Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Nano-8B-v1 GGUF Models

Choosing the Right Model Format

Selecting the correct model format depends on your hardware capabilities and memory constraints.

BF16 (Brain Float 16) – Use if BF16 acceleration is available

A 16-bit floating-point format designed for faster computation while retaining good precision.
Provides similar dynamic range as FP32 but with lower memory usage.
Recommended if your hardware supports BF16 acceleration (check your device’s specs).
Ideal for high-performance inference with reduced memory footprint compared to FP32.

📌 Use BF16 if:
✔ Your hardware has native BF16 support (e.g., newer GPUs, TPUs).
✔ You want higher precision while saving memory.
✔ You plan to requantize the model into another format.

📌 Avoid BF16 if:
❌ Your hardware does not support BF16 (it may fall back to FP32 and run slower).
❌ You need compatibility with older devices that lack BF16 optimization.

F16 (Float 16) – More widely supported than BF16

A 16-bit floating-point high precision but with less of range of values than BF16.
Works on most devices with FP16 acceleration support (including many GPUs and some CPUs).
Slightly lower numerical precision than BF16 but generally sufficient for inference.

📌 Use F16 if:
✔ Your hardware supports FP16 but not BF16.
✔ You need a balance between speed, memory usage, and accuracy.
✔ You are running on a GPU or another device optimized for FP16 computations.

📌 Avoid F16 if:
❌ Your device lacks native FP16 support (it may run slower than expected).
❌ You have memory limitations.

Quantized Models (Q4_K, Q6_K, Q8, etc.) – For CPU & Low-VRAM Inference

Quantization reduces model size and memory usage while maintaining as much accuracy as possible.

Lower-bit models (Q4_K) → Best for minimal memory usage, may have lower precision.
Higher-bit models (Q6_K, Q8_0) → Better accuracy, requires more memory.

📌 Use Quantized Models if:
✔ You are running inference on a CPU and need an optimized model.
✔ Your device has low VRAM and cannot load full-precision models.
✔ You want to reduce memory footprint while keeping reasonable accuracy.

📌 Avoid Quantized Models if:
❌ You need maximum accuracy (full-precision models are better for this).
❌ Your hardware has enough VRAM for higher-precision formats (BF16/F16).

Very Low-Bit Quantization (IQ3_XS, IQ3_S, IQ3_M, Q4_K, Q4_0)

These models are optimized for extreme memory efficiency, making them ideal for low-power devices or large-scale deployments where memory is a critical constraint.

IQ3_XS: Ultra-low-bit quantization (3-bit) with extreme memory efficiency.
- Use case: Best for ultra-low-memory devices where even Q4_K is too large.
- Trade-off: Lower accuracy compared to higher-bit quantizations.
IQ3_S: Small block size for maximum memory efficiency.
- Use case: Best for low-memory devices where IQ3_XS is too aggressive.
IQ3_M: Medium block size for better accuracy than IQ3_S.
- Use case: Suitable for low-memory devices where IQ3_S is too limiting.
Q4_K: 4-bit quantization with block-wise optimization for better accuracy.
- Use case: Best for low-memory devices where Q6_K is too large.
Q4_0: Pure 4-bit quantization, optimized for ARM devices.
- Use case: Best for ARM-based devices or low-memory environments.

Summary Table: Model Format Selection

Model Format	Precision	Memory Usage	Device Requirements	Best Use Case
BF16	Highest	High	BF16-supported GPU/CPUs	High-speed inference with reduced memory
F16	High	High	FP16-supported devices	GPU inference when BF16 isn’t available
Q4_K	Medium Low	Low	CPU or Low-VRAM devices	Best for memory-constrained environments
Q6_K	Medium	Moderate	CPU with more memory	Better accuracy while still being quantized
Q8_0	High	Moderate	CPU or GPU with enough VRAM	Best accuracy among quantized models
IQ3_XS	Very Low	Very Low	Ultra-low-memory devices	Extreme memory efficiency and low accuracy
Q4_0	Low	Low	ARM or low-memory devices	llama.cpp can optimize for ARM devices

Included Files & Details

`Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Nano-8B-v1-bf16.gguf`

Model weights preserved in BF16.
Use this if you want to requantize the model into a different format.
Best if your device supports BF16 acceleration.

`Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Nano-8B-v1-f16.gguf`

Model weights stored in F16.
Use if your device supports FP16, especially if BF16 is not available.

`Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Nano-8B-v1-bf16-q8_0.gguf`

Output & embeddings remain in BF16.
All other layers quantized to Q8_0.
Use if your device supports BF16 and you want a quantized version.

`Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Nano-8B-v1-f16-q8_0.gguf`

Output & embeddings remain in F16.
All other layers quantized to Q8_0.

`Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Nano-8B-v1-q4_k.gguf`

Output & embeddings quantized to Q8_0.
All other layers quantized to Q4_K.
Good for CPU inference with limited memory.

`Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Nano-8B-v1-q4_k_s.gguf`

Smallest Q4_K variant, using less memory at the cost of accuracy.
Best for very low-memory setups.

`Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Nano-8B-v1-q6_k.gguf`

Output & embeddings quantized to Q8_0.
All other layers quantized to Q6_K .

`Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Nano-8B-v1-q8_0.gguf`

Fully Q8 quantized model for better accuracy.
Requires more memory but offers higher precision.

`Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Nano-8B-v1-iq3_xs.gguf`

IQ3_XS quantization, optimized for extreme memory efficiency.
Best for ultra-low-memory devices.

`Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Nano-8B-v1-iq3_m.gguf`

IQ3_M quantization, offering a medium block size for better accuracy.
Suitable for low-memory devices.

`Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Nano-8B-v1-q4_0.gguf`

Pure Q4_0 quantization, optimized for ARM devices.
Best for low-memory environments.
Prefer IQ4_NL for better accuracy.

🚀 If you find these models useful

Please click like ❤ . Also I’d really appreciate it if you could test my Network Monitor Assistant at 👉 Network Monitor Assitant.

💬 Click the chat icon (bottom right of the main and dashboard pages) . Choose a LLM; toggle between the LLM Types TurboLLM -> FreeLLM -> TestLLM.

What I'm Testing

I'm experimenting with function calling against my network monitoring service. Using small open source models. I am into the question "How small can it go and still function".

🟡 TestLLM – Runs the current testing model using llama.cpp on 6 threads of a Cpu VM (Should take about 15s to load. Inference speed is quite slow and it only processes one user prompt at a time—still working on scaling!). If you're curious, I'd be happy to share how it works! .

The other Available AI Assistants

🟢 TurboLLM – Uses gpt-4o-mini Fast! . Note: tokens are limited since OpenAI models are pricey, but you can Login or Download the Free Network Monitor agent to get more tokens, Alternatively use the TestLLM .

🔵 HugLLM – Runs open-source Hugging Face models Fast, Runs small models (≈8B) hence lower quality, Get 2x more tokens (subject to Hugging Face API availability)

Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Nano-8B-v1

Model Overview

Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Nano-8B-v1 is a large language model (LLM) which is a derivative of Meta Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct (AKA the reference model). It is a reasoning model that is post trained for reasoning, human chat preferences, and tasks, such as RAG and tool calling.

Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Nano-8B-v1 is a model which offers a great tradeoff between model accuracy and efficiency. It is created from Llama 3.1 8B Instruct and offers improvements in model accuracy. The model fits on a single RTX GPU and can be used locally. The model supports a context length of 128K.

This model underwent a multi-phase post-training process to enhance both its reasoning and non-reasoning capabilities. This includes a supervised fine-tuning stage for Math, Code, Reasoning, and Tool Calling as well as multiple reinforcement learning (RL) stages using REINFORCE (RLOO) and Online Reward-aware Preference Optimization (RPO) algorithms for both chat and instruction-following. The final model checkpoint is obtained after merging the final SFT and Online RPO checkpoints. Improved using Qwen.

This model is part of the Llama Nemotron Collection. You can find the other model(s) in this family here: Llama-3.3-Nemotron-Super-49B-v1

This model is ready for commercial use.

License/Terms of Use

GOVERNING TERMS: Your use of this model is governed by the NVIDIA Open Model License. Additional Information: Llama 3.1 Community License Agreement. Built with Llama.

Model Developer: NVIDIA

Model Dates: Trained between August 2024 and March 2025

Data Freshness: The pretraining data has a cutoff of 2023 per Meta Llama 3.1 8B

Use Case:

Developers designing AI Agent systems, chatbots, RAG systems, and other AI-powered applications. Also suitable for typical instruction-following tasks. Balance of model accuracy and compute efficiency (the model fits on a single RTX GPU and can be used locally).

