AMD Releases Instella-MoE-16B-A3B: A Fully Open Mixture-of-Experts LLM With 2.8B Active Parameters Trained On Instinct GPUs
AMD launched Instella-MoE-16B-A3B, a completely open Mixture-of-Experts language mannequin skilled from scratch on Instinct MI300X and MI325X GPUs. The mannequin holds 16B complete parameters however prompts solely 2.8B per token. AMD is publishing weights from each coaching stage, together with information mixtures, coaching configs, and inference code. Two systems-level decisions carry the discharge: Gated Multi-head Latent Attention and FarSkip-Collective connectivity.
Is it deployable?
Partly. The weights ship below a ResearchRAIL license for tutorial and analysis functions solely, so this isn’t a drop-in industrial mannequin. The training codebase is MIT licensed, and that’s the extra reusable asset right here.
- Company degree: AI analysis labs, college teams, and enterprise R&D groups with data-center GPU capability. Not a match for lean startups wanting a hosted industrial endpoint.
- Industries: semiconductor and cloud infrastructure, AI tooling distributors, and tutorial analysis.
- Applications: reproducing an end-to-end MoE recipe, learning expert-parallel serving, evaluating 64K long-context habits, and working RL post-training experiments.
- Serving value: 16B parameters in BF16 want roughly 32 GB of weight reminiscence, so one high-memory accelerator suffices. AMD ships SGLang inference code.

Architecture
Instella-MoE is a decoder-only MoE with 27 layers, hidden dimension 2048, 16 consideration heads, and a 128,896-token vocabulary. Each MoE layer makes use of 2 shared consultants plus 6 routed consultants chosen from 64. That yields 2.8B energetic parameters towards 16B complete. A Multi-Token Prediction goal is used throughout pre-training and mid-training.
There are two structural decisions which can be necessary to know. Gated MLA provides a light-weight realized output gate to Multi-head Latent Attention. A devoted linear projection derives an input-conditioned gate, utilized multiplicatively earlier than the output projection. FarSkip-Collective passes outdated and partial activations into the MoE and a focus layers, overlapping expert-parallel communication with computation. AMD stories a 12.7% pre-training speedup and as much as a 39.2% discount in time to first token when serving with knowledgeable parallelism.
Training pipeline
Pre-training covers 7.1T tokens from open corpora together with Nemotron-CC-v2, MegaMath, WonderfulMath, RefineCode, and TxT360. Mid-training makes use of Dolma3 Dolmino 100B throughout three information variants, merged by weight averaging. A long-context stage extends the window from 4K to 64K utilizing YaRN, an elevated RoPE theta, and doc masking.
Post-training runs SFT on Dolci-Think-SFT-7B plus Nemotron mixtures, ending on a feedback-driven 512K-example set focusing on measured weaknesses. DPO follows, with router bias updates and the auxiliary load-balancing loss disabled to forestall degradation. RL runs within the Miles framework: 1,400 steps of instruction-following RLVR, then Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation to fold that acquire again with out shedding math or code.
Results
The base checkpoint averages 76.7, the strongest amongst totally open fashions, forward of Moonlight-16B-A3B (76.2), SmolLM3-3B-Base (70.5), OLMo-3-7B (70.1), and OLMoE-1B-7B (61.9). It trails Qwen3.5-4B-Base (79.5). It leads on WinoGrande (86.5) and scores 65.7 on HumanEval+. Long-context averages are 41.5 on HELMET and 79.4 on RULER.
Post-training climbs from SFT (71.58) to DPO (72.67) to Think (73.22), above Olmo3-7B-Think (71.97), Gemma-4-E4B suppose (70.47), and Qwen3.5-4B (69.73). IFEval rises from 77.08 to 83.70.
Interactive explainer
Key Takeaways
- 16B complete parameters, 2.8B energetic per token: 2 shared plus 6 of 64 routed consultants.
- Gated MLA and FarSkip-Collective give a 12.7% coaching speedup and 39.2% decrease TTFT.
- Trained end-to-end on AMD Instinct MI300X and MI325X with ROCm, Primus, and Miles.
- Base averages 76.7 and Think averages 73.22, each main totally open friends.
- ResearchRAIL weights restrict industrial use; the MIT-licensed coaching code doesn’t.
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Sources: ROCm blog · Hugging Face collection · GitHub
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