NVIDIA Star Elastic: One Checkpoint Contains 30B, 23B, and 12B Reasoning Models via Zero-Shot Slicing — Accepted at ICML 2026

r/LocalLLaMA·high signal

NVIDIA released Star Elastic, a post-training method that embeds three nested submodels (30B/3.6B active, 23B/2.8B active, 12B/2.0B active) in a single Nemotron Nano v3 checkpoint. The technique uses only 160B tokens (360x reduction vs pretraining from scratch) and reduces memory for deploying all three sizes from 126.1GB to 58.9GB in BF16. The 23B-to-30B configuration achieves up to 16% higher accuracy and 1.9x lower latency compared to default budget control.