Expedition Tiny Aya 2026

A global research challenge built on open, efficient multilingual language models.

🚀 What is Expedition Aya?

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Expedition Tiny Aya is a multi-phase, mentor-supported research challenge designed to catalyze new projects using the Tiny Aya model family. It brings together researchers, engineers, and open-source builders to explore multilingual AI—especially for low-resource languages—and to share their work publicly.

Why it matters

• First access to generative models in some languages
• Open research and open-source impact
• Community-driven collaboration with expert mentorship to grow your research skills

Expedition Tiny Aya is supported by the Cohere Labs Open Science Community, which provides technical guidance, collaboration infrastructure, and support towards publication.

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🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Who Should Get Involved?

Expedition Aya is for people who want to:

• Do ML research or open-source work using Tiny Aya
• Collaborate closely with mentors and peers
• Publish blog posts and potentially work towards research papers
• Contribute to open, non-commercial AI ecosystems

Projects must be research- or impact-focused (not startups), with some acceptable gray areas like tooling, datasets, or evaluation frameworks.

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🌐 Tiny Aya: The Model Behind the Expedition

Tiny Aya is a family of small, efficient multilingual language models designed for accessibility and research.

Key features 🔑

• ~3.35B parameters
• Optimized for on-device and local deployment
• Strong support for low-resource languages
• Language-cluster focus (Indic & Middle East, Asia, Europe)
• Cultural prompt adaptation and fusion techniques

Common use cases 💬

• First-time generative AI access in underrepresented languages
• Multilingual model comparison and evaluation
• Open-source tooling, datasets, and benchmarks
• Local or edge deployment experiments

→ Learn more about Tiny Aya

→ Read the Technical Report

→ Attend the Tiny Aya Technical Deep Dive, Mar 2

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🗓️ Program Structure

Phase 1 — Ideation & Team Formation 🧠

****Feb. 24 - March 8

• Share ideas for research and impact-focused projects, using Tiny Aya
• Meet new collaborators through synchronous and async sessions
• Submit a project proposal and scope to be considered for Phase 2 mentorship
• Demonstrate commitment and clarity of thought

Outputs:

• List of team captains (max 2) and crew members (max 5)
• Project proposals scope, to be considered by mentors to progress to Phase 2

**Phase 2 — Hackathon ⌨️

March 10 - March 24**

• Proposals submitted during Phase 1 will be selected by mentors to progress to Phase 2
• Sprint on your project ideas - teams build, experiment, and iterate intensively
• API credits to work with Cohere and Cohere Labs models
• Frequent, asynchronous support from your mentor
• Meet with your project mentor ~2 times during this period.
• Prepare a 5-minute demo/talk

Outcome:

• Each team presents a 5-minute demo/talk on their progress, to be considered to progress to Phase 3

Phase 3 — Blog Posts & Publication 📃

March 25-April 23

• Teams with promising projects invited for continued support to work towards a public research out put (eg. technical blog post).
• Lighter-touch mentorship as teams continue to explore their ideas, with a focus on writing and sharing results publicly

Support includes:

• Editing and feedback on blog posts
• Amplification through Cohere Labs channels
• Retrospective summary linking all projects
• Optional guidance toward papers, workshops, or arXiv
• Public online showcase of all projects

Teams are encouraged to continue working together toward publication after the program.

🙋How to Get Involved

🧑‍🏫Mentorship

💁 Meet our 2026 Expedition Aya Mentors

🌟Reasons to join Expedition Tiny Aya

ℹ️ Helpful Links & Other Info

FAQ

Captains Guide

Ready to captain a team? Submit the form now!

Ready to join a crew? Check out the projects looking for crew members

Join us on Discord

Learn more about Tiny Aya

Read the Tiny Aya Technical Report

Learn more about Cohere Labs

To help inspire you with ideas and to give you an idea of the breadth of projects, check out the closing ceremony from Expedition Aya 2025