---
language: en
pipeline_tag: text-generation
library_name: pytorch
tags:
- causal-lm
- small-language-model
- research
- text-generation
license: other
thumbnail: Aurora-5.png
---

# Vortex Alpha

![Vortex Alpha banner](Aurora-5.png)

[![Open In Colab](https://colab.research.google.com/assets/colab-badge.svg)](https://colab.research.google.com/#create=true&url=https://huggingface.co/North-ML1/vortex-alpha/resolve/main/Vortex_Alpha_Colab.ipynb)

Vortex is the working name for a compact, experimental language model. The
final public name has not been decided. This release is intended for research,
local experimentation, and further fine-tuning—not as a finished general
assistant.

## What is included

- `model.safetensors`: the instruction/tool-format preview selected from the
  best small internal behavior pilot.
- `base_model.safetensors`: the corresponding pretrained text-completion
  base.
- `config.json`: the architecture configuration.
- `tokenizer.model`: the 8,192-piece SentencePiece tokenizer used for both
  checkpoints.
- `vortex_model.py` and `inference.py`: a minimal dependency-light PyTorch
  loader and sampler.
- `configuration_vortex.py`, `modeling_vortex.py`, and
  `tokenization_vortex.py`: standard Transformers remote-code modules for
  `AutoModelForCausalLM` and `AutoTokenizer`.
- `Vortex_Alpha_Colab.ipynb`: a one-click Google Colab quickstart.
- `requirements.txt` and `chat_template.jinja`: convenience metadata for
  local and notebook use.
- `Aurora-5.png`: the project thumbnail/banner.

Optimizer state, private logs, local paths, credentials, and training-machine
metadata are intentionally not included.

## Architecture

Vortex is a dense decoder-only Transformer with 174,942,720 trainable
parameters:

| Component | Parameters |
| --- | ---: |
| Shared token embedding and tied output head | 8,388,608 |
| Attention Q projections | 12,582,912 |
| Attention K projections | 3,145,728 |
| Attention V projections | 3,145,728 |
| Attention output projections | 12,582,912 |
| Per-head QK RMSNorm parameters | 1,536 |
| SwiGLU feed-forward networks | 135,069,696 |
| Transformer-block RMSNorm parameters | 24,576 |
| Final RMSNorm | 1,024 |
| **Total** | **174,942,720** |

Configuration: 12 layers, hidden size 1,024, 16 query heads, 4 key/value
heads, 64-dimensional heads, SwiGLU with intermediate size 3,664, pre-layer
RMSNorm, per-head QK-Norm, RoPE with base 100,000, bias-free projections,
8,192-token vocabulary, and a 4,096-token training/inference limit.

The published weights use the readable reference PyTorch layout. They do not
require Transformer Engine to load. The input and output embeddings are tied.

## Quick start

The minimal reference runner uses PyTorch, SentencePiece, and
`safetensors`:

```bash
python -m pip install torch sentencepiece safetensors
python inference.py \
  --weights model.safetensors \
  --chat \
  --prompt "Explain why the sky appears blue in two short paragraphs."
```

For the normal Hugging Face API, load the custom architecture through the
repository's small remote-code modules:

```python
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

repo = "North-ML1/vortex-alpha"
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(repo, trust_remote_code=True)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    repo, trust_remote_code=True, torch_dtype="auto"
)
inputs = tokenizer("Explain why the sky appears blue.", return_tensors="pt")
outputs = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=80, do_sample=False)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0], skip_special_tokens=True))
```

The tokenizer also exposes the chat template directly:

```python
messages = [{"role": "user", "content": "What is photosynthesis?"}]
chat_inputs = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(
    messages, add_generation_prompt=True, return_tensors="pt"
)
outputs = model.generate(**chat_inputs, max_new_tokens=80, do_sample=False)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0], skip_special_tokens=True))
```

The `trust_remote_code=True` flag is required because Vortex's QK-Norm and
GQA implementation is not one of the built-in Transformers model classes.

For ordinary next-token completion, use the base checkpoint:

```bash
python inference.py \
  --weights base_model.safetensors \
  --prompt "The sky appears blue because"
```

The reference runner recomputes the full prefix at each generated token and
is deliberately simple. A production runner should add a KV cache and a
fused attention implementation.

The instruction preview was tuned with this compact serialization:

```text
[SYSTEM]
You are a helpful assistant. Follow instructions, answer clearly, and say
when information is missing.
</s>
[USER]
Your question here
</s>
[ASSISTANT]
```

The instruction preview may emit a `CALL {json}` calculator/search request
when prompted for tool use. No tool server is included in this repository;
without a tool runner, treat such output as ordinary text. The base checkpoint
is the better starting point for continued pretraining.

## Training summary

The base run used an approximate mixture of FineWeb, DCLM, educational/math
material, and The Stack v3 code data. The recorded base checkpoint had seen
about 8.48 billion pretraining tokens. Training used BF16 model computation,
FP8-capable NVIDIA kernels where available, a WSD-style learning-rate tail,
and token-budgeted batches designed for a 16 GB consumer GPU. The instruction
preview is a lightweight supervised derivative of that base; its optimizer
state and private training records are not part of this release.

These data-mixture descriptions are a project-level summary, not a claim that
every upstream document is suitable for every downstream use. Follow the
licenses and terms of the upstream datasets.

## Evaluation snapshot

These are exploratory measurements, not official leaderboard submissions.
The base results used greedy decoding, no tools, and the stated sample sizes:

| Test | Result | Notes |
| --- | ---: | --- |
| MMLU cloze sample | 511/2,000 = 25.55% | Wilson 95% interval: 23.69–27.51% |
| GSM8K strict numeric sample | 0/256 = 0.00% | Wilson 95% upper bound: 1.48% |
| GSM8K fallback numeric sample | 2/256 = 0.78% | Wilson 95% interval: 0.21–2.80% |

The instruction checkpoint reached 9/12 arithmetic, 4/4 grounding, 4/4
abstention, 2/4 exact-format, and 1/2 JSON checks on a 26-prompt internal
tool-format pilot when the calculator runner was available. That pilot is too
small to support general capability claims, and the arithmetic result is not
comparable to tool-free GSM8K.

The results show why this is an alpha release: the model can produce useful
local completions and structured tool calls, but it remains weak at reliable
arithmetic, broad knowledge, long-form coherence, and hallucination control.

## Limitations and intended use

Vortex is a small research model. It can be repetitive, overconfident, or
factually wrong; architecture and training scale do not guarantee reliable
answers. Do not use it as the sole basis for medical, legal, financial,
safety-critical, or other high-stakes decisions. It has not been evaluated for
privacy, bias, cybersecurity, or comprehensive safety.

The repository is public, but no open-source license is asserted yet. The
final name, licensing terms, and a production release decision are still open.

## Reproducibility note

The conversion removed optimizer state and Transformer Engine-only auxiliary
state, then wrote the model tensors in BF16 safetensors format. The exported
reference tensors preserve the tied-embedding model weights and can be loaded
with the included `vortex_model.py`.