Files changed (1) hide show
  1. README.md +181 -0
README.md CHANGED
@@ -36,3 +36,184 @@ if tokenizer.chat_template is not None:
36
 
37
  response = generate(model, tokenizer, prompt=prompt, verbose=True)
38
  ```
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
36
 
37
  response = generate(model, tokenizer, prompt=prompt, verbose=True)
38
  ```
39
+
40
+ ---
41
+ license: mit
42
+ language:
43
+ - en
44
+ ---
45
+ ## Ling-2.6-flash: Faster Responses, Stronger Execution, Higher Token Efficiency
46
+ ### Introduction
47
+ Today, we announce the official open-source release of **Ling-2.6-flash**, an **instruct model** with **104B total parameters** and **7.4B active parameters**.
48
+
49
+ As agent capabilities mature, skyrocketing **token consumption** has become a primary barrier to deployment. Unlike standard chat, agent workflows involve massive inputs and complex, multi-step execution, driving up both compute demand and user costs. While the industry is pivoting toward "long-reasoning" to push performance ceilings, a critical question remains: Are these excessive reasoning tokens truly necessary for high-frequency, everyday agent use cases?
50
+
51
+ Faced with mounting token pressure, Ling-2.6-flash takes a different path. Rather than relying on longer outputs to chase higher scores, it is systematically optimized for **inference efficiency, token efficiency, and agent performance**—aiming to stay highly competitive while being **faster, leaner, and better suited for real production workloads**.
52
+
53
+ At a high level, Ling-2.6-flash is built around three core strengths:
54
+
55
+ + **Hybrid linear architecture for higher inference efficiency.**
56
+ By introducing a hybrid linear architecture, we improve computational efficiency at the foundation level. On a 4× H20 setup, Ling-2.6-flash reaches inference speeds of up to **340 tokens/s**. In other words, it completes tasks with significantly better cost-performance efficiency.
57
+ + **Token-efficiency optimization for a better intelligence-efficiency tradeoff.**
58
+ During training, we specifically optimized for token efficiency, with the goal of accomplishing tasks using more concise outputs. On the full **Artificial Analysis** evaluation suite, Ling-2.6-flash uses only **15M tokens**while still delivering competitive performance. This translates into a meaningfully stronger intelligence-efficiency profile.
59
+ + **Targeted improvements for agent scenarios.**
60
+ For the agent use cases seeing the strongest demand today, we continuously refined Ling-2.6-flash in tool use, multi-step planning, and task execution. As a result, the model achieves performance that is competitive with, and in some cases reaches **SOTA level** against, models with larger active parameter counts on benchmarks including **BFCL-V4, TAU2-bench, SWE-bench Verified, Claw-Eval, and PinchBench**.
61
+
62
+ ### Evaluation
63
+ We have conducted a comprehensive evaluation of Ling-2.6-flash across multiple authoritative benchmarks. **Ling-2.6-flash** performs strongly on representative agent benchmarks such as **BFCL-V4**, **TAU2-bench**, **SWE-bench Verified**, and **PinchBench**. In practice, Ling-2.6-flash delivers a strong user experience across frameworks including **Claude Code**, **Kilo Code**, **Qwen Code**, **Hermes Agent**, and **OpenClaw**, etc.
64
+
65
+ Beyond agent tasks, Ling-2.6-flash also delivers strong performance across **general knowledge**,**mathematical reasoning**, **instruction following**, and **long-context understanding**, remains well aligned with SOTA models in the same size class.
