---
license: apache-2.0
library_name: transformers
pipeline_tag: text-generation
language:
- en
tags:
- custom_code
- small-language-model
- hybrid-attention
- sliding-window-attention
- muon
datasets:
- karpathy/climbmix-400b-shuffle
- HuggingFaceTB/dclm-edu
- Fredithefish/Nemotron-CC-HQ-20B
- caskcsg/NExtLong-512K-dataset
- Yxanul/cc-math-finest
---

# 100M-exp

A 98M-parameter base language model, trained from scratch on 21B tokens.

`100M-exp` is an experiment in small-model design: a hybrid sliding-window / full-attention transformer with a few additions meant to help at this scale. It was trained for 40k steps as a branch of a longer run, ending with a learning-rate cooldown. It scores **22.47** on the Open SLM Leaderboard's Intelligence Index (self-evaluated).

---

## At a glance

| | |
|---|---|
| **Parameters** | 98.2M (tied input/output embedding) |
| **Layers** | 20 (18 sliding-window + 2 full attention) |
| **Width** | 576 hidden, 9 query heads / 3 key-value heads (head dim 64) |
| **Context** | 8,192 tokens |
| **Vocabulary** | 32,000 (Mistral BPE) |
| **Training tokens** | ~21B (40,000 steps x 524,288 tokens) |
| **Optimizer** | Muon (matrices) + AdamW (everything else) |
| **Type** | Base model (not instruction-tuned) |

---

## Benchmarks

All scores are zero-shot, `acc_norm`, measured with our evaluation script that mirrors the leaderboard's Intelligence Index.

| Benchmark | Score | Random chance | What it tests |
|---|---|---|---|
| HellaSwag | **37.78** | 25 | Common-sense sentence completion |
| ARC-Easy | **49.83** | 25 | Grade-school science questions |
| ARC-Challenge | **27.22** | 25 | Harder science questions |
| PIQA | **66.97** | 50 | Physical common sense |
| ArithMark-3 | **40.00** | 25 | Arithmetic reasoning |
| WikiText (bits/byte, lower is better) | **0.9226** | | Raw language modeling |

### Intelligence Index: 22.47

*Self-evaluated; the leaderboard's own run may differ by a few tenths.*

### How the Index is built

The Index measures **how far above random guessing** a model is, as a share of the gap between guessing and perfect, averaged across tasks:

![How the Index is built: HellaSwag 17.0, ARC 18.0, PIQA 33.9 and ArithMark 20.0 (weighted 0.65) points above chance, averaged to 22.47](assets/index.png)

In other words, `100M-exp` covers about 22% of the distance between random guessing and a perfect score.

---

## More benchmarks

Beyond the leaderboard tasks: zero-shot, `lm-evaluation-harness`, same model.

| Benchmark | Metric | Score | Random chance | What it tests |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SciQ | acc / acc_norm | **83.4** / 76.5 | 25 | Science questions with a supporting passage |
| BLiMP (67 subtasks) | acc | **81.3** | 50 | Grammar: picking the grammatical sentence of a minimal pair |
| LAMBADA (OpenAI) | acc | **32.8** | ~0 | Predicting a passage's final word from long context |
| LAMBADA (OpenAI) | perplexity (lower is better) | **37.1** | | |
| BoolQ | acc | **57.6** | 62 (always "yes") | Yes/no reading comprehension |

---

## Architecture

`100M-exp` is a pre-norm decoder-only transformer with a **hybrid attention** layout: most layers only look at a local window, and two layers see everything.

![100M-exp layer layout: 18 sliding-window blocks and 2 full-attention blocks (7 and 15), with tied embedding and output head](assets/layers.png)

Inside every block:

![Inside a block: RMSNorm, fused qkv, causal conv, HoPE, attention with a learned sink and value residual, then RMSNorm and SwiGLU MLP, each with a residual connection](assets/block.png)

**What each piece does, in plain terms:**

- **Sliding-window + full attention.** 18 of 20 layers attend only to the previous 512 tokens, which is cheap and good at local grammar and phrasing. Two full-attention layers (7 and 15) connect the whole 8k context, so long-range information still flows.
- **Attention sinks.** Each head has a learned "nowhere" slot it can attend to, so it doesn't have to dump attention on real tokens when nothing is relevant (gpt-oss style).
- **HoPE positions.** A RoPE variant: rotary dimensions slower than one turn per 8k tokens are left un-rotated, giving the model some position-free channels for pure content matching.
- **Short causal convolution.** A tiny 4-token convolution on queries, keys and values lets each token blend in its immediate neighbours before attention, which tends to help small models.
- **Value residual (ResFormer).** Every block can mix in the first block's values, keeping early token information easy to reach in deep layers.
- **Document masking.** Documents packed into the same 8k sequence can never attend to each other, so the model never learns false connections between unrelated texts.
- **GQA 9:3.** Three key-value heads shared across nine query heads, which keeps attention lean.

---

## Training

### Data mix

![Training data mix: ClimbMix 45%, DCLM-Edu 15%, Nemotron-CC high quality 15%, NExtLong 15%, CC-Math-Finest 10%](assets/data_mix.png)

A broad, quality-filtered web mix, an educational slice, long documents for the 8k context, and a math slice. Every training batch draws from every source.

