NbAiLab/borealis-1b
NbAiLab/borealis-1b is a 1 billion parameter instruction-tuned model from the Borealis family, developed by the National Library of Norway. Based on Google's Gemma 3 architecture, this model is specifically fine-tuned for Norwegian-centric instruction following, writing, summarization, and question answering. It incorporates a limited subset of copyright-protected Norwegian press material to enhance its performance, particularly for generating news article titles and ingress texts. The model is intended for assistant-style tasks and assessment of Norwegian writing style.
Loading preview...
Borealis 1B: Norwegian-Centric Instruction-Tuned Model
NbAiLab/borealis-1b is a 1 billion parameter instruction-tuned model developed by the National Library of Norway (Nasjonalbiblioteket, NB). It is part of the Borealis family, built upon the Gemma 3 architecture, specifically fine-tuned from google/gemma-3-1b-it.
Key Differentiators & Capabilities
- Norwegian Language Focus: This model is extensively fine-tuned for Norwegian-centric instruction following, covering tasks like writing, summarization, and question answering in Norwegian.
- Unique Training Data: It incorporates a limited subset of copyright-protected Norwegian press material, made available through an agreement with rights-holder organizations. This data specifically teaches the model to generate news article titles and ingress texts.
- Safety Alignment: Borealis models employ "prompt baking" to distill system prompt behavior directly into model weights, balancing quality, usefulness, and safer behavior.
- Evaluation: Evaluated using NorEval, MMLU-English, and nb-gpt-bench, showing performance increases from the specialized training data.
Intended Use Cases
- Norwegian Assistant Tasks: Ideal for drafting, summarization, Q&A, and light reasoning in Norwegian.
- Writing Assessment: Useful for assessing and improving Norwegian writing style and quality.
- Language Coverage Evaluation: Suitable for evaluating behavior and language coverage for Norwegian, Bokmål, and Nynorsk.