# Kanana: Compute-efficient Bilingual Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.18934 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18934/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 69 of its 86 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 69)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03874/) (2021)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Program Synthesis with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07732/) (2021)
- [Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15556/) (2022)
- [ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16789/) (2023)
- [GLU Variants Improve Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05202/) (2020)
- [Is Your Code Generated by ChatGPT Really Correct? Rigorous Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01210/) (2023)
- [GQA: Training Generalized Multi-Query Transformer Models from Multi-Head Checkpoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13245/) (2023)
- [Instruction-Following Evaluation for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07911/) (2023)
- [ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12832/) (2020)
- [The FineWeb Datasets: Decanting the Web for the Finest Text Data at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17557/) (2024)
- [DeepSeek-V2: A Strong, Economical, and Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04434/) (2024)
- [Scaling Laws for Reward Model Overoptimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10760/) (2022)
- [SimPO: Simple Preference Optimization with a Reference-Free Reward](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14734/) (2024)
- [Bag of Tricks for Efficient Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01759/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [VerifyLLM: LLM-Based Pre-Execution Task Plan Verification for Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05118/) (2025)
- [Pushing on Multilingual Reasoning Models with Language-Mixed Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04230/) (2025)
- [Global PIQA: Evaluating Commonsense Reasoning Across 100+ Languages and Cultures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24081/) (2025)
- [From KMMLU-Redux to KMMLU-Pro: A Professional Korean Benchmark Suite for LLM Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08924/) (2025)
- [Mi:dm 2.0 Korea-centric Bilingual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09066/) (2026)
- [Are they lovers or friends? Evaluating LLMs' Social Reasoning in English and Korean Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19028/) (2025)
- [Korean Canonical Legal Benchmark: Toward Knowledge-Independent Evaluation of LLMs' Legal Reasoning Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24572/) (2025)
- [Redefining Evaluation Standards: A Unified Framework for Evaluating the Korean Capabilities of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22968/) (2025)
- [Everyday Physics in Korean Contexts: A Culturally Grounded Physical Reasoning Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17807/) (2025)
- [KoSimpleQA: A Korean Factuality Benchmark with an Analysis of Reasoning LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18368/) (2025)
- [KorMedMCQA-V: A Multimodal Benchmark for Evaluating Vision-Language Models on the Korean Medical Licensing Examination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13650/) (2026)
- [BankMathBench: A Benchmark for Numerical Reasoning in Banking Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17072/) (2026)
- [Polar: A Benchmark for Evaluating Political Bias in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12922/) (2026)
- [Ko-PIQA: A Korean Physical Commonsense Reasoning Dataset with Cultural Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11303/) (2025)
- [Beyond Line-Level Filtering for the Pretraining Corpora of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24139/) (2025)
- [Soft Inductive Bias Approach via Explicit Reasoning Perspectives in Inappropriate Utterance Detection Using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08480/) (2025)
- [Thunder-KoNUBench: A Corpus-Aligned Benchmark for Korean Negation Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04693/) (2026)
- [Mi:dm K 2.5 Pro](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18788/) (2026)
- [Discovering Lexical Gaps Using Embeddings from Multilingual LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24310/) (2026)
- [Ko-WideSearch: A Korean Breadth-Search Benchmark for Exhaustive Set Enumeration by Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.27595/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce Kanana, a series of bilingual language models that demonstrate exceeding performance in Korean and competitive performance in English. The computational cost of Kanana is significantly lower than that of state-of-the-art models of similar size. The report details the techniques employed during pre-training to achieve compute-efficient yet competitive models, including high quality data filtering, staged pre-training, depth up-scaling, and pruning and distillation. Furthermore, the report outlines the methodologies utilized during the post-training of the Kanana models, encompassing supervised fine-tuning and preference optimization, aimed at enhancing their capability for seamless interaction with users. Lastly, the report elaborates on plausible approaches used for language model adaptation to specific scenarios, such as embedding, retrieval augmented generation, and function calling. The Kanana model series spans from 2.1B to 32.5B parameters with 2.1B models (base, instruct, embedding) publicly released to promote research on Korean language models.