Release Date:

3/18/2025

References

[2502.00203] Reward-aware Preference Optimization: A Unified Mathematical Framework for Model Alignment

Model Architecture

Architecture Type: Dense decoder-only Transformer model

Network Architecture: Llama 3.1 8B Instruct

Intended use

Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Nano-8B-v1 is a general purpose reasoning and chat model intended to be used in English and coding languages. Other non-English languages (German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Hindi, Spanish, and Thai) are also supported.

Input:

Input Type: Text
Input Format: String
Input Parameters: One-Dimensional (1D)
Other Properties Related to Input: Context length up to 131,072 tokens

Output:

Output Type: Text
Output Format: String
Output Parameters: One-Dimensional (1D)
Other Properties Related to Output: Context length up to 131,072 tokens

Model Version:

1.0 (3/18/2025)

Software Integration

Runtime Engine: NeMo 24.12
Recommended Hardware Microarchitecture Compatibility:
- NVIDIA Hopper
- NVIDIA Ampere

Quick Start and Usage Recommendations:

Reasoning mode (ON/OFF) is controlled via the system prompt, which must be set as shown in the example below. All instructions should be contained within the user prompt
We recommend setting temperature to 0.6, and Top P to 0.95 for Reasoning ON mode
We recommend using greedy decoding for Reasoning OFF mode
We have provided a list of prompts to use for evaluation for each benchmark where a specific template is required

You can try this model out through the preview API, using this link: Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Nano-8B-v1.

See the snippet below for usage with Hugging Face Transformers library. Reasoning mode (ON/OFF) is controlled via system prompt. Please see the example below. Our code requires the transformers package version to be 4.44.2 or higher.

Example of “Reasoning On:”

import torch
import transformers

model_id = "nvidia/Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Nano-8B-v1"
model_kwargs = {"torch_dtype": torch.bfloat16, "device_map": "auto"}
tokenizer = transformers.AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_id)
tokenizer.pad_token_id = tokenizer.eos_token_id

pipeline = transformers.pipeline(
   "text-generation",
   model=model_id,
   tokenizer=tokenizer,
   max_new_tokens=32768,
   temperature=0.6,
   top_p=0.95,
   **model_kwargs
)

# Thinking can be "on" or "off"
thinking = "on"

print(pipeline([{"role": "system", "content": f"detailed thinking {thinking}"}, {"role": "user", "content": "Solve x*(sin(x)+2)=0"}]))

Example of “Reasoning Off:”

import torch
import transformers

model_id = "nvidia/Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Nano-8B-v1"
model_kwargs = {"torch_dtype": torch.bfloat16, "device_map": "auto"}
tokenizer = transformers.AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_id)
tokenizer.pad_token_id = tokenizer.eos_token_id

pipeline = transformers.pipeline(
   "text-generation",
   model=model_id,
   tokenizer=tokenizer,
   max_new_tokens=32768,
   do_sample=False,
   **model_kwargs
)

# Thinking can be "on" or "off"
thinking = "off"

print(pipeline([{"role": "system", "content": f"detailed thinking {thinking}"}, {"role": "user", "content": "Solve x*(sin(x)+2)=0"}]))

For some prompts, even though thinking is disabled, the model emergently prefers to think before responding. But if desired, the users can prevent it by pre-filling the assistant response.

import torch
import transformers

model_id = "nvidia/Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Nano-8B-v1"
model_kwargs = {"torch_dtype": torch.bfloat16, "device_map": "auto"}
tokenizer = transformers.AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_id)
tokenizer.pad_token_id = tokenizer.eos_token_id

# Thinking can be "on" or "off"
thinking = "off"

pipeline = transformers.pipeline(
   "text-generation",
   model=model_id,
   tokenizer=tokenizer,
   max_new_tokens=32768,
   do_sample=False,
   **model_kwargs
)

print(pipeline([{"role": "system", "content": f"detailed thinking {thinking}"}, {"role": "user", "content": "Solve x*(sin(x)+2)=0"}, {"role":"assistant", "content":"<think>\n</think>"}]))

Inference:

Engine: Transformers Test Hardware:

BF16:
- 1x RTX 50 Series GPUs
- 1x RTX 40 Series GPUs
- 1x RTX 30 Series GPUs
- 1x H100-80GB GPU
- 1x A100-80GB GPU

Preferred/Supported] Operating System(s): Linux

Training Datasets

A large variety of training data was used for the post-training pipeline, including manually annotated data and synthetic data.

