/README.html)
showed that there's no observable benefit from translating preference pairs.




## Evaluation

## Logits-based

Scores for logits-based evaluation benchmarks are available on the [EuroEval](https://euroeval.com/leaderboards/Monolingual/estonian/) leaderboard.

## Generative

Every benchmark in this category is treated as a *generative* problem, and thus the evaluation is performed on the model responses obtained with 0 temperature (not logits).
The top scores are higlighted with **bold**. Second best scores are highlighted with **_italic bold_**. Rows are sorted in descending order based on the number of parameters of models (not scores).
The arrow up symbol (↑) next to the score indicates an improvement compared to the previous version of the model (`Llama-3.1-EstLLM-8B-Instruct-0825`).
The test set is used for evaluation of each dataset unless noted otherwise.

Note that _all models are evaluated with the same prompt template_ for comparability, meaning that the scores do not necessarily represent each model's best possible
performance. This is especially the case for `deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3-0324` on some of the benchmarks.

Only models of comparable size are evaluated on benchmarks in English.

### Instruction-following

#### Estonian

Instruction level strict accuracy is reported for IFEval-et.

| Model (# parameters ↓) | [IFEval-et](https://huggingface.co/datasets/tartuNLP/ifeval_et)  |
|-------|-----------------------------------|
| moonshotai/Kimi-K2-Instruct | **0.7891** |
| deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.2 | 0.7221 |
| deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3-0324 | 0.7171 |
| mistralai/Mistral-Large-3-675B-Instruct-2512 | 0.7097 |
| meta-llama/Llama-3.1-405B-Instruct | 0.7159 |
| meta-llama/Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct | **_0.7705_** |
| Qwen/Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct | 0.7407 |
| google/gemma-3-27b-it | 0.7655 |
| google/gemma-3-12b-it | 0.7556 |
| utter-project/EuroLLM-9B-Instruct-2512 | 0.5571 |
| utter-project/EuroLLM-9B-Instruct | 0.5397 |
| mistralai/Ministral-3-8B-Instruct-2512 | 0.4888 |
| swiss-ai/Apertus-8B-Instruct-2509| 0.5484 |
| meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct | 0.3797 |
| **tartuNLP/Llama-3.1-EstLLM-8B-Instruct-1125** | 0.6141 ↑ |
| tartuNLP/Llama-3.1-EstLLM-8B-Instruct-0825 | 0.5174 |
| BSC-LT/salamandra-7b-instruct | 0.5195 |
| tartuNLP/Llammas | 0.3524 |
| Qwen/Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct | 0.4988 |
| CohereLabs/tiny-aya-global | 0.6687 |


#### English

Instruction level strict accuracy is reported for IFEval-en.


| Model (# parameters ↓) | [IFEval-en](https://huggingface.co/datasets/tartuNLP/ifeval_en)  |
|-------|-----------------------------------|
| utter-project/EuroLLM-9B-Instruct-2512 | 0.7564 |
| utter-project/EuroLLM-9B-Instruct | 0.7004 |
| mistralai/Ministral-3-8B-Instruct-2512 | 0.6845 |
| swiss-ai/Apertus-8B-Instruct-2509 | 0.7808 |
| meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct | _**0.8106**_ |
| **tartuNLP/Llama-3.1-EstLLM-8B-Instruct-1125** | **0.8173 ↑** |
| tartuNLP/Llama-3.1-EstLLM-8B-Instruct-0825 | 0.7527 |
| tartuNLP/Llammas | 0.4373 |
| BSC-LT/salamandra-7b-instruct | 0.3289 |
| Qwen/Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct | 0.7954 |

### Multiple Choice

All datasets except Winogrande-et are evaluated in 0-shot mode. Winogrande-et is evaluated in 3-shot mode. Exact match accuracy is reported for every dataset.

