Gargi

Gargi is a 384M-parameter English language model trained from scratch by UdgamLabs on about 17 billion tokens: roughly 1,000× less training data than comparable open models such as Qwen2.5-0.5B. It thinks step by step on maths problems, reads up to about 16,000 tokens, and runs comfortably on a laptop or phone-class device.

Data efficiency: on the same evaluation harness, Gargi's base model comes within 2 points of Qwen2.5-0.5B on ARC-Easy, ARC-Challenge and WinoGrande (62.8 vs 64.7, 32.3 vs 32.4, 54.6 vs 56.1), although Qwen2.5-0.5B was trained on ~18 trillion tokens and Gargi on ~17 billion. See Evaluation.

Gargi is named after Gargi Vachaknavi, the Vedic philosopher remembered for asking the hardest questions.

Parameters	384M (Gemma 4-style decoder, sliding-window + global attention)
Training data	≈17B tokens read in total, all openly licensed or public-domain text plus synthetic text from open models
Context	trained at 32K; reliable recall up to ~16K tokens (100% at 8K, 93% at 16K, 90% at 20K)
Modes	thinking on (step-by-step reasoning before the answer) or off
Languages	English
Licence	Apache-2.0
Formats	safetensors (this repo), GGUF (Q8_0, Q4_K_M, f16), MLX (bf16, 4-bit)
Code & examples	github.com/UdgamLabs/gargi

Quick start

Ollama

ollama run hf.co/udgamlabs/Gargi-GGUF:Q8_0

Type /set think to turn on step-by-step thinking (best for maths) and /set nothink to turn it off. Gargi writes thoughts mainly on maths problems.

llama.cpp

llama-cli -hf udgamlabs/Gargi-GGUF:Q8_0 -c 16384

MLX (Apple silicon)

pip install mlx-lm
mlx_lm.generate --model udgamlabs/Gargi-MLX --prompt "A train travels 60 km in 45 minutes. What is its speed in km/h?"

transformers

from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("udgamlabs/Gargi")
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("udgamlabs/Gargi", dtype="auto")
q = "Sara has 3 boxes of 6 pencils and gives away 4. How many are left?"
q += "\n\nSolve it step by step, then give the final answer on the last line as: Final answer: <number>"
inputs = tok.apply_chat_template([{"role": "user", "content": q}], add_generation_prompt=True,
                                 enable_thinking=True, return_tensors="pt", return_dict=True)
out = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=512, do_sample=False)
print(tok.decode(out[0][inputs["input_ids"].shape[1]:], skip_special_tokens=True))

Prompt format

Gargi uses the Gemma 4 chat format (<|turn>user … <turn|>). With thinking on, the system turn contains <|think|> and the model writes its reasoning in a thought channel (<|channel>thought … <channel|>) before the answer. The included chat template handles this; pass enable_thinking=True/False. For maths, ending the question with "Solve it step by step, then give the final answer on the last line as: Final answer: " gives the most reliable answers.

Evaluation

All rows below were measured by us on the same harness and settings (lm-evaluation-harness, 0-shot, GSM8K 5-shot, greedy, with each model's start token), unless marked as published by the model's authors.

Data efficiency: base models

Model	Params	Training tokens*	MMLU	ARC-E	ARC-C	HellaSwag	WinoGrande	PIQA
Gargi-Base	384M	~0.017T	25.5	62.8	32.3	41.5	54.6	66.8
Qwen2.5-0.5B	494M	~18T	47.3	64.7	32.4	52.1	56.1	70.0
SmolLM2-360M	360M	~4T	25.6	70.2	38.3	56.3	59.0	71.5
Granite-4.0-350M (base)	352M	–	32.0	65.4	33.7	52.0	56.0	70.7
Gemma-3-270M (pt)	268M	~6T	26.1	58.8	28.2	41.3	53.4	68.1

*Training-token counts for other models are as published by their authors.

Gargi trades breadth for efficiency: on reasoning-style multiple choice (ARC, WinoGrande) it is close to models trained on hundreds to thousands of times more data, while knowledge-heavy and everyday-commonsense benchmarks (MMLU, HellaSwag, PIQA) still scale with data, and there it is clearly behind.

Chat model

Benchmark	Gargi
GSM8K, thinking on (chat template, 0-shot, greedy)	36.0
GSM8K, thinking off	32.9
GSM8K 5-shot (lm-eval, no chat template)	19.8
MMLU / ARC-E / ARC-C / HellaSwag / WinoGrande / PIQA	24.9 / 62.2 / 31.0 / 42.0 / 55.2 / 66.4

Follow-up questions. On 50 held-out two-turn chats, Gargi repeats its previous reply in 0% of follow-ups with thinking off and 4% with thinking on, and it solves a GSM8K problem asked as the second question of a chat about as well as one asked alone (36.0 vs 34.0 on 200 problems). Its answers to follow-ups are still often factually wrong.

