nanowhale-100m-base 🐳

A small ~110M parameter language model implementing the DeepSeek-V4 architecture from scratch. This is the pretrained base model — see HuggingFaceTB/nanowhale-100m for the SFT/chat version.

Training code: github.com/huggingface/nanowhale

Architecture

This model implements key DeepSeek-V4 innovations at a miniature scale:

DeepSeek-V4 Features Implemented

• Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA): Compressed KV cache via latent projections
• Mixture of Experts (MoE): Sparse activation — only 2 of 4 experts per token
• Hyper-Connections: Multi-copy hidden states with learned Sinkhorn routing replacing residual connections
• SwiGLU FFN with configurable limit
• Grouped output projection (o_groups)

Training

• Dataset: HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-edu (streaming)
• Steps: 5,000
• Tokens seen: ~2.6B
• Batch size: 8 × 4 gradient accumulation = 32 effective
• Sequence length: 2,048
• Learning rate: 6e-4, cosine schedule, 3% warmup
• Optimizer: AdamW (β1=0.9, β2=0.95, weight_decay=0.1)
• Precision: bf16 mixed precision
• Hardware: 1× NVIDIA H100 80GB

Training Metrics

Usage

import torch
from safetensors.torch import load_file
from transformers import AutoConfig, AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download

# Load model (recommended: manual load for reliability)
config = AutoConfig.from_pretrained("HuggingFaceTB/nanowhale-100m-base", trust_remote_code=True)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_config(config, trust_remote_code=True).float()

# Download and load weights
weights_path = hf_hub_download("HuggingFaceTB/nanowhale-100m-base", "model.safetensors")
state_dict = load_file(weights_path)
model.load_state_dict(state_dict, strict=True)
model = model.cuda().eval()

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("HuggingFaceTB/nanowhale-100m-base")

# Generate
input_ids = tokenizer.encode("The meaning of life is", return_tensors="pt").cuda()
output = model.generate(input_ids, max_new_tokens=100, temperature=0.7, top_p=0.9,
                        pad_token_id=tokenizer.eos_token_id)
print(tokenizer.decode(output[0], skip_special_tokens=True))

Limitations

• Small model: 110M params with 129K vocab means ~37% of parameters are in embeddings, limiting model capacity
• Limited training: Only 5K steps / 2.6B tokens — significantly undertrained compared to production models
• Pretrained only: This is a base model without instruction tuning. Outputs are language-model completions, not conversations.
• bf16 NaN: Use fp32 — the Hyper-Connections architecture produces values that overflow bf16 range at this scale.
• Custom architecture: Requires trust_remote_code=True

License

Apache-2.0