#### Estonian Language Competence

| Model (# parameters ↓) | [Grammar-et](https://huggingface.co/datasets/TalTechNLP/grammar_et)| [Inflection-et](https://huggingface.co/datasets/TalTechNLP/inflection_et)| [Word-Meanings-et](https://huggingface.co/datasets/TalTechNLP/word_meanings_et) |
|-------|------|------|--------|
| moonshotai/Kimi-K2-Instruct  | **0.916** | 0.6458 | **0.9689** |
| deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.2 | 0.781 | 0.6891 | 0.8134 |
| deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3-0324  | 0.364 | 0 | 0 |
| mistralai/Mistral-Large-3-675B-Instruct-2512 | 0.796 | _**0.8355**_ | 0.9488 |
| meta-llama/Llama-3.1-405B-Instruct | 0.818 | **0.9089** | 0.9438 |
| meta-llama/Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct  | 0.797 | 0.6421 | 0.9408 |
| Qwen/Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct  | 0.694 | 0.5208 | 0.9057 |
| google/gemma-3-27b-it | 0.817 | 0.5934 | 0.9529 |
| google/gemma-3-12b-it | 0.789 | 0.4227 | 0.9318 |
| utter-project/EuroLLM-9B-Instruct-2512 | 0.644 | 0.4466 | 0.9288 |
| utter-project/EuroLLM-9B-Instruct | 0.764 | 0.367 | 0.9258 |
| mistralai/Ministral-3-8B-Instruct-2512 | 0.562 | 0.4833 | 0.8395 |
| swiss-ai/Apertus-8B-Instruct-2509 | 0.512 | 0.3662 | 0.9027 |
| meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct | 0.657 | 0.4165 | 0.8335 |
| **tartuNLP/Llama-3.1-EstLLM-8B-Instruct-1125** | _**0.8310 ↑**_ | 0.5777 ↑ | _**0.9619 ↑**_ |
| tartuNLP/Llama-3.1-EstLLM-8B-Instruct-0825  | 0.692 | 0.5188 | 0.9569 |
| BSC-LT/salamandra-7b-instruct  | 0.594 | 0.2668 | 0.8084 |
| Qwen/Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct | 0.598 | 0.4136 | 0.7984 |
| tartuNLP/Llammas | 0.529 | 0.2289 | 0.5326 |
| CohereLabs/tiny-aya-global | 0.563 | 0.3221 | 0.8455 |

#### Knowledge and Reasoning (Estonian)


| Model (# parameters ↓) | [Winogrande-et](https://huggingface.co/datasets/tartuNLP/winogrande_et) | [Trivia-et](https://huggingface.co/datasets/TalTechNLP/trivia_et) | [Exam-et](https://huggingface.co/datasets/TalTechNLP/exam_et) | [GlobalPIQA-et](https://huggingface.co/datasets/mrlbenchmarks/global-piqa-nonparallel/viewer/ekk_latn)|  [TruthfulQA-et](https://huggingface.co/datasets/LumiOpen/opengpt-x_truthfulqax/viewer/mc_ET) |
|-------|-----------------------------------|---------------------------------------------|---------------------------------------------|---------------------------------------------|-------------------------------------------|
| moonshotai/Kimi-K2-Instruct  | **0.8138** | 0.4225 | **0.8414** | **0.79** | **0.7136** |
| deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.2 | 0.4805 | 0.38 | 0.614 | 0.7 | 0.5863 |
| deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3-0324  | **_0.8042_** | 0.27 | 0.1221 | 0.04 | 0.2093 |
| mistralai/Mistral-Large-3-675B-Instruct-2512 | 0.7487 | 0.4275 | 0.7931 | _**0.73**_ | 0.6854 |
| meta-llama/Llama-3.1-405B-Instruct |0.7878  | **0.4713** | _**0.8309**_ | 0.58 | _**0.7001**_ |
| meta-llama/Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct  |0.7397  | 0.3875 | 0.7652 | 0.58 | 0.6255 |
| Qwen/Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct  | 0.7227 | 0.315 | 0.7162 | 0.65 | 0.6683 |
| google/gemma-3-27b-it | 0.7510 | 0.325 | 0.7751 | 0.71 | 0.5814 |
| google/gemma-3-12b-it | 0.6712 | 0.3237 | 0.7069 | 0.54 | 0.3158 |
| utter-project/EuroLLM-9B-Instruct-2512 | 0.5195 | 0.375 | 0.6097 | 0.52 | 0.399 |
| utter-project/EuroLLM-9B-Instruct | 0.5846 | 0.3738 | 0.5589 | 0.55 | 0.2889 |
| mistralai/Ministral-3-8B-Instruct-2512 | 0.5812 | 0.3125 | 0.5012 | 0.48 | 0.3525 |
| swiss-ai/Apertus-8B-Instruct-2509 | 0.5105 | 0.345 | 0.552 | 0.59 | 0.366 |
| meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct | 0.5399 | 0.2888 | 0.5 | 0.54 | 0.437 |
| **tartuNLP/Llama-3.1-EstLLM-8B-Instruct-1125**  | 0.6440 ↑ | _**0.4288 ↑**_ | 0.6332 ↑ | 0.68 ↑ | 0.3794 ↑ |
| tartuNLP/Llama-3.1-EstLLM-8B-Instruct-0825  | 0.5812 | 0.425 | 0.5093 | 0.63 | 0.3525 |
| BSC-LT/salamandra-7b-instruct  | 0.2878 | 0.2875 | 0.3556 | 0.55 | 0.3011 |
| Qwen/Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct | 0.5473 | 0.2938 | 0.4913 | 0.57 | 0.4113 |
| tartuNLP/Llammas | 0.5037 | 0.2838 | 0.3649 | 0.01 | 0.2032 |
| CohereLabs/tiny-aya-global | 0.5603 | 0.31 | 0.5638 | 0.52 | 0.3782 |

