AI Singapore (AISG) has launched SEA-LION v4, an open-source multimodal language mannequin developed in collaboration with Google and primarily based on the Gemma 3 (27B) structure. The mannequin is designed to help Southeast Asian languages, together with these with restricted digital sources, and offers each textual content and picture understanding capabilities. SEA-LION v4 makes use of a commercially permissive license and is meant for simple deployment on commonplace {hardware} platforms.
Benchmark Outcomes: “Small” however State-of-the-Artwork
Efficiency evaluations on the SEA-HELM benchmark—a rigorous multilingual suite designed particularly to check Southeast Asian (SEA) languages—affirm SEA-LION v4’s capabilities. Throughout duties in Burmese, Filipino, Indonesian, Malay, Tamil, Thai, and Vietnamese, v4 achieves a high rating amongst fashions below 200B parameters, and globally locations #5 out of 55 fashions examined.
This result’s hanging: the mannequin is just not solely outperforming open-source friends like Llama 3, Qwen 3, and Gemma 3, but additionally holding its personal in opposition to proprietary giants with parameter counts a number of instances bigger.
- Filipino: 74.53 (v4) vs. 74.09 (Gemma 3-27B)
- Malay: 71.31 (v4) vs. 71.20 (Gemma 3-27B)
- Tamil: 68.47 (v4) vs. 68.45 (Gemma 3-27B)
- Burmese: 57.18 (v4) simply behind Gemma 3’s 57.78, outperforming Llama 4 MoE (109B).
In lots of languages, SEA-LION v4 performs on par with or higher than fashions over 3–10x its dimension. This steadiness of effectivity and functionality makes it one of many strongest brazenly out there multilingual fashions for each analysis and business use.
What’s New in SEA-LION v4
The fourth-generation mannequin introduces a number of main technical developments that make it uniquely fitted to each regional and world purposes:
1. Open Sourced
In contrast to many closed fashions, SEA-LION v4 is launched below the commercially permissive Gemma license, decreasing adoption obstacles for startups, researchers, and enterprises. Distribution is supported throughout a number of ecosystems:
- Hugging Face (fine-tuned and base fashions)
- Google Cloud Vertex AI
- AWS SageMaker
- Kaggle for light-weight experimentation
- NVIDIA NIM and Ollama for edge deployment
This openness ensures SEA-LION v4 will be built-in into workflows throughout each cloud-scale enterprises and on-device environments.
2. Effectivity and Portability at Scale
Regardless of its 27B parameters, SEA-LION v4 is designed to run virtually anyplace. With quantized variations in FP4 and FP8, customers can obtain:
- <0.5% efficiency drop vs. full precision
- As much as 50% quicker inference
- Deployment on consumer-grade {hardware} (e.g., a laptop computer with 32GB RAM)
This effectivity democratizes entry: a high-quality multimodal mannequin that beforehand required intensive infrastructure is now out there to researchers or builders with modest setups.
3. Multimodality: Textual content + Imaginative and prescient
SEA-LION v4 is the initiative’s first multimodal launch. Past textual content technology and understanding, the mannequin can “see,” interpret photos, and mix multimodal info in responses. This makes it extremely related to be used circumstances reminiscent of:
- Multilingual doc evaluation and translation with embedded photos
- Picture-grounded query answering in native languages
- Interactive agentic workflows requiring textual content + picture context
The mannequin additionally helps 128K token context home windows, enabling prolonged reasoning over lengthy paperwork, transcripts, or multi-turn prompts, a crucial functionality for enterprise and analysis purposes.
4. Agentic and Structured Interactions
SEA-LION v4 consists of instruments past uncooked language technology, together with:
- Operate calling—enabling integration with exterior APIs and brokers
- Structured outputs—JSON and schema-compliant generations for downstream automation
- Compatibility with agentic workflows well-liked in enterprise adoption of LLMs
Collectively, these enhancements prolong SEA-LION v4 past static Q&A into real-world purposes reminiscent of workflow orchestration, analysis assistants, and multimodal enterprise bots.
Educated for Southeast Asia, Constructed for the World
A singular differentiator of SEA-LION v4 is its coaching basis. The mannequin is skilled on over 1 trillion tokens, with heavy emphasis on a curated Southeast Asian dataset. This makes it notably sturdy in dealing with low-resource regional languages, dialects, and cultural contexts, the place world basis fashions typically fail.
In SEA-HELM’s Filipino, Malay, Tamil, and Burmese duties, SEA-LION v4 is constantly among the many best-performing fashions throughout all parameter ranges. This makes it a essential enabler for digital fairness in a area the place over 600 million individuals depend on various linguistic ecosystems.
On the similar time, as a result of it inherits Gemma’s sturdy general-purpose reasoning, the mannequin stays aggressive in English and world duties, making it a flexible selection for common deployment.
Conclusion
SEA-LION v4 clarify how fashions with 27B parameters, when optimized and skilled on domain-specific information, can obtain aggressive ends in multilingual duties. It gives multilingual efficiency, multimodal capabilities, an open license, and deployability throughout numerous platforms, contributing to developments in regional AI fashions.
Take a look at the Mannequin on Hugging Face and SEA-LION Playground. Be happy to take a look at our GitHub Web page for Tutorials, Codes and Notebooks. Additionally, be at liberty to comply with us on Twitter and don’t neglect to affix our 100k+ ML SubReddit and Subscribe to our E-newsletter.
Asif Razzaq is the CEO of Marktechpost Media Inc.. As a visionary entrepreneur and engineer, Asif is dedicated to harnessing the potential of Synthetic Intelligence for social good. His most up-to-date endeavor is the launch of an Synthetic Intelligence Media Platform, Marktechpost, which stands out for its in-depth protection of machine studying and deep studying information that’s each technically sound and simply comprehensible by a large viewers. The platform boasts of over 2 million month-to-month views, illustrating its reputation amongst audiences.