For context, newer small models trained on far more data score higher on maths. Reported elsewhere, with varying settings: Qwen3-0.6B GSM8K 79.2 (thinking, 0-shot pass@1, as reported in the MobileLLM-R1.5 model card); MobileLLM-R1.5-360M GSM8K 52.8 and Granite-4.0-H-350M GSM8K 39.3 (8-shot), published by their authors. Gargi is not a maths specialist.

Long-context recall (needle in a haystack)

A 5-digit code is hidden early in a long document of real text and asked for at the end; 30 trials per length. Each model gets its own start token; lengths beyond a model's declared context are marked n/a.

Model	Params	8K	16K	20K	24K	32K
Gargi	384M	100	93	90	13	0
Qwen3-0.6B	600M	100	100	100	100	100
Hunyuan-0.5B-Instruct	500M	100	100	100	100	100
Falcon-H1-Tiny-R-0.6B	600M	100	97	100	100	97
Granite-4.0-H-350M	350M	100	100	100	100	100
ERNIE-4.5-0.3B	300M	100	100	100	100	100
Gemma-3-270M-it	270M	100	100	100	100	63
LFM2.5-350M	350M	90	0	0	0	0
SmolLM2-360M-Instruct	360M	60	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a

Use Gargi with inputs up to about 16K tokens.

Quantization

GSM8K with thinking, first 200 test problems, greedy, via Ollama:

Build	Size	GSM8K (200)	Same answers as f16
f16	770 MB	39.0	–
Q8_0 (recommended)	410 MB	37.5	96.5%
Q4_K_M	238 MB	32.0	87%

Q8_0 matches f16 closely; Q4_K_M loses a few points (each score is ±3.4 points at this sample size). Use Q8_0 unless memory is tight.

Safety

Gargi has not been safety-tuned beyond a small set of refusal examples. In our tests it may follow harmful requests (for example, it gave steps when asked how to break into a neighbour's house), and it sometimes lists other assistants it is not ("I'm not ChatGPT, Gemini, …") without being asked. Treat it as a research and hobby model: put a moderation layer in front of any user-facing deployment, and do not use it for medical, legal, financial or safety-critical advice.

Intended use and limitations

Good fits: learning and experimentation with small models; offline, on-device chat and step-by-step maths explanations where mistakes are acceptable; reading and answering questions about documents up to ~16K tokens.

Limitations:

• Often wrong on facts, arithmetic and code; double-check anything important.
• Limited world knowledge (MMLU near chance).
• Reliable recall only up to ~16–20K tokens, although it accepts 32K.
• English only.
• Not safety-hardened (see above).

Training

Gargi was pretrained from scratch by UdgamLabs on openly licensed and public-domain text and synthetic text written by open models (≈17B tokens read in total), extended to a 32K-token context window, and then fine-tuned for chat and step-by-step maths reasoning.

Data acknowledgements

Gargi was trained from scratch by UdgamLabs on openly licensed and public-domain text, plus synthetic text written by openly licensed models. We gratefully acknowledge the following sources, used under their licences:

• Web, books, papers and public records: FineWeb / Ultra-FineWeb (ODC-By 1.0 / Apache-2.0); Wikipedia and Wikisource (CC-BY-SA); the Common Pile collections (public-domain books from Project Gutenberg, the Library of Congress and pre-1929 publications; openly licensed arXiv papers, DOAB books and PubMed Central articles under CC-BY / CC-BY-SA / CC0; US Government Publishing Office records; permissively licensed source code).
• UK Parliament: Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0.
• Synthetic and instruction data: PleIAs SYNTH (CC-BY-4.0), FinePhrase (ODC-By), NVIDIA Nemotron datasets (CC-BY-4.0 and the NVIDIA Open Data License), Salesforce xLAM function-calling (CC-BY-4.0), Table-GPT (MIT), and step-by-step solutions and other examples written by OpenAI's gpt-oss models (Apache-2.0).
• Maths problems: GSM8K (MIT) and MATH (MIT) training splits. Their test splits were used only for evaluation.

Licences of individual documents vary within collections; we kept only documents whose licence allows this use.

Licence

Apache-2.0 (weights and tokenizer). The chat template is the Gemma 4 template (Apache-2.0).

Citation

@misc{udgamlabs2026gargi,
  title        = {Gargi: a 384M language model trained from scratch on 17B tokens},
  author       = {{UdgamLabs}},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/udgamlabs/Gargi}}
}