#### Knowledge and Reasoning (English)


| Model (# parameters ↓) | [Winogrande](https://huggingface.co/datasets/allenai/winogrande)  | [GlobalPIQA-en](https://huggingface.co/datasets/mrlbenchmarks/global-piqa-nonparallel/viewer/eng_latn) | [TruthfulQA](https://huggingface.co/datasets/truthfulqa/truthful_qa) | [MMLU-Redux](https://huggingface.co/datasets/edinburgh-dawg/mmlu-redux-2.0) | [GSM8K](https://huggingface.co/datasets/openai/gsm8k) |
|-------|-----------------------------------|-----------------------------------|-----------------------------------|-----------------------------------|-----------------------------------|
| utter-project/EuroLLM-9B-Instruct-2512 | 0.5546 | 0.58 |0.4614 | 0.6334 | 0.4139 |
| utter-project/EuroLLM-9B-Instruct | 0.5059 | 0.58 | 0.2962 | 0.5741 | 0.5944 |
| mistralai/Ministral-3-8B-Instruct-2512 | _**0.6503**_ | _**0.77**_ | 0.519 | _**0.7418**_ | 0.3927 |
| swiss-ai/Apertus-8B-Instruct-2509 | 0.5133 | 0.73 | 0.3831 | 0.6099 | 0.5936 |
| meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct | 0.5625 | 0.76 | _**0.5239**_ | 0.6959 | 0.7710 |
| **tartuNLP/Llama-3.1-EstLLM-8B-Instruct-1125** | 0.6118 ↑ | 0.76 ↑ | 0.3635 | 0.6606 ↑ | _**0.7726 ↑**_ |
| tartuNLP/Llama-3.1-EstLLM-8B-Instruct-0825 | 0.6084 | 0.71 | 0.366 | 0.6388 | 0.7202 |
| tartuNLP/Llammas | 0.498 | 0 | 0.1971 | 0.3417 | 0.1456 |
| BSC-LT/salamandra-7b-instruct | 0.4029 | 0.63 | 0.2717 | 0.5180 | 0.0076 |
| Qwen/Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct | **0.6627** | **0.83** | **0.5875** | **0.7555** | **0.7862** |


### Translation

#### English to Estonian

| Model | [wmt24pp](https://huggingface.co/datasets/google/wmt24pp) (BLEU ↑) |
|-------|---------|
| BSC-LT/salamandraTA-7b-instruct | 0.2713 |
| **tartuNLP/Llama-3.1-EstLLM-8B-Instruct-1125** | 0.2635 |
| tartuNLP/Llama-3.1-EstLLM-8B-Instruct-0825 | 0.264 |
| utter-project/EuroLLM-9B-Instruct | 0.2602 |
| utter-project/EuroLLM-9B-Instruct-2512 | 0.2567 |
| swiss-ai/Apertus-8B-Instruct-2509 | 0.2372 |
| tartuNLP/Llammas | 0.1472 |
| meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct | 0.1406 |
| BSC-LT/salamandra-7b-instruct | 0.1201 |
| Qwen/Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct | 0.0476 |


## Limitations

This is an early prototype version. Accordingly, it has limitations *in addition* to the base Llama limitations:

- Relatively short context of 4096 tokens. It's not expected to perform well on context sizes beyond that. Merging somewhat mitigates that.
- Multi-turn conversations are not guaranteed to be supported, although this capability is improved by merging.
- Trained with the original Llama 3.1 system prompt that has a hard-coded date cut-off.
- There may be unexpected side effects as a result of merging.


## Citation

```
@misc{dorkin2026estllmenhancingestoniancapabilities,
      title={{EstLLM: Enhancing Estonian Capabilities in Multilingual LLMs via Continued Pretraining and Post-Training}}, 
      author={Aleksei Dorkin and Taido Purason and Emil Kalbaliyev and Hele-Andra Kuulmets and Marii Ojastu and Mark Fišel and Tanel Alumäe and Eleri Aedmaa and Krister Kruusmaa and Kairit Sirts},
      year={2026},
      eprint={2603.02041},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02041}, 
}
```