---
language:
  - it
  - en
license: apache-2.0
tags:
  - text-generation
  - causal-lm
  - bilingual
  - italian
  - english
  - small-language-model
  - trained-from-scratch
  - quark
library_name: transformers
pipeline_tag: text-generation
model-index:
  - name: Quark-135m-Bilingual
    results: []
---


## Overview

Quark-135m-Bilingual is a compact bilingual language model designed for Italian and English, built entirely from scratch by [ThingsAI](https://things-ai.org). It represents the second generation of the Quark model family, featuring a custom bilingual BPE tokenizer and a modern transformer architecture.

This is the **base pretrained model**. An SFT (instruction-tuned) version trained on bilingual conversational data is available for chat applications.

## Model Details

| | |
|---|---|
| **Parameters** | 135M (143.98M with embeddings) |
| **Architecture** | Decoder-only Transformer |
| **Vocabulary** | 65,536 tokens (custom bilingual BPE) |
| **Context Length** | 2,048 tokens |
| **Precision** | BF16 |
| **Languages** | Italian, English |
| **Tokenizer** | [ThingAI/QuarkTokenizer](https://huggingface.co/ThingAI/QuarkTokenizer) |
| **License** | Apache 2.0 |

## Architecture

Quark-135m follows a SmolLM-inspired design optimized for efficiency at small scale:

| Component | Details |
|---|---|
| Attention | Grouped Query Attention (GQA) |
| Heads | 9 query heads, 3 KV heads |
| Head Dimension | 64 |
| Model Dimension | 576 |
| Layers | 30 |
| FFN Dimension | 1,536 |
| FFN Activation | SwiGLU |
| Normalization | RMSNorm (pre-attention & pre-FFN) |
| Positional Encoding | Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) |
| Weight Tying | Yes (embedding ↔ LM head) |

## Training

### Pretraining Data

Quark-135m v0.2 was pretrained on **15.7B tokens** from a curated bilingual mix:

| Subset | Weight | Source |
|---|---|---|
| FineWeb-2 (Italian) | 29% | `HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-2` [ita_Latn] |
| CulturaX (Italian) | 14% | `uonlp/CulturaX` [it] |
| Wikipedia (Italian) | 7% | `wikimedia/wikipedia` [20231101.it] |
| FineWeb (English) | 36% | `HuggingFaceFW/fineweb` [sample-10BT] |
| Wikipedia (English) | 7% | `wikimedia/wikipedia` [20231101.en] |
| The Stack (Code) | 7% | `bigcode/the-stack-smol` |



## Chat Format

The model uses a simple chat template:

```
<|user|>
{user message}
<|end|>
<|assistant|>
{model response}
<|end|>
```

## Tokenizer

Quark-135m v0.2 uses a custom bilingual BPE tokenizer ([ThingAI/QuarkTokenizer](https://huggingface.co/ThingAI/QuarkTokenizer)) specifically designed for Italian and English:

- **Vocabulary**: 65,536 tokens
- **Type**: Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE)
- **Languages**: Balanced Italian + English coverage
- **Published**: [ThingAI/QuarkTokenizer](https://huggingface.co/ThingAI/QuarkTokenizer)

## Usage

### Loading the Model

Quark uses a custom architecture. To load and run inference:

```python
import torch
import json
from safetensors.torch import load_file
from transformers import AutoTokenizer

# Load tokenizer
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("ThingAI/Quark-135m-v0.2")

# Load model (requires custom architecture classes — see repository)
# Full architecture code available in the model repository
```

### Generation Example

```python
prompt = "<|user|>\nCos'è l'intelligenza artificiale?\n<|end|>\n<|assistant|>\n"
ids = tokenizer.encode(prompt, return_tensors="pt").to("cuda")

# Token-by-token generation with sampling
with torch.no_grad():
    for _ in range(200):
        logits = model(ids)[:, -1, :] / 0.7  # temperature
        topk = torch.topk(logits, 40)
        probs = torch.softmax(topk.values, -1)
        idx = topk.indices.gather(-1, torch.multinomial(probs, 1))
        ids = torch.cat([ids, idx], -1)
        if idx.item() == tokenizer.eos_token_id:
            break

print(tokenizer.decode(ids[0], skip_special_tokens=False))
```

## Limitations

- **Scale**: At 135M parameters, the model has limited factual knowledge and reasoning capacity
- **Hallucination**: The model frequently generates plausible but incorrect information
- **Mathematics**: Cannot reliably perform arithmetic beyond simple operations
- **Code**: Generates syntactically plausible but often non-functional code
- **Vocabulary overhead**: The 65k vocabulary consumes ~26% of model parameters in the embedding layer, reducing transformer capacity — a key lesson for v0.3
- **Pretraining plateau**: Loss plateaued at ~4.6 due to the vocab/parameter ratio imbalance

## Comparison with v0.1

| | Quark-135m v0.1 | Quark-135m v0.2 |
|---|---|---|
| **Tokenizer** | cosmo2 (49k) | QuarkTokenizer (65k) |
| **Languages** | Math-focused (EN) | Bilingual IT+EN |
| **Training Data** | 15B tokens (math-heavy) | 15.7B tokens (bilingual web + code) |
| **Final Loss** | ~3.5-4.0 | 4.635 |
| **Strengths** | Arithmetic, math reasoning | Italian fluency, bilingual chat |



## Citation

```bibtex
@misc{quark2026,
  title={Quark: A Family of Compact Bilingual Language Models},
  author={Di Nicola, Michelangelo},
  year={2026},
  publisher={ThingsAI},
  url={https://huggingface.co/ThingAI/Quark-135m-v0.2}
}
```

## Links

- 🌐 [ThingsAI Website](https://things-ai.org)
- 💬 [Things Chat](https://chat.things-ai.org)
- 🔤 [QuarkTokenizer](https://huggingface.co/ThingAI/QuarkTokenizer)
- 📊 [Open SLM Leaderboard](https://huggingface.co/spaces/AxiomicLabs/Open_SLM_Leaderboard)



*Built from scratch by ThingsAI 🇮🇹*