Deimos R1
Kozu AI Research · 4.54B · Apache 2.0 BF16 weights Reasoning + instruction Report DR1-2026.07 Small model. Disciplined reasoning.Release brief
01Deimos R1 is a focused 4B-class system for reasoning and instruction following. In like-for-like evaluation, it improves five of seven reported full-budget capability rows while using substantially fewer thinking tokens on the headline tasks.
The central result is efficiency, not scale. Deimos R1 reaches 0.907 GSM8K flexible and 0.551 MMLU-Pro in the recorded full-budget run while reducing mean thinking tokens by 5.0× and 2.9× respectively.
5.0×fewer GSM8K think tokens +0.188MMLU-Pro absolute delta 0.465held-out reasoning accuracy · n=200Evaluation
02The table reports matched comparisons under the same open harness, generation budget, sampling settings, and seed. Values are run-local and should not be compared with vendor-published numbers produced by other evaluation stacks.
| Full-budget benchmark | Reference | Deimos R1 | Delta | Think tokens · ref → R1 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GSM8K · flexible | 0.860 | 0.907 | +0.047 | 1,778 → 357 |
| MMLU-Pro | 0.363 | 0.551 | +0.188 | 1,984 → 677 |
| IFEval · prompt loose | 0.260 | 0.353 | +0.093 | 4,808 → 1,189 |
| IFEval · instruction loose | 0.437 | 0.487 | +0.050 | — |
| IFEval · prompt strict | 0.260 | 0.267 | +0.007 | — |
| IFEval · instruction strict | 0.437 | 0.429 | −0.008 | — |
| GSM8K · strict format | 0.727 | 0.333 | −0.394 | — |
lm-eval 0.4.12 · 32,768-token generation budget · temperature 1.0 · top_p 0.95 · presence penalty 1.5 · thinking enabled · GSM8K/IFEval n=150 · MMLU-Pro n=25 per subtask · seed 42.
| 4,096-token constrained run | Reference | Deimos R1 | Delta |
|---|---|---|---|
| GSM8K · flexible | 0.660 | 0.933 | +0.273 |
| MMLU-Pro | 0.394 | 0.634 | +0.240 |
| IFEval · prompt strict | 0.247 | 0.320 | +0.073 |
Constrained-budget results use greedy decoding. Compare within this table, not across decoding regimes.
- The internal held-out math set is contamination-filtered with verified ground truth: accuracy moved from 0.175 to 0.465 at n=200. The 12-check instruction suite remained 0.917.
- IFEval scores the complete response, including the thinking block. Shorter reasoning can therefore improve constraint scores; the behavior affects both compared models.
- GSM8K strict rewards an unrequested
#### Nending. Deimos R1 is materially weaker at silently copying that demonstrated format. Explicit format requests are more reliable. - Raw evaluation artifacts are retained under bench/ in this repository.
Data & development
03kozu_reasoning_v1.1 is a roughly 10k-example blend of verified reasoning traces and human-authored instruction data. The release uses a three-layer quality process for the reasoning portion and a dedicated 800-example format-adherence slice.
Reasoning · ~5kKozu’s Kuiper trace inverter was designed to recreate Mythos/Fable-style reasoning from answer-scrubbed human reference solutions in GSM8K and NuminaMath 1.5. Retained traces passed symbolic answer verification, derivation checks, deterministic defect scans, and an adversarial judge panel. Instruction · ~5kHuman-authored pairs used from Databricks Dolly 15k and OpenAssistant OASST2. Format · 800Deterministic rewraps of verified rows for explicitly requested formats including JSON, boxed answers, and named answer markers. Source licenses and attributionGSM8K: MIT. NuminaMath 1.5: Apache-2.0. Databricks Dolly 15k: CC-BY-SA-3.0. OpenAssistant OASST2: Apache-2.0. Reasoning traces were generated with Kuiper-R1 by Kozu AI.Deployment
04The repository includes merged BF16 weights, tokenizer assets, processor configuration, generation configuration, and the model chat template. Thinking is enabled by default and appears inside <think>…</think> before the final answer.
vllm serve Michael-Kozu/Deimos-R1 --served-model-name deimos-r1 \
--max-model-len 8192 --gpu-memory-utilization 0.80 --trust-remote-code
Recommended sampling: temperature 0.6–1.0 and top_p 0.95. Request required output formats explicitly.
Limitations
05- This is a research preview, not a safety-certified or production-guaranteed system.
- The strongest evidence covers English reasoning and instruction following. Performance outside those domains is not established here.
- Silent few-shot format imitation is a known weakness; strict GSM8K formatting declines substantially in the recorded comparison.
- Long reasoning may still be incorrect. Verify outputs for consequential decisions and domain-specific use.