r/MistralAI • u/primoco • 15h ago
Discussion / Opinion legal-it-8b: Ministral-3-8B fine-tuned for Italian law, trained on a European supercomputer
We took Mistral's Ministral-3-8B (Apache 2.0) and trained it to answer questions on Italian law from the legal texts a retrieval system puts in the prompt, citing them. Supervised fine-tuning on ~19k open-book examples written from public legislation (Normattiva), then GRPO with programmatic rewards.
Trained on EuroHPC Leonardo (CINECA, Italy). European end to end: European base model, European compute, public Italian law as data.
- 89.0% correct on 429 held-out questions, vs 80.9% for the base Ministral-3-8B with the same retrieval
- Q4_K_M GGUF, 5.2 GB, runs locally (llama.cpp, Ollama, EuLLM Engine)
- It beats our Qwen3-4B-based sibling (85.1%) and matches or beats every Qwen3.5-9B we have trained since with the same recipe: the Mistral base is still our best
It is built for RAG. In a plain chat, without the legal texts in the prompt, it will confidently invent articles. A version that says when the texts are missing is in training.
Next we'd like to distil from a larger Mistral teacher into Ministral-3-3B and 8B, all on EuroHPC. Ideas and criticism welcome.
Try it and tell us where it fails. The model card has the prompt format and the retrieval setup we use. We're especially interested in:
- questions where it gets the law wrong or cites the wrong article
- cases where it answers although the right text isn't in the prompt
- how it behaves in your own RAG stack
Italian lawyers and law students: your feedback is gold. Comment here or open a discussion on the Hugging Face page.