Microsoft: Phi-4 Reasoning Competes with Larger Models and Achieves DeepSeek-R1 Performance

Microsoft: Phi-4 Reasoning Competes with Larger Models and Achieves DeepSeek-R1 Performance

Microsoft Unveils Phi-4-Reasoning: A Breakthrough in Language Models

In an exciting development for artificial intelligence, Microsoft has introduced Phi-4-reasoning, a 14 billion parameter model designed to tackle complex reasoning tasks with impressive efficacy. This innovative model has been created using supervised fine-tuning on a specifically curated set of “teachable”prompts, which were generated with the help of o3-mini, ensuring that the training data is both high-quality and relevant.

Alongside this, the company also rolled out Phi-4-reasoning-plus, a variant that not only retains the 14B parameter design but enhances reasoning capabilities by producing longer reasoning traces, thereby offering improved performance benchmarks.

Performance Metrics: A Competitive Edge

According to findings detailed in Microsoft’s recent whitepaper, the Phi-4-reasoning models demonstrate superior performance compared to several larger models, including the well-known DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B. Remarkably, these models even match the full capabilities of the DeepSeek-R1 model across specific benchmarks. Additionally, they have outperformed the Claude 3.7 Sonnet from Anthropic and Gemini 2 Flash Thinking from Google in nearly all tasks, with exceptions noted for GPQA and Calendar Planning.

Microsoft Phi-4-Reasoning
Microsoft’s Phi-4-Reasoning Model

Insights into Model Development and Limitations

The promising performance of the Phi-4-reasoning model reinforces the idea that meticulous data curation for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) can significantly enhance the capabilities of reasoning language models. Furthermore, there is potential for performance boosts through the implementation of reinforcement learning techniques.

However, the Phi-4-reasoning model does come with certain restrictions. Primarily, it is tailored for English text and has been predominantly trained on Python, utilizing standard coding libraries. Additionally, it operates with a limited context length of 32, 000 tokens. For a deeper understanding of its capabilities and constraints, readers can refer to the whitepaper.

Introducing Phi-4-reasoning, adding reasoning models to the Phi family of SLMs. The model is trained with both supervised finetuning (using a carefully curated dataset of reasoning demonstration) and Reinforcement Learning.📌Competitive results on reasoning benchmarks with… pic.twitter.com/p2FkjD4qfu

Implications for AI Development

Microsoft envisions the Phi-4-reasoning models as pivotal tools in advancing research in language models. Their applications are expected to be particularly beneficial in environments where memory or computational resources are limited, scenarios with high latency requirements, and tasks that demand intensive reasoning.

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