Marco-Mini-Base

Marco-Mini-Base is a compact, highly sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) multilingual language model from the Marco-MoE family, developed by Alibaba International Digital Commerce. It activates only 0.86B out of 17.3B total parameters (5% activation ratio) per token, matching or surpassing dense models with up to 4B parameters on English and multilingual benchmarks across 29 languages — while using 5.5x fewer training FLOPs than Qwen3-4B.

Model Description

Marco-Mini is built on a decoder-only Transformer architecture with sparse MoE layers replacing standard FFN layers. It is upcycled from Qwen3-0.6B-Base using a fine-grained sub-matrix splitting strategy combined with Drop-Upcycling to promote expert diversification.

Configuration	Value
Total Parameters	17.3B
Activated Parameters	0.86B
Activation Ratio	5%
Num Layers	28
Model Dimension	1024
FFN Intermediate Dimension	3072
Q-Heads	16
KV-Heads	8
Head Dimension	128
Expert Dimension	768
Total Experts	256
Activated Experts	8
Tie Embeddings	True
Training FLOPs	$1.56 \times 10^{23}$

Training Details

Marco-Mini was pre-trained on 5.1 trillion tokens using a four-stage curriculum:

1. Stage 1 (0 - 2.4T tokens): Foundational Training — High-quality English data (Nemotron-CC-v2), reasoning and instruction data, and multilingual web/QA data for 19 languages.
2. Stage 2 (2.4T - 4.1T tokens): Optimization & Upsampling — Upsampled reasoning corpora, downsampled English web data, and upsampled Chinese data with learning rate decay.
3. Stage 3 (4.1T - 4.6T tokens): Language Expansion — Added 9 new languages (Bengali, Czech, Urdu, Kazakh, Greek, Romanian, Hungarian, Nepali, Azerbaijani) and upsampled medium-resource languages.
4. Stage 4 (4.6T - 5.1T tokens): Synthetic Data Integration — Curated multilingual synthetic data including cultural content (Fineweb2-Culture) and synthetic regional MCQs.

Supported Languages

English, Chinese, Arabic, German, Spanish, French, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese, Turkish, Indonesian, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Vietnamese, Thai, Hebrew, Ukrainian, Malay, Bengali, Czech, Urdu, Kazakh, Greek, Romanian, Hungarian, Nepali, Azerbaijani

Evaluation

We compare Marco-Mini against strong baselines: Qwen3-4B (4B activated), Trinity Mini (3.85B activated), Gemma3-4B (4B activated), SmolLM3-3B (3B activated), Llama3.2-3B (3B activated), and Tiny-Aya-3.35B (3.35B activated). Marco-Mini uses only 0.86B activated parameters — far fewer than all baselines.

English

Benchmark	# Shots	Llama3.2-3B	SmolLM3-3B	Gemma3-4B	Tiny-Aya-3.35B	Qwen3-4B	Trinity Mini	Marco-Mini
MMLU (Acc)	5-shot	57.6	62.6	61.1	58.6	75.2	71.4	72.8
MMLU-Redux (Acc)	0-shot	56.9	58.4	57.7	51.7	71.3	68.2	68.8
MMLU-Pro (Acc)	5-shot	26.0	35.1	28.8	26.9	45.9	41.3	45.3
AGIEval (Acc)	0-shot	31.2	34.5	32.6	29.0	44.0	39.7	41.9
BBH (EM)	3-shot	47.1	60.0	52.2	46.8	72.3	57.6	65.1
ARC-Easy (Acc)	0-shot	71.8	78.5	82.6	76.5	75.0	80.6	82.4
ARC-Challenge (Acc)	0-shot	46.0	52.6	54.1	47.4	49.9	57.8	56.3
HellaSwag (Acc)	0-shot	75.6	76.1	76.7	71.0	74.4	82.8	77.4
WinoGrande (Acc)	0-shot	58.6	58.9	61.4	56.6	59.6	60.8	57.7
BoolQ (Acc)	0-shot	75.2	79.3	76.6	74.6	74.2	72.5	74.2
CommonsenseQA (Acc)	0-shot	60.4	55.4	61.1	60.4	52.9	57.7	61.5
OpenBookQA (Acc)	0-shot	42.2	40.4	42.6	40.4	42.6	44.8	44.6
PIQA (Acc)	0-shot	78.2	79.1	80.3	76.9	77.4	71.7	81.1
SIQA (Acc)	0-shot	51.0	49.8	50.4	49.9	53.0	52.5	49.4
GSM8K (EM)	5-shot	27.3	67.4	39.3	58.0	81.7	57.5	76.4
Average	-	53.7	59.2	57.2	55.5	63.3	61.1	63.7

