Nemotron-Cascade 2: Post-Training LLMs with Cascade RL and Multi-Domain On-Policy Distillation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yang, Zhuolin, Liu, Zihan, Chen, Yang, Dai, Wenliang, Wang, Boxin, Lin, Sheng-Chieh, Lee, Chankyu, Chen, Yangyi, Jiang, Dongfu, He, Jiafan, Pi, Renjie, Lam, Grace, Lee, Nayeon, Bukharin, Alexander, Shoeybi, Mohammad, Catanzaro, Bryan, Ping, Wei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Yang, Zhuolin
Liu, Zihan
Chen, Yang
Dai, Wenliang
Wang, Boxin
Lin, Sheng-Chieh
Lee, Chankyu
Chen, Yangyi
Jiang, Dongfu
He, Jiafan
Pi, Renjie
Lam, Grace
Lee, Nayeon
Bukharin, Alexander
Shoeybi, Mohammad
Catanzaro, Bryan
Ping, Wei
author_facet Yang, Zhuolin
Liu, Zihan
Chen, Yang
Dai, Wenliang
Wang, Boxin
Lin, Sheng-Chieh
Lee, Chankyu
Chen, Yangyi
Jiang, Dongfu
He, Jiafan
Pi, Renjie
Lam, Grace
Lee, Nayeon
Bukharin, Alexander
Shoeybi, Mohammad
Catanzaro, Bryan
Ping, Wei
contents We introduce Nemotron-Cascade 2, an open 30B MoE model with 3B activated parameters that delivers best-in-class reasoning and strong agentic capabilities. Despite its compact size, its mathematical and coding reasoning performance approaches that of frontier open models. It is the second open-weight LLM, after DeepSeekV3.2-Speciale-671B-A37B, to achieve Gold Medal-level performance in the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), and the ICPC World Finals, demonstrating remarkably high intelligence density with 20x fewer parameters. In contrast to Nemotron-Cascade 1, the key technical advancements are as follows. After SFT on a meticulously curated dataset, we substantially expand Cascade RL to cover a much broader spectrum of reasoning and agentic domains. Furthermore, we introduce multi-domain on-policy distillation from the strongest intermediate teacher models for each domain throughout the Cascade RL process, allowing us to efficiently recover benchmark regressions and sustain strong performance gains along the way. We release the collection of model checkpoint and training data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_19220
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Nemotron-Cascade 2: Post-Training LLMs with Cascade RL and Multi-Domain On-Policy Distillation
Yang, Zhuolin
Liu, Zihan
Chen, Yang
Dai, Wenliang
Wang, Boxin
Lin, Sheng-Chieh
Lee, Chankyu
Chen, Yangyi
Jiang, Dongfu
He, Jiafan
Pi, Renjie
Lam, Grace
Lee, Nayeon
Bukharin, Alexander
Shoeybi, Mohammad
Catanzaro, Bryan
Ping, Wei
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
We introduce Nemotron-Cascade 2, an open 30B MoE model with 3B activated parameters that delivers best-in-class reasoning and strong agentic capabilities. Despite its compact size, its mathematical and coding reasoning performance approaches that of frontier open models. It is the second open-weight LLM, after DeepSeekV3.2-Speciale-671B-A37B, to achieve Gold Medal-level performance in the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), and the ICPC World Finals, demonstrating remarkably high intelligence density with 20x fewer parameters. In contrast to Nemotron-Cascade 1, the key technical advancements are as follows. After SFT on a meticulously curated dataset, we substantially expand Cascade RL to cover a much broader spectrum of reasoning and agentic domains. Furthermore, we introduce multi-domain on-policy distillation from the strongest intermediate teacher models for each domain throughout the Cascade RL process, allowing us to efficiently recover benchmark regressions and sustain strong performance gains along the way. We release the collection of model checkpoint and training data.
title Nemotron-Cascade 2: Post-Training LLMs with Cascade RL and Multi-Domain On-Policy Distillation
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19220