EdgeRunner 20B: Military Task Parity with GPT-5 while Running on the Edge

Jack FitzGerald; Aristotelis Lazaridis; Dylan Bates; Aman Sharma; Jonnathan Castillo; Yousif Azami; Sean Bailey; Jeremy Cao; Peter Damianov; Kevin de Haan; Luke Kerbs; Vincent Lu; Joseph Madigan; Jeremy McLaurin; Jonathan Tainer; Dave Anderson; Jonathan Beck; Jamie Cuticello; Colton Malkerson; Tyler Saltsman

arXiv · 2510.26550

EdgeRunner 20B: Military Task Parity with GPT-5 while Running on the Edge

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Abstract

We present EdgeRunner 20B, a fine-tuned version of gpt-oss-20b optimized for military tasks. EdgeRunner 20B was trained on 1.6M high-quality records curated from military documentation and websites. We also present four new tests sets: (a) combat arms, (b) combat medic, (c) cyber operations, and (d) mil-bench-5k (general military knowledge). On these military test sets, EdgeRunner 20B matches or exceeds GPT-5 task performance with 95%+ statistical significance, except for the high reasoning setting on the combat medic test set and the low reasoning setting on the mil-bench-5k test set. Versus gpt-oss-20b, there is no statistically-significant regression on general-purpose benchmarks like ARC-C, GPQA Diamond, GSM8k, IFEval, MMLU Pro, or TruthfulQA, except for GSM8k in the low reasoning setting. We also present analyses on hyperparameter settings, cost, and throughput. These findings show that small, locally-hosted models are ideal solutions for data-sensitive operations such as in the military domain, allowing for deployment in air-gapped edge devices.

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Jack FitzGerald, Aristotelis Lazaridis, Dylan Bates, Aman Sharma, Jonnathan Castillo, Yousif Azami, Sean Bailey, Jeremy Cao, Peter Damianov, Kevin de Haan, Luke Kerbs, Vincent Lu, Joseph Madigan, Jeremy McLaurin, Jonathan Tainer, Dave Anderson, Jonathan Beck, Jamie Cuticello, Colton Malkerson, Tyler Saltsman. 2025-10-30. EdgeRunner 20B: Military Task Parity with GPT-5 while Running on the Edge. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26550

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