🧠 NanoAgent — A 135M Parameter Agentic SLM

NanoAgent is a 135M parameter, 8k context length, open-source language model designed for agentic tasks such as tool calling, instruction following, and lightweight reasoning.
It’s small enough (~135 MB in 8-bit) to run on edge devices like personal laptops, low-memory CPUs, and even wearables — yet smart enough to make tool calls, parse web information, and give structured answers.

Quick inference resource: here

Github Scripts: NanoAgent-135M

Run in Ollama: ollama run quwsarohi/NanoAgent

🌍 Real-World Use Cases

• 🕹️ Runs on edge devices — laptops, smartwatches, browsers, or CPU-only environments.
• 🌐 Parses and answers from the web — supports tool calling to fetch real-time information.
• 🔎 Answers recent questions with live web search tools.
• 💬 Continues conversations — ideal for assistant or agent frameworks.
• ⚙️ Tool calling support enables chaining multiple tools and parsing results to produce final answers.

✨ What NanoAgent Supports

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🧪 Training Overview

• Base model: SmolLM2-135M-Instruct (instruction-tuned)
• Fine-tuning method: Dynamic Fine-Tuning (DFT) Supervised Fine-Tuning
• Platform: Apple Mac M1 (16 GB) — MLX framework

📚 Datasets Used

This model was trained using a combination of datasets under different open licenses.
Each dataset retains its original license, and use of those datasets is subject to their respective terms.

General Training (SFT)

Function Calling Training

🧭 Key Explorations & Findings

• ✂️ Dataset deduplication significantly improved performance by removing noisy or duplicate Q/As.
• ✂️ Shortening the responses (casual response) and using shorter python code in training improved performance and reduce repeated token generation.
• 🧮 Word-level reasoning from orca-math enhanced the model’s ability to handle stepwise logic.
• 🧰 Designing tool calling prompts using six open-source tool calling datasets resulted in stronger structured output generation.
• 🌐 Tool calling integration enabled the model to extract answers from parsed web data, supporting up-to-date queries.

⚡ Benchmark

Model Comparison

BFCL Benchmark (Tool Calling)

*All evaluations were conducted using greedy decoding (sampling parameter was set to false during HuggingFace inference).

Key Findings

• NanoAgent significantly outperforms the base SmolLM2-135M-Instruct on instruction following (IFEval) with +8-10% improvements across all metrics
• NanoAgent improves on tinyMMLU, tinyTruthfulQA, and tinyHellaswag over the base model
• 🧰 Tool Calling: Only NanoAgent supports tool calling — SmolLM2-135M-Instruct does not

⚡ Example Usage

Basic Inference

from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

model_name = "quwsarohi/NanoAgent-135M"
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(model_name, device_map="auto")

def inference(messages, max_new_tokens=256, temperature=0.3, **kwargs):
    if isinstance(message, list):
        input_text = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(
            messages, tokenize=False, add_generation_prompt=True
        )
    inputs = tokenizer.encode(input_text, return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)
    outputs = model.generate(
        inputs,
        max_new_tokens=max_new_tokens,
        do_sample=True,
        temperature=temperature,
        **kwargs
    )
    return tokenizer.decode(outputs[0][inputs.shape[1]:], skip_special_tokens=True)

messages = [{"role": "user", "content": "Hi! Do you have a name?"}]
print(inference(messages))

Tool Calling

NanoAgent uses a JSON-based tool calling format:

import json

tools = [
    {
        "type": "function",
        "function": {
            "name": "web_search",
            "description": "Performs a web search and returns formatted results.",
            "parameters": {
                "type": "object",
                "properties": {
                    "query": {"type": "string", "description": "The search query."}
                },
                "required": ["query"],
            },
        }
    }
]

TOOL_TEMPLATE = """You are a helpful AI assistant. You have a set of possible tools that you can execute to retrieve information or to perform specific actions. You can execute zero or more tools to answer user question.

Here are the list of tools that you have access to:
```json
{tools}
```

Only execute tools from above. Follow the below JSON signature to execute tools:
```json
[{{"name": "tool_name", "arguments": {{"arg1": "val1", ...}}}}, ...]
```
"""

messages = [
    {"role": "system", "content": TOOL_TEMPLATE.format(tools=json.dumps(tools, indent=2))},
    {"role": "user", "content": "What's the latest AI news?"},
]
response = inference(messages, max_new_tokens=512)
print(response)

# Output: ```json
# [{"name": "web_search", "arguments": {"query": "latest AI news 2026"}}]
# ```

It is suggested to add '''json\n tokens as prefill during inference. This shows improved performance as LLM knows it has to execute a tool.

messages = [
    {"role": "system", "content": TOOL_TEMPLATE.format(tools=json.dumps(tools, indent=2))},
    {"role": "user", "content": "What's the latest AI news?"},
    {"role": "assistant", "content": "```json\n"}
]

input_text = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(
    messages,
    tokenize=False,
    add_generation_prompt=False,
    continue_final_message=True
)

response = inference(input_text, max_new_tokens=512)
print(response)

# Output: [{"name": "web_search", "arguments": {"query": "latest AI news 2026"}}]
# ```

🧭 Roadmap

• 📊 Benchmark more agentic tasks
• 🧠 Explore GRPO for tool calling improvement
• 🔀 Experiment with weight merging
• 🧪 Evaluate multi-turn tool chaining
• 🧹 Further refine datasets for stability

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📄 License

This project (code, model weights, and training recipes) is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

📢 Notice

• Model & code are © quwsarohi, licensed under Apache 2.0.
• Portions of the training data were sourced from third-party datasets under CDLA-P 2.0, MIT, CC-BY 4.0, ODC-BY, and Apache 2.0.
• The licensors of these datasets do not endorse this project or its outputs.
• If you redistribute or fine-tune this model, ensure your use complies with all applicable dataset licenses.