SLM — Small Language Model trained on TinyStories

A GPT-style small language model (~16M parameters) built entirely from scratch using PyTorch and trained on the TinyStories dataset.

This model was built as a learning project to understand transformer architecture, training loops, gradient accumulation, and mixed-precision training from the ground up.

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Model details

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How to use

Install dependencies

pip install transformers torch huggingface_hub

Generate text

import torch
from transformers import GPT2Tokenizer
from modeling_slm import SLMModel

# Load
tokenizer = GPT2Tokenizer.from_pretrained("YOUR_HF_USERNAME/slm-tinystories")
model = SLMModel.from_pretrained("YOUR_HF_USERNAME/slm-tinystories",
                                 trust_remote_code=True)
model.eval()

# Generate
prompt = "Once upon a time there was a little girl"
inputs = tokenizer(prompt, return_tensors="pt")
output = model.generate(inputs["input_ids"], max_new_tokens=200,
                        temperature=1.0, top_k=50)
print(tokenizer.decode(output.squeeze().tolist(), skip_special_tokens=True))

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Training approach

The model was trained using:

• Gradient accumulation (8 steps) to simulate an effective batch size of 128 sequences without needing that much GPU memory at once
• Mixed precision (bfloat16) for faster training and lower memory usage
• Gradient clipping (max norm 0.5) for training stability
• Weight tying between the token embedding matrix and the output projection layer — saves parameters and improves learning

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Limitations

• Context window of 64 tokens is short — long prompts will be truncated
• Trained on a small 50k-story subset, so vocabulary and topics are limited
• Output quality is intentionally modest — this is a from-scratch learning project, not a production model
• Not suitable for any real-world application

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What I learned building this

• How transformer blocks work internally (attention, MLP, residual connections, layer norm)
• How gradient accumulation simulates large batch training on limited hardware
• How the training loop, optimizer, and LR scheduler fit together
• How to package a custom PyTorch model for HuggingFace Hub

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References

• TinyStories paper
• nanoGPT by Karpathy — architecture reference
• Vizuara SLM tutorial — workshop this was built from