Key Features
Ministral 3 3B consists of two main architectural components:
- 3.4B Language Model
- 0.4B Vision Encoder
The Ministral 3 3B 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
Ideal for lightweight, real-time applications on edge or low-resource devices, such as:
- Image captioning
- Text classification
- Real-time efficient translation
- Data extraction
- Short content generation
- Fine-tuning and specialization
- And more...
Bringing advanced AI capabilities to edge and distributed environments for embedded systems.
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
Table with columns: Model Name, Type, Precision, Link| 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 | |
Other formats available here.
Benchmark Results
We compare Ministral 3 to similar sized models.
Reasoning
Table with columns: Model, AIME25, AIME24, GPQA Diamond, LiveCodeBench| 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 |
| | | | |
|
Instruct
Table with columns: Model, Arena Hard, WildBench, MATH Maj@1, MM MTBench| 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 |
Base
Table with columns: Model, Multilingual MMLU, MATH CoT 2-Shot, AGIEval 5-shot, MMLU Redux 5-shot, MMLU 5-shot, TriviaQA 5-shot| 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 |
Usage
The model can be used with the following frameworks;
vLLM
We recommend using this model with vLLM.
Installation
Make sure to install vllm >= 0.12.0:
pip install vllm --upgrade
Doing so should automatically install mistral_common >= 1.8.6.
To check:
python -c "import mistral_common; print(mistral_common.__version__)"
You can also make use of a ready-to-go docker image or on the docker hub.
Serve
Due to their size, Ministral-3-3B-Reasoning-2512 and Ministral-3-8B-Reasoning-2512 can run on a single 1xH200 GPU.
A simple launch command is:
vllm serve mistralai/Ministral-3-3B-Reasoning-2512 \
--tokenizer_mode mistral --config_format mistral --load_format mistral \
--enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser mistral \
--reasoning-parser mistral
Key parameter notes:
- enable-auto-tool-choice: Required when enabling tool usage.
- tool-call-parser mistral: Required when enabling tool usage.
- reasoning-parser mistral: Required when enabling reasoning.
Additional flags:
- You can set
--max-model-len to preserve memory. By default it is set to 262144 which is quite large but not necessary for most scenarios.
- You can set
--max-num-batched-tokens to balance throughput and latency, higher means higher throughput but higher latency.
Recommended Sampling Settings:
- We recommend starting with a Temperature of 0.7 for most use cases. Feel free to experiment with different settings to best suit your specific needs.
Usage of the model
Here we assume that the model mistralai/Ministral-3-3B-Reasoning-2512 is served and you can ping it to the domain localhost with the port 8000 which is the default for vLLM.
Let's see if the Ministral 3 model knows when to pick a fight !
from typing import Any
from openai import OpenAI
from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download
openai_api_key = "EMPTY"
openai_api_base = "http://localhost:8000/v1"
TEMP = 0.7
TOP_P = 0.95
MAX_TOK = 262144
client = OpenAI(
api_key=openai_api_key,
base_url=openai_api_base,
)
models = client.models.list()
model = models.data[0].id
def load_system_prompt(repo_id: str, filename: str) -> dict[str, Any]:
file_path = hf_hub_download(repo_id=repo_id, filename=filename)
with open(file_path, "r") as file:
system_prompt = file.read()
index_begin_think = system_prompt.find("[THINK]")
index_end_think = system_prompt.find("[/THINK]")
return {
"role": "system",
"content": [
{"type": "text", "text": system_prompt[:index_begin_think]},
{
"type": "thinking",
"thinking": system_prompt[
index_begin_think + len("[THINK]") : index_end_think
],
"closed": True,
},
{
"type": "text",
"text": system_prompt[index_end_think + len("[/THINK]") :],
},
],
}
SYSTEM_PROMPT = load_system_prompt(model, "SYSTEM_PROMPT.txt")
image_url = "https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/essentialsdocs/images/7/70/Battle.png/revision/latest?cb=20220523172438"
messages = [
SYSTEM_PROMPT,
{
"role": "user",
"content": [
{
"type": "text",
"text": "What action do you think I should take in this situation? List all the possible actions and explain why you think they are good or bad.",
},
{"type": "image_url", "image_url": {"url": image_url}},
],
},
]
stream = client.chat.completions.create(
model=model,
messages=messages,
stream=True,
temperature=TEMP,
top_p=TOP_P,
max_tokens=MAX_TOK,
)
print("client: Start streaming chat completions...:\n")
printed_reasoning_content = False
answer = []
for chunk in stream:
reasoning_content = None
content = None
if hasattr(chunk.choices[0].delta, "reasoning_content"):
reasoning_content = chunk.choices[0].delta.reasoning_content
if hasattr(chunk.choices[0].delta, "content"):
content = chunk.choices[0].delta.content
if reasoning_content is not None:
if not printed_reasoning_content:
printed_reasoning_content = True
print("Start reasoning:\n", end="", flush=True)
print(reasoning_content, end="", flush=True)
elif content is not None:
if not reasoning_content and printed_reasoning_content:
answer.extend(content)
print(content, end="", flush=True)
if answer:
print("\n\n=============\nAnswer\n=============\n")
print("".join(answer))
else:
print("\n\n=============\nNo Answer\n=============\n")
print(
"No answer was generated by the model, probably because the maximum number of tokens was reached."
)
You can also use Ministral 3 3B Reasoning 2512 with Transformers !
Make sure to install Transformers from its first v5 release candidate or from "main":
pip install transformers==5.0.0rc0
To make the best use of our model with Transformers make sure to have installed mistral-common >= 1.8.6 to use our tokenizer.
pip install mistral-common --upgrade
Then load our tokenizer along with the model and generate:
import torch
from transformers import Mistral3ForConditionalGeneration, MistralCommonBackend
model_id = "mistralai/Ministral-3-3B-Reasoning-2512"
tokenizer = MistralCommonBackend.from_pretrained(model_id)
model = Mistral3ForConditionalGeneration.from_pretrained(
model_id, torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16, device_map="auto"
)
image_url = "https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/essentialsdocs/images/7/70/Battle.png/revision/latest?cb=20220523172438"
messages = [
{
"role": "user",
"content": [
{
"type": "text",
"text": "What action do you think I should take in this situation? List all the possible actions and explain why you think they are good or bad.",
},
{"type": "image_url", "image_url": {"url": image_url}},
],
},
]
tokenized = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(messages, return_tensors="pt", return_dict=True)
tokenized["input_ids"] = tokenized["input_ids"].to(device="cuda")
tokenized["pixel_values"] = tokenized["pixel_values"].to(dtype=torch.bfloat16, device="cuda")
image_sizes = [tokenized["pixel_values"].shape[-2:]]
output = model.generate(
**tokenized,
image_sizes=image_sizes,
max_new_tokens=8092,
)[0]
decoded_output = tokenizer.decode(output[len(tokenized["input_ids"][0]):])
print(decoded_output)
License
This model is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.
You must not use this model in a manner that infringes, misappropriates, or otherwise violates any third party’s rights, including intellectual property rights.