Paper
Phi-4 Technical Report
Authors
Marah Abdin, J. Aneja, Harkirat Singh Behl, Sébastien Bubeck, Ronen Eldan, S. Gunasekar, Michael Harrison, Russell J. Hewett, Mojan Javaheripi, Piero Kauffmann, James R. Lee, Yin Tat Lee, Yuanzhi Li, Weishung Liu, C. C. T. Mendes, Anh Nguyen, Eric Price, Gustavo de Rosa, Olli Saarikivi, Adil Salim, Shital Shah, Xin Wang, Rachel Ward, Yue Wu, Dingli Yu, Cyril Zhang, Yi Zhang
Abstract
We present phi-4, a 14-billion parameter language model developed with a training recipe that is centrally focused on data quality. Unlike most language models, where pre-training is based primarily on organic data sources such as web content or code, phi-4 strategically incorporates synthetic data throughout the training process. While previous models in the Phi family largely distill the capabilities of a teacher model (specifically GPT-4), phi-4 substantially surpasses its teacher model on STEM-focused QA capabilities, giving evidence that our data-generation and post-training techniques go beyond distillation. Despite minimal changes to the phi-3 architecture, phi-4 achieves strong performance relative to its size -- especially on reasoning-focused benchmarks -- due to improved data, training curriculum, and innovations in the post-training scheme.