# Nanbeige4-3B Technical Report: Exploring the Frontier of Small Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.06266 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06266/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [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)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12022/) (2023)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [MiniCPM: Unveiling the Potential of Small Language Models with Scalable Training Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06395/) (2024)
- [From Crowdsourced Data to High-Quality Benchmarks: Arena-Hard and BenchBuilder Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11939/) (2024)
- [GLM-4.5: Agentic, Reasoning, and Coding (ARC) Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06471/) (2025)
- [MultiChallenge: A Realistic Multi-Turn Conversation Evaluation Benchmark Challenging to Frontier LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17399/) (2025)
- [Nemotron-CC: Transforming Common Crawl into a Refined Long-Horizon Pretraining Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02595/) (2024)
- [Every Activation Boosted: Scaling General Reasoner to 1 Trillion Open Language Foundation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22115/) (2025)
- [ToolMind Technical Report: A Large-Scale, Reasoning-Enhanced Tool-Use Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15718/) (2025)
- [Hunyuan-TurboS: Advancing Large Language Models through Mamba-Transformer Synergy and Adaptive Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15431/) (2025)
- [Unearthing Large Scale Domain-Specific Knowledge from Public Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14624/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Nanbeige4.2-3B: Unlocking Agentic Capabilities in a Compact Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22083/) (2026)
- [Youtu-LLM: Unlocking the Native Agentic Potential for Lightweight Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24618/) (2025)
- [Nanbeige4.1-3B: A Small General Model that Reasons, Aligns, and Acts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13367/) (2026)
- [PACE: Prefix-Protected and Difficulty-Aware Compression for Efficient Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11639/) (2026)
- [Measuring and Mitigating Post-hoc Rationalization in Reverse Chain-of-Thought Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14469/) (2026)
- [Extreme Region Policy Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25582/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present Nanbeige4-3B, a family of small-scale but high-performing language models. Pretrained on 23T high-quality tokens and finetuned on over 30 million diverse instructions, we extend the boundary of the scaling law for small language models. In pre-training, we design a Fine-Grained Warmup-Stable-Decay (FG-WSD) training scheduler, which progressively refines data mixtures across stages to boost model performance. In post-training, to improve the quality of the SFT data, we design a joint mechanism that integrates deliberative generation refinement and chain-of-thought reconstruction, yielding substantial gains on complex tasks. Following SFT, we employ our flagship reasoning model to distill Nanbeige4-3B through our proposed Dual Preference Distillation (DPD) method, which leads to further performance gains. Finally, a multi-stage reinforcement learning phase was applied, leveraging verifiable rewards and preference modeling to strengthen abilities on both reasoning and human alignment. Extensive evaluations show that Nanbeige4-3B not only significantly outperforms models of comparable parameter scale but also rivals much larger models across a wide range of benchmarks. The model checkpoints are available at https://huggingface.co/Nanbeige.