### Recipe

| | |
|---|---|
| Batch | 524,288 tokens per step (8,192 context) |
| Steps | 40,000 (~21B tokens, ~214 tokens per parameter) |
| Optimizer | Muon (momentum 0.95, weight decay 0.1) for attention and MLP matrices; AdamW (betas 0.9/0.95, no decay) for embeddings, norms, sinks and convs |
| Peak LR | 1e-3 |
| Precision | bf16 with fp32 loss accumulation |
| Gradient clipping | 1.0 |

### Schedule

![Learning-rate schedule: 500-step warmup, constant 1e-3 to 30k, then a 1 - sqrt cooldown to zero at 40k; Index 20.61 before the cooldown and 22.47 after](assets/schedule.png)

`100M-exp` is a **cooldown branch**: it starts from the step-30k checkpoint of a longer 100k-step run and decays the learning rate to zero over 10k steps. Most of the final gain came from the cooldown:

| Checkpoint | Intelligence Index | WikiText bits/byte |
|---|---|---|
| 30k, before cooldown (best weight average) | 20.61 | 0.9443 |
| 32k, cooldown starting | 20.87 | 0.9510 |
| 39k, near the end | 21.94 | 0.9241 |
| **40k, final (`100M-exp`)** | **22.47** | **0.9226** |

---

## Usage

The model uses custom code, so `trust_remote_code=True` is required.

**Requirements:** PyTorch 2.5 or newer (attention runs on FlexAttention); tested with transformers 5.14. On an Ampere or newer GPU (compute capability 8.0+) with triton, attention is compiled; on CPU, older GPUs (T4, V100), or if compiling fails, it falls back to chunked attention: the same results, with sliding-window layers scoring only the 512 keys each query can see, so memory grows with length instead of length squared (set `SWA_NO_COMPILE=1` to force it). GPUs without bf16 (T4, V100) and CPUs: load with `dtype=torch.float32`. Generation uses a KV cache. Batches must not be padded: generate one prompt at a time, or batch only prompts of equal length.

```python
import torch
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

repo = "User01110/100M-exp"
tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(repo)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(repo, trust_remote_code=True, dtype=torch.bfloat16).cuda().eval()

prompt = "The process of photosynthesis"
ids = tok(prompt, return_tensors="pt").input_ids.cuda()
out = model.generate(ids, max_new_tokens=60, do_sample=True, temperature=0.7, top_p=0.9)
print(tok.decode(out[0], skip_special_tokens=True))
```

---

## Limitations

- **A base model.** It continues text; it was not trained to follow instructions or chat.
- **Small.** At 98M parameters it makes factual mistakes, loses the thread in long generations, and is weak at multi-step reasoning. Treat it as a research artifact, not a source of truth.
- **Mostly English**, reflecting its training data.
- **Inherits web-data biases.** The training mix is filtered web text, so outputs can reflect the biases and errors in that data.

---

## Acknowledgements

`100M-exp` combines published ideas; none of the components below are new here.

**Architecture**
- Sliding-window and local/global attention: [Longformer](https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.05150), [Mistral 7B](https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.06825)
- Attention sinks: [Efficient Streaming Language Models with Attention Sinks](https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.17453); learned per-head sinks as in gpt-oss
- Rotary positions: [RoFormer](https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.09864); [HoPE](https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.21216)
- Short convolution on queries/keys/values: [Primer](https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.08668)
- Value residual: [Value Residual Learning (ResFormer)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.17897)
- Grouped-query attention: [GQA](https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.13245)
- SwiGLU: [GLU Variants Improve Transformer](https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.05202); RMSNorm: [Root Mean Square Layer Normalization](https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.07467)

**Training**
- Muon optimizer: Keller Jordan's [Muon](https://github.com/KellerJordan/Muon); [Muon is Scalable for LLM Training](https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.16982)
- Warmup-stable-decay schedule and 1 - sqrt cooldown: [Scaling Laws and Compute-Optimal Training Beyond Fixed Training Durations](https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.18392)
- PyTorch FlexAttention; [Liger Kernel](https://github.com/linkedin/Liger-Kernel) fused cross-entropy

**Data and tokenizer**
- Datasets: [ClimbMix](https://huggingface.co/datasets/karpathy/climbmix-400b-shuffle), [DCLM-Edu](https://huggingface.co/datasets/HuggingFaceTB/dclm-edu), [Nemotron-CC](https://huggingface.co/datasets/Fredithefish/Nemotron-CC-HQ-20B), [NExtLong](https://huggingface.co/datasets/caskcsg/NExtLong-512K-dataset), [CC-Math-Finest](https://huggingface.co/datasets/Yxanul/cc-math-finest)
- Tokenizer: [Mistral-7B-v0.1](https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Mistral-7B-v0.1) (Apache-2.0)

**Evaluation**
- [lm-evaluation-harness](https://github.com/EleutherAI/lm-evaluation-harness); the Open SLM Leaderboard's Intelligence Index

---

## License

Apache-2.0 for the weights, code and model card. The tokenizer is Mistral's, also Apache-2.0. Each training dataset keeps its own license.