**Apriel-1.6-15B-Thinker** is an updated multimodal reasoning model in ServiceNow’s Apriel SLM series, building on [**Apriel-1.5-15B-Thinker**](https://huggingface.co/ServiceNow-AI/Apriel-1.5-15b-Thinker). With significantly improved text and image reasoning capabilities, Apriel-1.6 achieves competitive performance against models up to 10x its size. Like its predecessor, it benefits from extensive continual pretraining across both text and image domains. We further perform post-training, focusing on Supervised Finetuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL). Apriel-1.6 obtains frontier performance without sacrificing reasoning token efficiency. The model improves or maintains task performance in comparison with Apriel-1.5-15B-Thinker, while *reducing reasoning token usage by more than 30%*.

**Highlights**

* Achieves a score of **57** on the Artificial Analysis index outperforming models like Gemini 2.5 Flash, Claude Haiku 4.5 and GPT OSS 20b. It obtains a score on par with Qwen3 235B A22B, while being signficantly more efficient.
* Scores **69** on Tau2 Bench Telecom and **69** on IFBench, which are key benchmarks for the enterprise domain.
* At 15B parameters, the model fits on a single GPU, making it highly memory-efficient.
* Based on community feedback on Apriel-1.5-15b-Thinker, we simplified the chat template by removing redundant tags and introduced four special tokens to the tokenizer (`<tool_calls>`, `</tool_calls>`, `[BEGIN FINAL RESPONSE]`, `<|end|>`) for easier output parsing.

ServiceNow-AI/Apriel-1.6-15b-Thinker · Hugging Face