AfriqueGemma-4B

Model Overview

AfriqueGemma-4B is part of the AfriqueLLM suite—a collection of open language models adapted to 20 African languages through continued pre-training (CPT) on 25.2B tokens. This model is based on google/gemma-3-4b-pt and has been specifically adapted for improved performance on African languages while maintaining strong capabilities in high-resource languages.

Key Features

Type: Causal Language Model (Base/Pre-trained)
Base Model: Gemma 3 4B PT
Parameters: 4B
Context Length: 8,192 tokens (native)
Training Tokens: 25.2B tokens of carefully curated multilingual data

Supported Languages

AfriqueGemma-4B has been adapted for the following 20 African languages plus 4 high-resource languages:

Language	Code	Family	Script
Afrikaans	afr_Latn	Germanic	Latin
Swahili	swh_Latn	Bantu	Latin
Moroccan Arabic	ary_Arab	Semitic	Arabic
Somali	som_Latn	Cushitic	Latin
Amharic	amh_Ethi	Semitic	Ethiopic
Egyptian Arabic	arz_Arab	Semitic	Arabic
Hausa	hau_Latn	Chadic	Latin
Kinyarwanda	kin_Latn	Bantu	Latin
Zulu	zul_Latn	Bantu	Latin
Igbo	ibo_Latn	Volta-Niger	Latin
Plateau Malagasy	plt_Latn	Austronesian	Latin
Xhosa	xho_Latn	Bantu	Latin
Shona	sna_Latn	Bantu	Latin
Yoruba	yor_Latn	Volta-Niger	Latin
Nyanja	nya_Latn	Bantu	Latin
Southern Sotho	sot_Latn	Bantu	Latin
Tigrinya	tir_Ethi	Semitic	Ethiopic
Tunisian Arabic	aeb_Arab	Semitic	Arabic
Oromo	gaz_Latn	Cushitic	Latin
Tswana	tsn_Latn	Bantu	Latin

High-resource languages (for catastrophic forgetting mitigation): English, French, Portuguese, Arabic

Training Data

Our training corpus combines multiple high-quality sources:

African Monolingual Data (~22.8B tokens): FineWeb2, WURA, and MADLAD-400
Code (~1B tokens): CornStack-Python for reasoning capabilities
Mathematics (~1B tokens): FineMath-4+ for mathematical understanding
Synthetic Data (~324M tokens): GPT-4.1 translated domain-specific content across 10 domains

We use UniMax sampling to create a balanced distribution, capping high-resource languages at approximately 1B tokens and upsampling lower-resource languages for up to five epochs.

Quickstart

from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

model_name = "McGill-NLP/AfriqueGemma-4B"

# 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 = "Bawo ni o ṣe n ṣe?"  # Yoruba: "How are you doing?"
inputs = tokenizer(prompt, return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)

# Generate text
generated_ids = model.generate(
    **inputs,
    max_new_tokens=100,
    do_sample=True,
    temperature=0.7,
    top_p=0.9
)
output = tokenizer.decode(generated_ids[0], skip_special_tokens=True)
print(output)

Deployment

For deployment, you can use vllm or sglang to create an OpenAI-compatible API endpoint:

vLLM:

vllm serve McGill-NLP/AfriqueGemma-4B

SGLang:

python -m sglang.launch_server --model-path McGill-NLP/AfriqueGemma-4B

Training Details

Hyperparameters

Learning Rate: 5e-5 (with warmup and cosine decay)
Context Length: 16,384 tokens
Optimizer: AdamW
Precision: BF16 mixed precision

Infrastructure

Training was conducted using the LLaMA-Factory framework on 2 nodes of NVIDIA H100x8 GPUs with:

DeepSpeed ZeRO-1/ZeRO-2
Flash Attention 3
Sequence packing
Liger Kernel optimizations

Evaluation

All AfriqueLLM models are evaluated on multiple multilingual benchmarks:

Model	AfriMGSM	AfriMMLU	AfriXNLI	Belebele	FLORES	INJONG	SIB-200	Overall	Δ
Gemma3-4B	10.24	33.89	37.76	45.79	29.50	55.52	63.59	39.47
AfriqueGemma-4B	14.86	36.73	39.62	50.52	57.31	69.28	69.21	48.22	+8.7 (22.2%)
Gemma3-12B	25.21	48.76	44.01	68.84	40.16	73.53	79.17	54.24
AfriqueGemma-12B	32.14	49.47	44.60	68.65	66.89	76.79	75.08	59.09	+4.8 (8.9%)
Qwen3-8B	11.22	36.56	38.24	44.63	18.93	29.47	53.06	33.16
AfriqueQwen-8B	39.68	46.91	45.99	68.46	63.54	73.36	77.00	59.28	+26.1 (78.8%)
Qwen3-14B-Base	16.60	39.66	43.22	50.74	20.86	41.80	66.29	39.88
AfriqueQwen-14B	45.01	52.22	49.01	74.63	65.26	77.80	82.63	63.79	+23.9 (60.0%)
Llama3.1-8B	8.14	32.27	37.90	40.95	23.59	41.37	59.99	34.89
AfriqueLlama-8B	17.51	36.57	37.39	50.51	64.88	71.17	69.14	49.60	+14.7 (42.2%)

Model Variants

AfriqueGemma-12B - Larger 12B variant
AfriqueQwen-8B - Qwen-based 8B model
AfriqueQwen-14B - Qwen-based 14B model (flagship)
AfriqueLlama-8B - Llama-based 8B model

License

This model is released under the CC BY 4.0 License. Please review the license terms before use.

Acknowledgments

We thank the creators of the base models, datasets and compute resources that made this work possible, including Mila, Compute Canada, Microsoft, the FineWeb team, WURA, MADLAD-400 and etc..