K2-Horizon

K2-Horizon-3.7B is the small dense member of the K2-Horizon family: a 3.7B-core decoder-only model with a 512K context window.

K2-Horizon-3.7B Highlights

• Strong small-model baseline. A dense model evaluated on the same agentic, coding, and reasoning benchmarks as the rest of the family.
• 512K context. Native 524,288-token context from the midtraining stages onward.
• Intermediate checkpoints. Intermediate checkpoints are released so capability changes can be studied across training rather than at a single checkpoint.
• Fully open. Training data and recipe, training code, and evaluation resources are public.

Benchmark Results

The chart at the top of this card shows K2-Horizon-3.7B against selected reference models. The table below lists every comparison model used in the figure.

Full Results

Scores in %. Bold marks the best score in each row. Baseline protocols may differ;

Quickstart

Serving

vLLM, recipe at recipes.vllm.ai/IFM:

vllm serve IFM/K2-Horizon-3.7B \
  --trust-remote-code \
  --dtype bfloat16 \
  --max-model-len 131072 \
  --tensor-parallel-size 1 \
  --reasoning-parser k2_horizon \
  --enable-auto-tool-choice \
  --tool-call-parser k2_horizon

SGLang, this is the recipe validated in the SGLang K2 Horizon cookbook:

sglang serve \
  --model-path IFM/K2-Horizon-3.7B \
  --revision c177771836a4c460743c00002c22483f6f18d1eb \
  --tp 1 \
  --dtype bfloat16 \
  --attention-backend fa3 \
  --reasoning-parser k2_horizon \
  --host 0.0.0.0 \
  --port 30000

API Usage

[!Tip] Recommended settings: reasoning_effort="high", temperature=1.0, top_p=0.95, and at least 32,768 output tokens. Reasoning depth is selected per request through chat_template_kwargs. Thinking is returned in reasoning_content and the answer in content.

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(base_url="http://localhost:30000/v1", api_key="EMPTY")
response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="IFM/K2-Horizon-3.7B",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Explain the result step by step."}],
    temperature=1.0,
    top_p=0.95,
    max_tokens=32768,
    extra_body={"chat_template_kwargs": {"reasoning_effort": "high"}},
)
message = response.choices[0].message
print("Reasoning:", getattr(message, "reasoning_content", None))
print("Answer:", message.content)

Transformers

Validated with Transformers 5.15.0, PyTorch 2.13.0, Safetensors 0.8.0.

from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

model_id = "IFM/K2-Horizon-3.7B"
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_id, trust_remote_code=True)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    model_id, device_map="auto", dtype="bfloat16", low_cpu_mem_usage=True, trust_remote_code=True
)

inputs = tokenizer("Explain why long-context evaluation is difficult.", return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)
inputs.pop("token_type_ids", None)
outputs = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=32768, temperature=1.0, top_p=0.95, do_sample=True)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0], skip_special_tokens=True))

Best Practices

1. Reasoning effort: always high. All reported results use high reasoning effort. Pass {"chat_template_kwargs": {"reasoning_effort": "high"}} on every request; medium and low trade accuracy for speed and are not recommended for evaluation.
2. Sampling parameters. temperature=1.0, top_p=0.95.
3. Output length. Allow at least 32,768 output tokens so reasoning is never cut off. Truncated reasoning is a failed response, not a shorter one.
4. Serving. Use the validated SGLang recipe above: BF16, TP=1, FlashAttention-3. Full recipes for every K2-Horizon size, with measured H200 latency and throughput, are in the SGLang cookbook.
5. Parsers. Enable the k2_horizon reasoning parser for chat, and add the k2_horizon tool-call parser for agent use. Leave both off for plain completion-style generation.
6. Revisions. Pin a revision tag when reproducibility matters. main is the default checkpoint; base_final and the mid_*_final tags identify training stages.

Citation

@misc{k2horizon2026,
  title  = {Introducing K2 Horizon: Frontier Performance, Radically Open},
  author = {{IFM Team}},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://ifm.ai/blog/k2/},
}