The data for the multi-stage post-training phases for improvements in Code, Math, and Reasoning is a compilation of SFT and RL data that supports improvements of math, code, general reasoning, and instruction following capabilities of the original Llama instruct model.

Prompts have been sourced from either public and open corpus or synthetically generated. Responses were synthetically generated by a variety of models, with some prompts containing responses for both Reasoning On and Off modes, to train the model to distinguish between two modes.

Data Collection for Training Datasets:

Hybrid: Automated, Human, Synthetic

Data Labeling for Training Datasets:

Evaluation Datasets

We used the datasets listed below to evaluate Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Nano-8B-v1.

Data Collection for Evaluation Datasets: Hybrid: Human/Synthetic

Data Labeling for Evaluation Datasets: Hybrid: Human/Synthetic/Automatic

Evaluation Results

These results contain both “Reasoning On”, and “Reasoning Off”. We recommend using temperature=0.6, top_p=0.95 for “Reasoning On” mode, and greedy decoding for “Reasoning Off” mode. All evaluations are done with 32k sequence length. We run the benchmarks up to 16 times and average the scores to be more accurate.

NOTE: Where applicable, a Prompt Template will be provided. While completing benchmarks, please ensure that you are parsing for the correct output format as per the provided prompt in order to reproduce the benchmarks seen below.

MT-Bench

Reasoning Mode	Score
Reasoning Off	7.9
Reasoning On	8.1

MATH500

Reasoning Mode	pass@1
Reasoning Off	36.6%
Reasoning On	95.4%

User Prompt Template:

"Below is a math question. I want you to reason through the steps and then give a final answer. Your final answer should be in \boxed{}.\nQuestion: {question}"

AIME25

Reasoning Mode	pass@1
Reasoning Off	0%
Reasoning On	47.1%

User Prompt Template:

"Below is a math question. I want you to reason through the steps and then give a final answer. Your final answer should be in \boxed{}.\nQuestion: {question}"

GPQA-D

Reasoning Mode	pass@1
Reasoning Off	39.4%
Reasoning On	54.1%

User Prompt Template:

"What is the correct answer to this question: {question}\nChoices:\nA. {option_A}\nB. {option_B}\nC. {option_C}\nD. {option_D}\nLet's think step by step, and put the final answer (should be a single letter A, B, C, or D) into a \boxed{}"

IFEval Average

Reasoning Mode	Strict:Prompt	Strict:Instruction
Reasoning Off	74.7%	82.1%
Reasoning On	71.9%	79.3%

BFCL v2 Live

Reasoning Mode	Score
Reasoning Off	63.9%
Reasoning On	63.6%

User Prompt Template:

<AVAILABLE_TOOLS>{functions}</AVAILABLE_TOOLS>

{user_prompt}

MBPP 0-shot

Reasoning Mode	pass@1
Reasoning Off	66.1%
Reasoning On	84.6%

User Prompt Template:

You are an exceptionally intelligent coding assistant that consistently delivers accurate and reliable responses to user instructions.

@@ Instruction
Here is the given problem and test examples:
{prompt}
Please use the python programming language to solve this problem.
Please make sure that your code includes the functions from the test samples and that the input and output formats of these functions match the test samples.
Please return all completed codes in one code block.
This code block should be in the following format:
```python
# Your codes here
```

Ethical Considerations:

NVIDIA believes Trustworthy AI is a shared responsibility and we have established policies and practices to enable development for a wide array of AI applications. When downloaded or used in accordance with our terms of service, developers should work with their internal model team to ensure this model meets requirements for the relevant industry and use case and addresses unforeseen product misuse.

For more detailed information on ethical considerations for this model, please see the Model Card++ Explainability, Bias, Safety & Security, and Privacy Subcards.

Please report security vulnerabilities or NVIDIA AI Concerns here.

Downloads last month: 2,008

GGUF

Model size

8.03B params

Architecture

llama

1-bit

2-bit

3-bit

4-bit

5-bit

6-bit

8-bit

16-bit

View +3 variants

Inference Providers NEW

Text Generation

This model isn't deployed by any Inference Provider. 🙋 Ask for provider support