Multilingual — General

Benchmark	# Shots	Llama3.2-3B	SmolLM3-3B	Gemma3-4B	Tiny-Aya-3.35B	Qwen3-4B	Trinity Mini	Marco-Mini
GlobalMMLU (Acc)	5-shot	43.2	46.7	50.8	50.0	61.6	52.6	64.2
MMMLU (Acc)	0-shot	44.0	47.3	47.4	44.5	59.3	50.9	62.0
MMLU-ProX-Lite (Acc)	5-shot	22.4	28.3	24.3	24.3	38.5	32.2	39.2
BELEBELE (Acc)	0-shot	60.1	54.3	65.7	65.4	81.5	67.6	79.8
mHellaSwag (Acc_norm)	0-shot	49.0	49.6	55.2	53.5	53.2	51.5	58.6
mARC-Challenge (Acc_norm)	0-shot	34.2	36.1	41.5	37.2	42.5	37.5	45.4
FLORES-200 En→Xx (BLEU)	5-shot	23.5	19.7	32.1	30.2	25.4	13.7	32.3
FLORES-200 Xx→En (BLEU)	5-shot	34.6	30.3	39.7	37.3	36.8	24.1	40.1
WMT24++ En→Xx (BLEU)	5-shot	16.4	17.8	27.7	26.1	23.9	7.5	28.1
WMT24++ Xx→En (BLEU)	5-shot	28.9	27.4	34.0	32.7	32.9	10.6	34.4
MGSM (EM)	8-shot	22.4	50.8	36.6	38.4	76.0	57.2	75.6
Average	-	34.4	37.1	41.4	39.9	48.3	36.9	50.9

Multilingual — Cultural & Regional

Benchmark	# Shots	Llama3.2-3B	SmolLM3-3B	Gemma3-4B	Tiny-Aya-3.35B	Qwen3-4B	Trinity Mini	Marco-Mini
INCLUDE (Acc)	5-shot	45.5	46.2	52.6	53.9	61.4	51.9	61.7
Global-PIQA (Acc_norm)	0-shot	62.2	60.9	69.4	67.9	65.4	57.2	72.3
CMMLU (Acc)	5-shot	44.1	50.1	50.2	58.8	76.2	58.6	68.0
C-Eval (Acc)	5-shot	43.1	47.9	48.5	57.6	76.6	57.1	66.0
ArabicMMLU (Acc)	3-shot	48.9	60.6	61.6	63.2	67.0	57.1	67.1
TurkishMMLU (Acc)	5-shot	36.7	28.4	43.7	45.2	60.6	43.0	62.7
GreekMMLU (Acc)	5-shot	56.4	64.0	63.4	66.3	69.4	59.7	70.3
KazakhMMLU (Acc)	5-shot	44.7	47.4	52.1	47.1	62.3	49.6	62.6
IndoMMLU (Acc)	0-shot	47.0	43.7	48.5	52.0	60.1	51.0	59.9
IndoCareer (Acc)	3-shot	48.6	47.7	53.4	56.6	61.5	55.2	61.5
IndoCulture (Acc)	0-shot	50.1	44.5	59.1	58.5	61.1	57.6	62.3
Average	-	47.9	49.2	54.8	57.0	65.6	54.4	65.0

Usage

from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

model_name = "AIDC-AI/Marco-Mini-Base"
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(model_name, device_map="auto")

input_text = "The capital of France is"
inputs = tokenizer(input_text, return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)
outputs = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=50)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0], skip_special_tokens=True))

Citation

@article{marco-moe,
  title={Marco-MoE: Open Multilingual Mixture-of-Expert Language Models with Efficient Upcycling},
  author={Fan Jiang, Yu Zhao, Chenyang Lyu, Tianqi Shi, Yichao Du, Feihu Jiang, Longyue Wang and Weihua Luo},
  year={2026}
}

License

This model is released under the Apache 2.0 License.