TaiPhone: A Phone-Scale LLM Rooted in Taiwanese Knowledge

TaiPhone is a low-cost, lightweight language model built for Traditional Chinese, with a strong focus on Taiwanese language, culture, and context. Trained on just 0.7 billion carefully curated tokens and enhanced with chat vector techniques, TaiPhone delivers superior performance compared to similarly sized open-source 1B or 3B-scale LLMs. TaiPhone shows that with the right data, effective and culturally-aware models can be built at a fraction of the cost.

Model Information

Base model: https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-3.2-1B
Context length: 16k
Training detail:
- Numbers of tokens: 0.7B tokens
- Continual pretraining(CP) epochs: 2
- Fine-tuning(FT) epochs: 3
- CP learning rate: 5e-5 with cosine scheduler.
- FT learning rate: 1e-5 with cosine scheduler.

Benchmark

Evalaution code can be found here: https://github.com/aqweteddy/TaiphoneEval

MCQ Evaluation Process

The model is prompted to answer each multiple-choice question in free-form, without being constrained to a specific format.
A lightweight LLM (e.g., GPT-4.1-nano) is then used to extract the model’s final selected option from its response.
Accuracy is calculated by comparing the extracted answers against the correct choices.

Score

1B Scale

Model	TW-MCQ	MMLU-Redux
LLaMA3.2-1B-Instruct	0.305	0.403
LLaMA3.2-1B-it-chinese-kyara	0.360	0.405
LLaMA3.2-TaiPhone-1B-Instruct-v0.1 (Ours)	0.375	0.421

3B Scale

Model	TW-MCQ	MMLU-Redux
LLaMA3.2-3B-Instruct	0.442	0.569
LLaMA3.2-3B-it-chinese-kyara	0.462	0.405
Llama-3.2-3B-F1-Instruct	0.458	0.548
LLaMA3.2-TaiPhone-3B-Instruct-v0.1 (Ours)	0.502	0.578