Model Card: "nb-notram-llama-3.1-8b-instruct"
Model overview
"NbAiLab/nb-notram-llama-3.1-8b-instruct" is part of the "NB-Llama-3.x" series (covering "Llama 3.1", "Llama 3.2", and "Llama 3.3" based releases) and the "NoTraM" line of work, trained on top of Meta’s "Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct":
https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-InstructThe model is fine-tuned to improve instruction-following behavior in Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk, while aiming to preserve strong English performance.
This release is an experiment in how far modern open-weight models can be adapted for Norwegian using only publicly available data. Although trained at the National Library of Norway, it does not include material that is only accessible through legal deposit. It may include public documents (for example governmental reports) that are publicly available and also part of legal deposit collections.
Key features
- Base model: "Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct"
- Languages:
- Strong: Norwegian Bokmål ("nb"), Norwegian Nynorsk ("nn"), English ("en")
- Alignment recipe (high level):
- Primarily supervised fine-tuning ("SFT") for instruction-following and chat formatting.
- A very light preference optimization step ("DPO") was applied mainly to stabilize instruction-following; note that the starting point ("Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct") is already preference-tuned by the base model provider.
- Response style: the model tends to produce shorter, more concise answers than many chatty assistants. This reflects the current instruction-tuning recipe and training mix. The behavior can be adjusted with an additional alignment round (for example "GRPO") to encourage more elaborate, conversational responses if desired.
Motivation and research framing
Adapting instruction-tuned models to Norwegian can be approached in two broad ways:
-
Adapt a base model first, then instruction-tune.
This tends to improve core Norwegian language modeling reliably, but producing a strong instruction-tuned assistant usually requires substantial alignment work and high-quality supervised data.
-
Start from an instruction-tuned model, then adapt further.
This leverages general instruction-following behaviors already learned by large multilingual models. In practice, however, it can be difficult to add generalizable Norwegian cultural and historical knowledge at this late stage using only supervised instruction data. We have observed a failure mode where new knowledge becomes brittle and overly prompt-dependent—usable in narrow contexts, but not reliably accessible across phrasing and tasks. Internally we refer to this as "knowledge pocketing".
Within the "NoTraM" project, we explore techniques for adapting instruction-tuned models to Norwegian language, culture, and history while explicitly trying to reduce "knowledge pocketing" and improve generalization. This line of work is intentionally distinct from the "NB-GPT" approach, which primarily targets training from scratch or from base models using established pretraining-first recipes.
For smaller languages, fully closed post-training pipelines are rarely reproducible. Public-data approaches are therefore a pragmatic path to improving Norwegian-capable models—while being explicit about limitations and the remaining gap to highly resourced multilingual instruction-tuned systems.
Model details
- Developer: "National Library of Norway (NB-AiLab)"
- Parameters: "8B"
- Knowledge cutoff: "May 2024" (practical guideline; the model may be incomplete or incorrect on specific facts)
- License: "Llama 3.1 Community License"
Intended use
Suitable for
- Dialogue systems and assistant-style applications in Norwegian ("nb"/"nn") and English ("en")
- Summarization and Q&A in Bokmål or Nynorsk
Out of scope
- Use in violation of applicable laws or regulations
- High-stakes domains (medical/legal/financial) without additional controls, evaluation, and human oversight
- Reliance on the model as a sole source of truth (it can hallucinate)
How to use
This is a research release. For end-user deployments, we recommend careful evaluation in your target setting. Quantized variants (when provided) typically run faster with minimal loss in quality on many platforms. When fine-tuning instruction-tuned Llama models, best results usually require using the correct "Llama 3.1" chat templates.
Using "transformers" (pipeline)
1import torch
2from transformers import pipeline
3
4model_id = "NbAiLab/nb-notram-llama-3.1-8b-instruct"
5
6pipe = pipeline(
7 task="text-generation",
8 model=model_id,
9 torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16,
10 device_map="auto",
11)
12
13messages = [
14 {"role": "user", "content": "Hvem døde på Stiklestad?"},
15]
16
17outputs = pipe(messages, max_new_tokens=256)
18print(outputs[0]["generated_text"][-1])
Training data
Overview
Training is based entirely on publicly available datasets and synthetically generated data.
For more details on the base model’s pretraining data and data selection, see:
https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-InstructPublic datasets (partial use)
Alignment data sources ("SFT" + light preference optimization)
- "Magpie" (English)
https://huggingface.co/Magpie-Align
- "Anthropic Helpful and Harmless" (used lightly)
https://huggingface.co/datasets/Anthropic/hh-rlhf
- Various synthetic and translated datasets derived from the above
Data selection and quality filtering
Only a small subset of raw web-scale data was used. We used the "FineWeb" approach as inspiration for large-scale web data curation and filtering, and applied similar principles when selecting and filtering public data:
https://huggingface.co/spaces/HuggingFaceFW/blogpost-fineweb-v1In addition, we trained "Corpus Quality Classifiers" (educational value + linguistic quality) based on "NbAiLab/nb-bert-base" and release them as part of the broader "NB-Llama" effort:
-
-
What we optimize for:
- Educational value: prioritize content likely to improve reasoning and usefulness.
- Linguistic quality: prioritize well-formed, clear language (important for Norwegian norms and orthography).
EU AI Act transparency note
To support transparency obligations under the EU AI Act, this model card documents:
- Model lineage: the "base_model" is listed in the metadata and linked above.
- Primary training data sources: the main public datasets used (see "Training data" and links).
- Curation methodology: we explicitly state that our data selection and filtering is guided by the "FineWeb" approach and we provide a public reference.
- Filtering tools: we link to the released "Corpus Quality Classifiers" used to score educational value and linguistic quality.
The training data used for this release is restricted to publicly available sources as described above (no legal-deposit-only material).
Limitations and known issues
- The model can produce incorrect statements, fabricated details, or plausible-sounding but wrong explanations.
- Norwegian cultural/historical knowledge may be uneven; some knowledge can appear "pocketed" (prompt-sensitive) depending on topic and phrasing.
- Safety alignment is limited by the scope of the released recipe and data; evaluate carefully for your use case.
Licensing
Refer to the "Acceptable Use Policy" for restrictions:
https://llama.meta.com/llama3.1/use-policy
Citing & authors
Model training and documentation: Per Egil Kummervold.
Funding and acknowledgement
Training was supported by Google’s TPU Research Cloud ("TRC"), which provided Cloud TPUs essential for the computational work.
