mistralai/Ministral-3-8B-Reasoning-2512

Ministral 3 8B Reasoning 2512

A balanced model in the Ministral 3 family, Ministral 3 8B is a powerful, efficient tiny language model with vision capabilities.

This model is the reasoning post-trained version, trained for reasoning tasks, making it ideal for math, coding and stem related use cases.

The Ministral 3 family is designed for edge deployment, capable of running on a wide range of hardware. Ministral 3 8B can even be deployed locally, capable of fitting in 24GB of VRAM in BF16, and less than 12GB of RAM/VRAM when quantized.

Learn more in our blog post and paper.

Key Features

Ministral 3 8B consists of two main architectural components:

• 8.4B Language Model
• 0.4B Vision Encoder

The Ministral 3 8B Reasoning model offers the following capabilities:

• Vision: Enables the model to analyze images and provide insights based on visual content, in addition to text.
• Multilingual: Supports dozens of languages, including English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic.
• System Prompt: Maintains strong adherence and support for system prompts.
• Agentic: Offers best-in-class agentic capabilities with native function calling and JSON outputting.
• Reasoning: Excels at complex, multi-step reasoning and dynamic problem-solving.
• Edge-Optimized: Delivers best-in-class performance at a small scale, deployable anywhere.
• Apache 2.0 License: Open-source license allowing usage and modification for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.
• Large Context Window: Supports a 256k context window.

Use Cases

Perfect for balanced performance in local or embedded systems, combining versatility with efficiency.

• Chat interfaces in constrained environments
• Local daily-driver AI assistant
• Image/document description and understanding
• Translation and content generation
• Specialized agentic use cases
• Fine-tuning and specialization
• And more...

Bringing advanced AI capabilities to resource-constrained environments.

Recommended Settings

We recommend deploying with the following best practices:

• System Prompt: Use our provided system prompt, and append it to your custom system prompt to define a clear environment and use case, including guidance on how to effectively leverage tools in agentic systems.
• Multi-turn Traces: We highly recommend keeping the reasoning traces in context.
• Sampling Parameters: Use a temperature of 0.7 for most environments ; Different temperatures may be explored for different use cases - developers are encouraged to experiment with alternative settings.
• Tools: Keep the set of tools well-defined and limit their number to the minimum required for the use case - Avoiding overloading the model with an excessive number of tools.
• Vision: When deploying with vision capabilities, we recommend maintaining an aspect ratio close to 1:1 (width-to-height) for images. Avoiding the use of overly thin or wide images - crop them as needed to ensure optimal performance.

Ministral 3 Family

| Model Name | Type | Precision | Link | |--------------------------------|--------------------|-----------|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | Ministral 3 3B Base 2512 | Base pre-trained | BF16 | Hugging Face | | Ministral 3 3B Instruct 2512 | Instruct post-trained | FP8 | Hugging Face | | Ministral 3 3B Reasoning 2512 | Reasoning capable | BF16 | Hugging Face | | Ministral 3 8B Base 2512 | Base pre-trained | BF16 | Hugging Face | | Ministral 3 8B Instruct 2512 | Instruct post-trained | FP8 | Hugging Face | | Ministral 3 8B Reasoning 2512 | Reasoning capable | BF16 | Hugging Face | | Ministral 3 14B Base 2512 | Base pre-trained | BF16 | Hugging Face | | Ministral 3 14B Instruct 2512 | Instruct post-trained | FP8 | Hugging Face | | Ministral 3 14B Reasoning 2512 | Reasoning capable | BF16 | Hugging Face |

Other formats available here.

Benchmark Results

We compare Ministral 3 to similar sized models.

Reasoning

| Model | AIME25 | AIME24 | GPQA Diamond | LiveCodeBench | |---------------------------|-------------|-------------|--------------|---------------| | Ministral 3 14B | 0.850| 0.898| 0.712 | 0.646 | | Qwen3-14B (Thinking) | 0.737 | 0.837 | 0.663 | 0.593 | | | | | | | | Ministral 3 8B | 0.787 | 0.860| 0.668 | 0.616 | | Qwen3-VL-8B-Thinking | 0.798| 0.860| 0.671 | 0.580 | | | | | | | | Ministral 3 3B | 0.721| 0.775| 0.534 | 0.548 | | Qwen3-VL-4B-Thinking | 0.697 | 0.729 | 0.601 | 0.513 |

Instruct

| Model | Arena Hard | WildBench | MATH Maj@1 | MM MTBench | |---------------------------|-------------|------------|-------------|------------------| | Ministral 3 14B | 0.551| 68.5| 0.904| 8.49 | | Qwen3 14B (Non-Thinking) | 0.427 | 65.1 | 0.870 | NOT MULTIMODAL | | Gemma3-12B-Instruct | 0.436 | 63.2 | 0.854 | 6.70 | | | | | | | | Ministral 3 8B | 0.509 | 66.8| 0.876 | 8.08 | | Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct | 0.528| 66.3 | 0.946| 8.00 | | | | | | | | Ministral 3 3B | 0.305 | 56.8| 0.830 | 7.83 | | Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct | 0.438| 56.8| 0.900| 8.01 | | Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct | 0.163 | 42.2 | 0.786 | 6.36 | | Gemma3-4B-Instruct | 0.318 | 49.1 | 0.759 | 5.23 |

Base

| Model | Multilingual MMLU | MATH CoT 2-Shot | AGIEval 5-shot | MMLU Redux 5-shot | MMLU 5-shot | TriviaQA 5-shot | |---------------------|-------------------|-----------------|----------------|-------------------|-------------|-----------------| | Ministral 3 14B | 0.742 | 0.676 | 0.648 | 0.820 | 0.794 | 0.749 | | Qwen3 14B Base | 0.754 | 0.620 | 0.661 | 0.837 | 0.804| 0.703 | | Gemma 3...