66
+ <div align="center">
67
+ <img src="https://mdn.alipayobjects.com/huamei_3p6pd0/afts/img/KhFxSrxyF5IAAAAAgCAAAAgADryCAQFr/original" width="8001" title="" crop="0,0,1,1" id="u4a7a4034" class="ne-image">
68
+ </div>
69
+
70
+ <div align="center">
71
+ <img src="https://mdn.alipayobjects.com/huamei_3p6pd0/afts/img/4bI1SK8pNM8AAAAAgBAAAAgADryCAQFr/original" width="8001" title="" crop="0,0,1,1" id="uc95688f2" class="ne-image">
72
+ </div>
73
+
74
+ > + **<font style="color:rgb(38, 38, 38);">PinchBench</font>**<font style="color:rgb(38, 38, 38);">: Comparative scores are retrieved directly from the official PinchBench leaderboard (as of April 20, 2026), adhering to their evaluation modes (potentially Reasoning Mode). </font>
75
+ > + **<font style="color:rgb(38, 38, 38);">Claw-Eval</font>**<font style="color:rgb(38, 38, 38);">: Comparative scores are sourced from the official Claw-Eval leaderboard (version dated 2026-03-25), adhering to their evaluation modes (potentially Reasoning Mode). Official scores for GPT-OSS-120B and GPT-5.4-mini are currently unavailable and have been omitted.</font>
76
+ > + **<font style="color:rgb(38, 38, 38);">TAU2-Bench</font>**<font style="color:rgb(38, 38, 38);">: Evaluations are conducted using official v1.0.0 code and datasets. Following the GLM-5 evaluation protocol, we applied minor prompt adjustments in the Retail and Telecom domains to ensure users express requests clearly and to prevent premature session termination. Additionally, GPT-5.2 was utilized as the User Agent across all evaluated domains.</font>
77
+ > + **<font style="color:rgb(38, 38, 38);">IFBench</font>**<font style="color:rgb(38, 38, 38);">: Scores for GPT-OSS-120B (low) and GPT-5.4-mini (Non-Reasoning) are sourced from the AA (Artificial Analysis) Leaderboard. All other model performance data are based on internal evaluation results.</font>
78
+ >
79
+
80
+ ### Architecture
81
+ Ling-2.6-flash continues the architectural direction introduced in Ling 2.5. Building on the Ling 2.0 foundation, we incorporate a **hybrid linear attention mechanism**, upgrading the original **GQA attention** design into a **1:7 MLA + Lightning Linear** hybrid architecture through incremental training.
82
+ <div align="center">
83
+ <img src="https://mdn.alipayobjects.com/huamei_3p6pd0/afts/img/dZ9VS4RPjzAAAAAAgBAAAAgADryCAQFr/fmt.webp" width="650" title="" crop="0,0,1,1" id="u46a87a11" class="ne-image">
84
+ </div>
85
+
86
+ This combination of **hybrid attention** and a **highly sparse MoE architecture** gives Ling-2.6-flash a clear advantage in inference efficiency. Compared with mainstream SOTA models in a similar size class, Ling-2.6-flash not only delivers faster time-to-first-token, but also achieves substantially higher generation throughput in long-output scenarios. At peak, both **prefill throughput** and **decode throughput** can improve by up to **around 4×**.
87
+
88
+ As shown in the figure below, Ling-2.6-flash’s throughput advantage becomes more pronounced as both context length and generation length increase. More importantly, this is not just a benchmark-side gain on static metrics. In real deployment settings, the model continues to unlock stronger speed benefits as task complexity grows.
89
+
90
+ Whether the workload involves **long-context understanding** or **extended text generation**, Ling-2.6-flash preserves model capability while delivering **faster responses, higher throughput, and better real-world deployment efficiency**.
91
+ <div align="center">
92
+ <img src="https://mdn.alipayobjects.com/huamei_3p6pd0/afts/img/Fa_fQrVD3hcAAAAAX7AAAAgADryCAQFr/original" width="600" alt="Decode Throughput Comparison">
93
+ <p><em>Decode Throughput Comparison, 4× H20-3e, TP=4, Batch Size = 32</em></p>
94
+ </div>
95
+
96
+ <div align="center">
97
+ <img src="https://mdn.alipayobjects.com/huamei_3p6pd0/afts/img/LRDBTILYEooAAAAAXdAAAAgADryCAQFr/original" width="600" alt="Prefill Throughput Comparison">
98
+ <p><em>Prefill Throughput Comparison, 4× H20-3e, TP=4, Batch Size = 32</em></p>
99
+ </div>
100
+
101
+ ### Quickstart
102
+ #### SGLang (Recommended)
103
+ ##### Environment Preparation
104
+ ```bash
105
+ pip install uv
106
+
107
+ uv venv ~/my_ling_env
108
+
109
+ source ~/my_ling_env/bin/activate
110
+
111
+ # uv pip "sglang-kernel>=0.4.1"
112
+ uv pip install "sglang[all]>=0.5.10.post1" --prerelease=allow
113
+ ```
114
+
115
+ ##### Run Inference
116
+ Both BF16 and FP8 models are supported by SGLang now. It depends on the dtype of the model in `${MODEL_PATH}`. Here is the example to run Ling-2.6-flash with 4 GPUs, where the master node IP is `${MASTER_IP}` and server port is `${PORT}`:
