Nova-1.1-0.8B

Bugfix release on top of Nova-1-0.8B: pair-tuned to stop hallucinating tool calls on prompts that need a plain answer, clean XML termination, and the missing Apache-2.0 LICENSE file was added.

• Base: HyperAiCorp/Nova-1-0.8B (f7b64ef)
• Patch: LoRA r16/a16, lr 5e-5, 3 epochs, 241 rows (negatives-heavy: chat / facts / explain prompts that used to trigger fake tool calls, plus positive tool-call anchors across JSON, XML and plain-text protocols), merged into a standalone BF16 checkpoint
• Architecture: unchanged Qwen3_5ForConditionalGeneration, vision encoder preserved, vocab 248320, stock Transformers — drop-in replacement for 1.0

What changed vs Nova-1.0

Probe	Nova-1.0	Nova-1.1
Tell me an interesting fact about the universe! (tools available)	{"name":"get_weather","arguments":{"city":"Earth"}}	plain factual answer
Explain quantum computing in simple terms. (tools available)	invented {"name":"explain",...}	plain factual answer
Hi, what can you help me with? (tools available)	ok	ok
What is 45 plus 12? (JSON protocol)	{"name":"calculator","arguments":{"expression":"45+12"}}	same, exact
Set a timer for 5 minutes.	{"name":"timer","arguments":{"seconds":300}}	same
XML <tool_call> output	sometimes appended fabricated user <tool_response> tail	stops cleanly at </tool_call>
`TOOL timer	seconds=300` (plain protocol)	ok

No regression (spot-checked): calculator/weather/translate/currency/timer/note JSON calls, XML and plain-text protocols, The capital of Australia is Canberra.

Benchmarks

Tool-use (in-house toolbench, n=100, greedy)

Metric	Qwen3.5-0.8B	Nova-1-0.8B	Nova-1.1-0.8B
Overall (100 cases)	55.0%	74.0%	90.0%
Positives — correct tool call (70)	58.6%	88.6%	91.4%
Negatives — no call when none fits (30)	46.7%	40.0%	86.7%
Spurious-call rate ↓	53.3%	60.0%	13.3%

Protocol	Qwen3.5-0.8B	Nova-1-0.8B	Nova-1.1-0.8B
JSON	70.8%	72.3%	89.2%
XML (<tool_call>)	23.8%	85.7%	95.2%
Plain-text (TOOL …)	28.6%	64.3%	85.7%

Suite: 100 cases (EN+RU) — calculator (graded by safe evaluation, not string match), weather, translate, currency, timer, note, greetings/facts/explanations as negatives, 6 multi-step chains with tool history. Identical prompts on all checkpoints, greedy decoding. Reproduce: toolbench.py --model <id> --out r.json.

Knowledge (internal A/B, greedy)

Identical 0-shot greedy protocol on both checkpoints, fixed seed, subsample of the public test sets:

Task (sampled)	Nova-1-0.8B	Nova-1.1-0.8B
GSM8K (n=100)	22.0%	26.0%
ARC-Easy (n=150)	78.7%	77.3%
In-house mini-math (n=6)	6/6	6/6
In-house mini-ARC (n=4)	2/4	3/4

No knowledge regression; math improved slightly. These are internal spot-check numbers with our prompt format, not a full official evaluation run — treat as relative A/B.

Limitations

• Nova is a 0.8B model — for complex reasoning, code generation, or long-context tasks, larger models remain stronger. Its sweet spot is fast, reliable assistant and tool-calling workloads.
• The tool domains and evaluation were validated primarily in English and Russian.
• The fix is dataset-specific: covered prompt families and paraphrases behave, but small models can still misfire on novel phrasing. Validate outputs in high-stakes contexts.

Quickstart

from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoProcessor

model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    "HyperAiCorp/Nova-1.1-0.8B", torch_dtype="bfloat16", trust_remote_code=True
)
processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained("HyperAiCorp/Nova-1.1-0.8B", trust_remote_code=True)

SYSTEM = (
    "You are a virtual assistant developed by HyperAI. You assist with day-to-day "
    "tasks, are helpful, polite and concise, and respond in the same language as the user."
)

messages = [
    {"role": "system", "content": SYSTEM},
    {"role": "user", "content": "What is the capital of Australia?"},
]

text = processor.apply_chat_template(messages, tokenize=False, add_generation_prompt=True)
inputs = processor(text=text, return_tensors="pt")
outputs = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=128)
print(processor.decode(outputs[0][inputs["input_ids"].shape[-1]:], skip_special_tokens=True))
# The capital of Australia is Canberra.

Function calling (JSON protocol)

messages = [
    {
        "role": "system",
        "content": SYSTEM + "\n\nYou have access to tools: calculator(expression), get_weather(city). "
        'Reply with ONLY a JSON object: {"name": "tool_name", "arguments": {"param": "value"}}.',
    },
    {"role": "user", "content": "What is 45 plus 12?"},
]
# -> {"name": "calculator", "arguments": {"expression": "45+12"}}

Deployment Notes

• Optimized for lightweight assistant deployments and on-device scenarios.
• For long generations, streaming with early interruption is recommended.
• The vision encoder is inherited from the base model; the checkpoint's training focus is conversational and tool-based interaction.
• GGUF / Ollama builds for 1.1 are planned; meanwhile the 1.0 GGUF repo shows the quantization flow.

Disabling Thinking Mode

Like the base, Nova answers directly. In some runtimes the model may start an internal chain-of-thought that slows responses and breaks tool-calling — keep thinking disabled:

• llama.cpp: add --reasoning off.
• Ollama: use a TEMPLATE that pre-closes the thinking block (an response marker right after thinking).
• Transformers: use a system prompt that forbids reasoning and generate with greedy decoding.

Citation

@software{hyperai_nova_1_1_8b,
  title  = {Nova-1.1-0.8B: Pair-Tuned Function-Calling Assistant},
  author = {HyperAI},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://huggingface.co/HyperAiCorp/Nova-1.1-0.8B},
}

License

Apache-2.0, consistent with the base Qwen3.5-0.8B. See LICENSE.

About HyperAI

HyperAI develops compact, deployable language assistants and tool-calling models. Reach us through the community discussions.