Nemotron-Cascade 2: Post-Training LLMs with Cascade RL and Multi-Domain On-Policy Distillation
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.
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Zhuolin Yang
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Zihan Liu
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Yang Chen
claimed_verified
2026-03-23T10:54:11.828Z
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Yang Chen
ychenNLP
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ychenNLP
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Wenliang Dai
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Boxin Wang
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Sheng-Chieh Lin
69bcae18081b9ad49af571eb
Chankyu Lee
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Yangyi Chen
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Dongfu Jiang
claimed_verified
2026-03-25T10:51:30.901Z
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Dongfu Jiang
DongfuJiang
user
DongfuJiang
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Jiafan He
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Renjie Pi
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Grace Lam
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Nayeon Lee
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Alexander Bukharin
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Mohammad Shoeybi
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Bryan Catanzaro
69bcae18081b9ad49af571f5
Wei Ping
Nemotron-Cascade 2: Post-Training LLMs with Cascade RL and Multi-Domain On-Policy Distillation
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.
Nemotron-Cascade 2 is a 30B parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with 3B activated parameters that achieves exceptional reasoning and agentic capabilities, matching frontier open models despite its compact size and demonstrating high intelligence density.
Mixture-of-Experts reasoning agentic capabilities mathematical reasoning coding reasoning Cascade RL on-policy distillation intermediate teacher models