K2-Horizon-MoVA-36B-A4B

K2-Horizon-MoVA-36B-A4B is the sparse member of the K2-Horizon family: a Mixture-of-Experts model with Mixture-of-Values attention (MoVA) that stores 36B parameters and runs 4B per token. We have released the final checkpoint; intermediate checkpoints, along with the data and the training code, will be released.

K2-Horizon-MoVA-36B-A4B Highlights

• Frontier-class results at 4B active parameters. On agentic and reasoning benchmarks it outscores open weight dense (approximately 30B model size) and MoE models up to 15× its size; and also performs competitively against closed frontier models (see Benchmark Results).
• 512K context. Native 524,288-token context from the midtraining stages onward.
• Intermediate checkpoints. Intermediate checkpoints will be released so capability changes can be studied across training rather than at a single checkpoint.
• Fully open. Training data/recipe and the training code will be made public.

Benchmark Results

		Open-weight models
	K2-Horizon-MoVA-36B-A4B	Nemotron 3 Ultra	Nemotron 3 Super	G9v3-39A5B	Qwen3.6-35B-A3B	Muse Glimmer-30B	Gemma 4 31B-it
# Params	36B	550B	120B	39B	35B	30B	31B
# Activated params	4B	55B	12B	5B	3B	30B	31B
Architecture	MoE	MoE	MoE	MoE	MoE	Dense	Dense
Agents
tau3-Banking Agentic tool use	26.8	14.2	10.3	22.1	9.3	23.5	14.8
Coding
Terminal-Bench 2.1 Agentic terminal use	58.6	53.9	38.6	32.6	44.9	51.7	43.4
SciCode Scientific coding	38.9	39.9	36.0	34.0	35.8	43.6	43.4
Scientific Reasoning
Humanity's Last Exam (without tools) Expert-level reasoning	25.2	28.4	20.8	17.5	22.2	22.0	23.6
GPQA Diamond Graduate-level science QA	80.8	86.7	80.0	80.5	84.1	83.5	85.7
CritPt Frontier physics reasoning	2.1	3.1	3.1	0.3	0.3	2.6	1.4
General
AA-LCR Long-context reasoning	66.3	71.0	60.3	62.0	66.7	80.0	68.3
AA-Omniscience Accuracy Factual accuracy	18.8	22.6	24.3	14.9	18.8	27.0	20.0
AA-Omniscience Non-Hallucination Non-hallucination rate	69.2	70.3	13.0	87.0	49.5	18.1	15.0

Scores in %. Bold marks the best score in each row. Sections follow the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index categories. Baseline scores are from Artificial Analysis; Muse Glimmer-30B at high reasoning effort, all other open models in their reasoning mode.

Quickstart

Serving

vLLM, recipe at recipes.vllm.ai/IFM:

vllm serve IFM/K2-Horizon-MoVA-36B-A4B \
  --revision main \
  --tensor-parallel-size 2 \
  --enable-expert-parallel \
  --trust-remote-code \
  --dtype bfloat16 \
  --max-model-len 131072 \
  --reasoning-parser k2_horizon \
  --tool-call-parser k2_horizon \
  --enable-auto-tool-choice

SGLang recipe validated on 2× H200 in the SGLang K2 Horizon cookbook:

python3 -m sglang.launch_server \
  --model-path IFM/K2-Horizon-MoVA-36B-A4B \
  --revision main \
  --tp 2 \
  --ep 2 \
  --dtype bfloat16 \
  --attention-backend fa3 \
  --json-model-override-args '{"xllm_source_router_gemm_partitions":2}' \
  --reasoning-parser k2_horizon \
  --tool-call-parser k2_horizon \
  --host 0.0.0.0 --port 30000

API Usage

Recommended settings: reasoning_effort="high", temperature=1.0, top_p=0.95. Reasoning depth is selected per request through chat_template_kwargs. Thinking is returned in reasoning_content and the answer in content.

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(base_url="http://localhost:30000/v1", api_key="EMPTY")
response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="IFM/K2-Horizon-MoVA-36B-A4B",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Explain the result step by step."}],
    temperature=1.0,
    top_p=0.95,
    max_tokens=32768,
    extra_body={"chat_template_kwargs": {"reasoning_effort": "high"}},
)
message = response.choices[0].message
print("Reasoning:", getattr(message, "reasoning_content", None))
print("Answer:", message.content)

Transformers

Validated with Transformers 5.15.0, PyTorch 2.13.0, Safetensors 0.8.0.

from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

model_id = "IFM/K2-Horizon-MoVA-36B-A4B"
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_id, trust_remote_code=True)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    model_id, device_map="auto", dtype="bfloat16", low_cpu_mem_usage=True, trust_remote_code=True
)

inputs = tokenizer("Explain why long-context evaluation is difficult.", return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)
inputs.pop("token_type_ids", None)
outputs = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=32768, temperature=1.0, top_p=0.95, do_sample=True)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0], skip_special_tokens=True))

Best Practices

1. Reasoning effort: always high. All reported results use high reasoning effort. Pass {"chat_template_kwargs": {"reasoning_effort": "high"}} on every request.
2. Sampling parameters. temperature=1.0, top_p=0.95.
3. Serving. Use the validated SGLang recipe above: BF16, TP=2, FlashAttention-3, and the xllm_source_router_gemm_partitions override, which preserves the checkpoint's router numerics. Full recipes for every K2-Horizon size, with measured H200 latency and throughput, are in the SGLang cookbook and the vLLM recipe.
4. Parsers. Enable the k2_horizon reasoning parser for chat, and add the k2_horizon tool-call parser for agent use. Leave both off for plain completion-style generation.

Citation

@misc{k2horizon2026,
  title  = {Introducing K2 Horizon: Frontier Performance, Radically Open},
  author = {{IFM Team}},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://ifm.ai/blog/k2/},
}