SmolLM2 is a family of compact language models available in three size: 135M, 360M, and 1.7B parameters. They are capable of solving a wide range of tasks while being lightweight enough to run on-device. More details in our paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.02737

SmolLM2 demonstrates significant advances over its predecessor SmolLM1, particularly in instruction following, knowledge, reasoning. The 360M model was trained on 4 trillion tokens using a diverse dataset combination: FineWeb-Edu, DCLM, The Stack, along with new filtered datasets we curated and will release soon. We developed the instruct version through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) using a combination of public datasets and our own curated datasets. We then applied Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) using UltraFeedback.

The instruct model additionally supports tasks such as text rewriting, summarization and function calling (for the 1.7B) thanks to datasets developed by Argilla such as Synth-APIGen-v0.1. You can find the SFT dataset here: https://huggingface.co/datasets/HuggingFaceTB/smol-smoltalk and finetuning code in the alignement handbook

For more details refer to: https://github.com/huggingface/smollm. You will find pre-training, post-training, evaluation and local inference code.

How to use

Transformers

pip install transformers

python

from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
checkpoint = "HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM2-360M-Instruct"

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)

messages = [{"role": "user", "content": "What is the capital of France."}]
input_text=tokenizer.apply_chat_template(messages, tokenize=False)
print(input_text)
inputs = tokenizer.encode(input_text, return_tensors="pt").to(device)
outputs = model.generate(inputs, max_new_tokens=50, temperature=0.2, top_p=0.9, do_sample=True)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0]))

Chat in TRL

You can also use the TRL CLI to chat with the model from the terminal:

bash

pip install trl
trl chat --model_name_or_path HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM2-360M-Instruct --device cpu

Transformers.js

npm i @huggingface/transformers

import { pipeline } from "@huggingface/transformers";

// Create a text generation pipeline
const generator = await pipeline(
  "text-generation",
  "HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM2-135M-Instruct",
);

// Define the list of messages
const messages = [
  { role: "system", content: "You are a helpful assistant." },
  { role: "user", content: "What is the capital of France?" },
];

// Generate a response
const output = await generator(messages, { max_new_tokens: 128 });
console.log(output[0].generated_text.at(-1).content);
// "The capital of France is Paris."

Evaluation

In this section, we report the evaluation results of SmolLM2. All evaluations are zero-shot unless stated otherwise, and we use lighteval to run them.

Base Pre-Trained Model

Metrics	SmolLM2-360M	Qwen2.5-0.5B	SmolLM-360M
HellaSwag	54.5	51.2	51.8
ARC (Average)	53.0	45.4	50.1
PIQA	71.7	69.9	71.6
MMLU (cloze)	35.8	33.7	34.4
CommonsenseQA	38.0	31.6	35.3
TriviaQA	16.9	4.3	9.1
Winogrande	52.5	54.1	52.8
OpenBookQA	37.4	37.4	37.2
GSM8K (5-shot)	3.2	33.4	1.6

Instruction Model

Metric	SmolLM2-360M-Instruct	Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct	SmolLM-360M-Instruct
IFEval (Average prompt/inst)	41.0	31.6	19.8
MT-Bench	3.66	4.16	3.37
HellaSwag	52.1	48.0	47.9
ARC (Average)	43.7	37.3	38.8
PIQA	70.8	67.2	69.4
MMLU (cloze)	32.8	31.7	30.6
BBH (3-shot)	27.3	30.7	24.4
GSM8K (5-shot)	7.43	26.8	1.36

Limitations

SmolLM2 models primarily understand and generate content in English. They can produce text on a variety of topics, but the generated content may not always be factually accurate, logically consistent, or free from biases present in the training data. These models should be used as assistive tools rather than definitive sources of information. Users should always verify important information and critically evaluate any generated content.

Training

Model

Architecture: Transformer decoder
Pretraining tokens: 4T
Precision: bfloat16

Hardware

GPUs: 64 H100

Software

Training Framework: nanotron

License

Apache 2.0

Citation