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Kolibri: A Sovereign European Model on the Pareto Frontier

2026-10-22 21:45:10
Aleph Alpha, , Moritz Althaus, Artur Baranowski, Michael Barlow, Fabien C. Y. Benureau, Felix Berkenkamp, Amrita Bhattacherjee, Lukas Bl\"ubaum, Duncan Blythe, Augustijn de Boer, Bastian Boll, Thomas F. Burns, Bj\"orn Deiseroth, Niko D\"urr, B\'eni Bal\'azs Egressy, Niklas Finken, Niklas Freymuth, Fabian Gebhart, Max Hammer, Bastian Harren, Andreas Hartel, Johann Higl, Steffen Hirschmann, Pablo Iyu Guerrero, Yasser Jadidi, Andreas Jagusch, Mitja Kleider, Markus Klein, Jonas Knupp, Murali Kondragunta, Garwin Lechner, Dominik L\^e-Kellner, Jurek Leonhardt, Jiaze Li, Sohir Maskey, Omar Mehio, Pit Neitemeier, Letitia Parcalabescu, Alejandro Petry Pacheco, Pranav Ragupathy, Martin Reinhardt, Peter Rodenkirch Nfissi, Dylan Rodriquez, Leonard Salewski, Raziye Sari, Jordan Sassoon, Ivo Schaper, Ilhan Scheer, Frank Schneider, Philipp Scholl, Lukas Schott, Eric Schreiber, Pablo Schumacher, Alessio Serra, Philipp Siedler, Prabhu Teja Sivaprasad, Mohamed Soliman, Till Speicher, Volker Stampa, Simon Thel, Serge Thilges, Irina Vidal Migall\'on, Denis Wa{\ss}mann, Samuel Weinbach, Sascha Wirges, Michael W\"uthrich, Alexei Zacharov

Abstract

This report introduces Kolibri, an English-German mixture-of-experts transformer with 78.1B total parameters and 3.46B active parameters per token, released as open weights under the Apache 2.0 licence. We built Kolibri for sovereign and specialised deployment, with a particular focus on German and on regulated domains such as public administration, industry, and aerospace. To support these settings, we control the full model-development process, including data, architecture, training infrastructure, post-training, and evaluation. We train Kolibri on 24T tokens across pre-training, mid-training, and long-context extension, with German accounting for more than 20% of the data mix by bytes. To reach this share, we complement German datasets with more than 2T German tokens that we curate from the web with our own pipeline and generate synthetically. Post-training combines supervised fine-tuning on curated German and English data with reinforcement learning on more than 1.2M internally curated tasks, which cover reasoning, tool use, instruction following, code, and retrieval. The model activates 4.4% of its parameters per token, and among the open models evaluated in this report, it lies on the Pareto frontier of quality and serving cost in English and German. Kolibri builds on Kolibri Origin, an earlier iteration that validated our full pipeline at scale. Both models come from our Model Factory, which connects data, experimentation, training, evaluation, and deployment through version-controlled workflows.

Abstract (translated)

URL

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31945

PDF

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.31945.pdf


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