Alibaba/Dense

Qwen3 0.6B

chatreasoningThinkingTool Use
0.6B
Parameters
32K
Context length
16
Benchmarks
4
Quantizations
200K
HF downloads
Architecture
Dense
Released
2025-04-28
Layers
28
KV Heads
8
Head Dim
128
Family
qwen

Qwen3-0.6B

<a href="https://chat.qwen.ai/" target="_blank" style="margin: 2px;"> </a>

Qwen3 Highlights

Qwen3 is the latest generation of large language models in Qwen series, offering a comprehensive suite of dense and mixture-of-experts (MoE) models. Built upon extensive training, Qwen3 delivers groundbreaking advancements in reasoning, instruction-following, agent capabilities, and multilingual support, with the following key features:

  • Uniquely support of seamless switching between thinking mode (for complex logical reasoning, math, and coding) and non-thinking mode (for efficient, general-purpose dialogue) within single model, ensuring optimal performance across various scenarios.
  • Significantly enhancement in its reasoning capabilities, surpassing previous QwQ (in thinking mode) and Qwen2.5 instruct models (in non-thinking mode) on mathematics, code generation, and commonsense logical reasoning.
  • Superior human preference alignment, excelling in creative writing, role-playing, multi-turn dialogues, and instruction following, to deliver a more natural, engaging, and immersive conversational experience.
  • Expertise in agent capabilities, enabling precise integration with external tools in both thinking and unthinking modes and achieving leading performance among open-source models in complex agent-based tasks.
  • Support of 100+ languages and dialects with strong capabilities for multilingual instruction following and translation.

Model Overview

Qwen3-0.6B has the following features:

  • Type: Causal Language Models
  • Training Stage: Pretraining & Post-training
  • Number of Parameters: 0.6B
  • Number of Paramaters (Non-Embedding): 0.44B
  • Number of Layers: 28
  • Number of Attention Heads (GQA): 16 for Q and 8 for KV
  • Context Length: 32,768

For more details, including benchmark evaluation, hardware requirements, and inference performance, please refer to our blog, GitHub, and Documentation.

[!TIP] If you encounter significant endless repetitions, please refer to the Best Practices section for optimal sampling parameters, and set the presence_penalty to 1.5.

Quickstart

The code of Qwen3 has been in the latest Hugging Face transformers and we advise you to use the latest version of transformers.

With transformers<4.51.0, you will encounter the following error:

KeyError: 'qwen3'

The following contains a code snippet illustrating how to use the model generate content based on given inputs.

from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

model_name = "Qwen/Qwen3-0.6B"

# load the tokenizer and the model
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    model_name,
    torch_dtype="auto",
    device_map="auto"
)

# prepare the model input
prompt = "Give me a short introduction to large language model."
messages = [
    {"role": "user", "content": prompt}
]
text = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(
    messages,
    tokenize=False,
    add_generation_prompt=True,
    enable_thinking=True # Switches between thinking and non-thinking modes. Default is True.
)
model_inputs = tokenizer([text], return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)

# conduct text completion
generated_ids = model.generate(
    **model_inputs,
    max_new_tokens=32768
)
output_ids = generated_ids[0][len(model_inputs.input_ids[0]):].tolist() 

# parsing thinking content
try:
    # rindex finding 151668 (</think>)
    index = len(output_ids) - output_ids[::-1].index(151668)
except ValueError:
    index = 0

thinking_content = tokenizer.decode(output_ids[:index], skip_special_tokens=True).strip("\n")
content = tokenizer.decode(output_ids[index:], skip_special_tokens=True).strip("\n")

print("thinking content:", thinking_content)
print("content:", content)

For deployment, you can use sglang>=0.4.6.post1 or vllm>=0.8.5 or to create an OpenAI-compatible API endpoint:

  • SGLang:
    python -m sglang.launch_server --model-path Qwen/Qwen3-0.6B --reasoning-parser qwen3
    
  • vLLM:
    vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3-0.6B --enable-reasoning --reasoning-parser deepseek_r1
    

For local use, applications such as Ollama, LMStudio, MLX-LM, llama.cpp, and KTransformers have also supported Qwen3.

Switching Between Thinking and Non-Thinking Mode

[!TIP] The enable_thinking switch is also available in APIs created by SGLang and vLLM. Please refer to our documentation for SGLang and vLLM users.

enable_thinking=True

By default, Qwen3 has thinking capabilities enabled, similar to QwQ-32B. This means the model will use its reasoning abilities to enhance the quality of generated responses. For example, when explicitly setting enable_thinking=True or leaving it as the default value in tokenizer.apply_chat_template, the model will engage its thinking mode.

text = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(
    messages,
    tokenize=False,
    add_generation_prompt=True,
    enable_thinking=True  # True is the default value for enable_thinking
)

In this mode, the model will generate think content wrapped in a <think>...</think> block, followed by the final response.

[!NOTE] For thinking mode, use Temperature=0.6, TopP=0.95, TopK=20, and MinP=0 (the default setting in generation_config.json). DO NOT use greedy decoding, as it can lead to performance degradation and endless repetitions. For more detailed guidance, please refer to the Best Practices section.

enable_thinking=False

We provide a hard switch to strictly disable the model's thinking behavior, aligning its functionality with the previous Qwen2.5-Instruct models. This mode is particularly useful in scenarios where disabling thinking is essential for enhancing efficiency.

text = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(
    messages,
    tokenize=False,
    add_generation_prompt=True,
    enable_thinking=False  # Setting enable_thinking=False disables thinking mode
)

In this mode, the model will not generate any think content and will not include a <think>...</think> block.

[!NOTE] For non-thinking mode, we suggest using Temperature=0.7, TopP=0.8, TopK=20, and MinP=0. For more detailed guidance, please refer to the Best Practices section.

Advanced Usage: Switching Between Thinking and Non-Thinking Modes via User Input

We provide a soft switch mechanism that allows users to dynamically control the model's behavior when enable_thinking=True. Specifically, you can add /think and /no_think to user prompts or system messages to switch the model's thinking mode from turn to turn. The model will follow the most recent instruction in multi-turn conversations.

Here is an example of a multi-turn conversation:

from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

class QwenChatbot:
    def __init__(self, model_name="Qwen/Qwen3-0.6B"):
        self.tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name)
        self.model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(model_name)
        self.history = []

    def generate_response(self, user_input):
        messages = self.history + [{"role": "user", "content": user_input}]

        text = self.tokenizer.apply_chat_template(
            messages,
            tokenize=False,
            add_generation_prompt=True
        )

        inputs = self.tokenizer(text, return_tensors="pt")
        response_ids = self.model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=32768)[0][len(inputs.input_ids[0]):].tolist()
        response = self.tokenizer.decode(response_ids, skip_special_tokens=True)

...

Quantizations & VRAM

Q4_K_M4.5 bpw
0.6 GB
VRAM required
94%
Quality
Q6_K6.5 bpw
0.8 GB
VRAM required
97%
Quality
Q8_08 bpw
0.9 GB
VRAM required
100%
Quality
FP1616 bpw
1.5 GB
VRAM required
100%
Quality

Benchmarks (16)

MATH65.0
HumanEval62.0
IFEval60.0
MATH-50052.1
GPQA Diamond23.1
AIME10.3
AA Math10.3
BigCodeBench8.8
LiveCodeBench7.3
AA Intelligence5.7
HLE5.2
BBH5.1
MMLU-PRO4.6
MUSR2.0
AA Coding1.4
GPQA0.0

Run with Ollama

$ollama run qwen3:0.6b

GPUs that can run this model

At Q4_K_M quantization. Sorted by minimum VRAM.

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