In plain words: Starting from an already-trained model that reads every word against every other, it freezes the non-attention weights and searches which attention layers to keep, drop, or swap for cheaper ones. The 2-billion-parameter result matches bigger models' accuracy while generating text up to 53.6 times faster.
Abstract · Jet-Nemotron: Efficient Language Model with Post Neural Architecture Search
We present Jet-Nemotron, a new family of hybrid-architecture language models, which matches or exceeds the accuracy of leading full-attention models while significantly improving generation throughput. Jet-Nemotron is developed using Post Neural Architecture Search (PostNAS), a novel neural architecture exploration pipeline that enables efficient model design. Unlike prior approaches, PostNAS begins with a pre-trained full-attention model and freezes its MLP weights, allowing efficient exploration of attention block designs. The pipeline includes four key components: (1) learning optimal full-attention layer placement and elimination, (2) linear attention block selection, (3) designing new attention blocks, and (4) performing hardware-aware hyperparameter search. Our Jet-Nemotron-2B model achieves comparable or superior accuracy to Qwen3, Qwen2.5, Gemma3, and Llama3.2 across a comprehensive suite of benchmarks while delivering up to 53.6x generation throughput speedup and 6.1x prefilling speedup. It also achieves higher accuracy on MMLU and MMLU-Pro than recent advanced MoE full-attention models, such as DeepSeek-V3-Small and Moonlight, despite their larger scale with 15B total and 2.2B activated parameters.
Yuxian Gu, Qinghao Hu, Shang Yang, Haocheng Xi, Junyu Chen, Song Han, Han Cai
arXiv:2508.15884 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Aug 21, 2025 · updated Sep 28, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · NeurIPS 2025