nano-case

Converts a messy identifier to a target case style — snake, kebab, camel, pascal, const — and, crucially, segments boundary-destroyed inputs (no separators, one global case: sdkmodel, HTTPREQUESTHANDLER) that a regular expression provably cannot split. A ~1M-parameter (1,016,960) byte-level transformer.

const  | sdkmodel          => SDK_MODEL
camel  | usertablehandler  => userTableHandler
kebab  | sqlqueryname      => sql-query-name
snake  | md5cache          => md5_cache
pascal | rendertokenerror  => RenderTokenError

It runs on a CPU in milliseconds and was trained entirely on code-generated data — no scraping, no labelling, no distillation. Weights + a self-contained inference file are here and on Hugging Face.

📄 Technical report (PDF) · 📝 Full writeup (gist)

Why a model and not a regex

Converting a clean identifier between cases is a solved, free problem — a regex splits on separators and camel-humps and re-renders. So that slice has no value. The value is the regex-killer slice: inputs where the separators and casing are gone (userprofilecache, HTTPREQUESTHANDLER), leaving nothing to split on. The only way back to the intended words is a learned vocabulary. That is what nano-case has, and what a script cannot have.

Benchmark (held-out, seed 987654321, N=4000)

Exact-match accuracy, model vs a standard regex case-converter. Mean ± std over 3 training seeds (0/1/2).

	model	regex script
overall	99.8% ± 0.0%	61.8%
smushed slice (N=1410)	99.7% ± 0.0%	8.2%

The smushed slice is the regex-killer: boundary-destroyed, single-case, multi-word inputs. 8.2% for the script vs 99.7% for the model is the "you genuinely need a model here" result.

Reproduce: python eval_nano_case.py --n 4000.

Where it breaks (out-of-distribution)

nano-case's segmentation prior is its ~120-token training vocabulary. Honest limits, measured:

input type	accuracy
in-vocab smushed (the trained slice)	100%
out-of-vocabulary words smushed	2%
chains longer than trained (5–6 words)	33%

So it nails smushing of known words and degrades on unknown tokens / very long chains — the expected ceiling of a 1M model on a vocabulary task, reported rather than hidden.

Use it

pip install -r requirements.txt
python modeling_nano_case.py            # demo

from modeling_nano_case import load, to_case
m = load("model.safetensors", "config.json")
to_case(m, "const", "sdkmodel")          # -> "SDK_MODEL"
to_case(m, "camel", "user_table_handler")# -> "userTableHandler"

How it was trained

Code-generated data (sample words from a fixed vocabulary → render the gold target canonically → corrupt a copy into a messy input, ~45% boundary-destroyed), SFT with the prompt masked so only the target + newline EOS is supervised. ~1M-param byte-level transformer (RMSNorm, RoPE, GQA, SwiGLU), 12k steps, AdamW, cosine LR. Full recipe and exact config in TRAINING.md.

Files

• modeling_nano_case.py — self-contained model + load() / to_case() (torch + safetensors only).
• data_cases.py — the code data generator (shared by train and eval).
• eval_nano_case.py — the model-vs-regex benchmark.
• test_nano_case.py — labels-correct / no-leakage / determinism / published-weights regression.
• model.safetensors, config.json — weights + architecture.
• report/nano-case-report.pdf — the technical report.
• TRAINING.md — reproduction recipe.

License

MIT. Built by Vuk Rosić.