117
+
118
+ **Server**
119
+
120
+ **1. Standard Inference (Without MTP)**
121
+ ```bash
122
+ python -m sglang.launch_server \
123
+ --model-path $MODEL_PATH \
124
+ --tp-size 4 \
125
+ --pp-size 1 \
126
+ --dp-size 1 \
127
+ --trust-remote-code \
128
+ --context-length 262144 \
129
+ --tool-call-parser qwen25 \
130
+ --json-model-override-args '{"rope_scaling": {"rope_type": "yarn", "factor": 2.0, "rope_theta": 6000000, "partial_rotary_factor": 0.5, "original_max_position_embeddings": 131072}}' \
131
+ --dist-init-addr $MASTER_IP:2345 \
132
+ --port $PORT \
133
+ --nnodes 1
134
+ ```
135
+
136
+ **2. Inference with MTP (Multi-Token Prediction)**
137
+ _The current official SGLang implementation of MTP contains a bug. For better inference performance, we recommend installing our patched version. Our fix is currently under review and is expected to be merged into the official SGLang library shortly._
138
+
139
+ **Install our SGLang**
140
+ ```bash
141
+ git clone -b ling_2_6 git@github.com:antgroup/sglang.git
142
+ cd sglang
143
+
144
+ pip install --upgrade pip
145
+ pip install -e "python"
146
+ ```
147
+ Start server
148
+ ```bash
149
+ python -m sglang.launch_server \
150
+ --model-path $MODEL_PATH \
151
+ --tp-size 4 \
152
+ --pp-size 1 \
153
+ --dp-size 1 \
154
+ --context-length 262144 \
155
+ --mamba-scheduler-strategy extra_buffer \
156
+ --speculative-algorithm NEXTN \
157
+ --speculative-num-steps 3 \
158
+ --speculative-eagle-topk 1 \
159
+ --speculative-num-draft-tokens 4 \
160
+ --mem-fraction-static 0.75 \
161
+ --max-running-requests 64 \
162
+ --max-mamba-cache-size 256 \
163
+ --tool-call-parser qwen25 \
164
+ --json-model-override-args '{"rope_scaling": {"rope_type": "yarn", "factor": 2.0, "rope_theta": 6000000, "partial_rotary_factor": 0.5, "original_max_position_embeddings": 131072}}' \
165
+ --trust-remote-code \
166
+ --dist-init-addr $MASTER_IP:2345 \
167
+ --port $PORT \
168
+ --nnodes 1
169
+ ```
170
+
171
+ **Client**
172
+
173
+ ```bash
174
+ curl -s http://${MASTER_IP}:${PORT}/v1/chat/completions \
175
+ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
176
+ -d '{"model": "auto", "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "What is the capital of France?"}]}'
177
+ ```
178
+
179
+ #### vLLM
180
+ ##### Environment Preparation
181
+ ```bash
182
+ pip install uv
183
+
184
+ uv venv ~/my_ling_env
185
+
186
+ source ~/my_ling_env/bin/activate
187
+
188
+ git clone https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm.git
189
+
190
+ cd vllm
191
+
192
+ VLLM_USE_PRECOMPILED=1 uv pip install --editable . --torch-backend=auto
193
+ ```
194
+
195
+ #### Run inference
196
+
197
+ **Server**
198
+ ```bash
199
+ vllm serve $MODEL_PATH \
200
+ --port $PORT \
201
+ --served-model-name my_model \
202
+ --trust-remote-code --tensor-parallel-size 4 \
203
+ --gpu-memory-utilization 0.85
204
+ ```
205
+
206
+ **Client**
207
+
208
+ ```bash
209
+ curl -s http://${MASTER_IP}:${PORT}/v1/chat/completions \
210
+ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
211
+ -d '{"model": "auto", "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "What is the capital of France?"}]}'
212
+ ```
213
+
214
+ ### Limitations & Future Plans
215
+ Ling-2.6-flash has already made meaningful progress in our pursuit of an extreme intelligence-efficiency tradeoff. The model has improved substantially in key areas such as **tool use, multi-step planning, and long-horizon task execution**. Combined with systematic optimizations in inference efficiency and interaction experience, Ling-2.6-flash is now better equipped to handle **large-scale, high-frequency automated workloads**, delivering stronger real-world value in production settings.
216
+
217
+ At the same time, we are fully aware that pushing intelligence efficiency to the limit comes with tradeoffs. In some highly complex scenarios, the model can still exhibit **tool hallucinations** due to limited reasoning depth. In addition, there is still room for improvement in areas such as **natural bilingual switching between Chinese and English** and **compliance with highly complex instructions**.
218
+
219
+ Looking ahead, we will continue exploring the frontier of intelligence efficiency. While preserving the model’s high-efficiency inference characteristics, we aim to further improve the balance between **output quality** and **token efficiency**, and to continuously strengthen the model’s **stability, usability, and interaction experience across a wider range of real-world scenarios**.