İvme-Conversate-v2-Base (Codenamed Apple 2)

Conversate-v2 Logo

İvme (Turkish: acceleration) is a series of stupidly small language models built to punch above their weight. This is the second release: a 24M parameter decoder-only base model trained from scratch, this time with a much heavier training diet.

v1 produced grammatically correct sentences that did not really say anything when strung together, fluent without being about anything. v2 keeps almost the exact same architecture as v1 on purpose, and instead fixes the two things that actually mattered: far more training data, and a data mix weighted toward material that teaches a model to stay on topic across sentences.


Model Details

Parameter Value
Architecture Decoder-only transformer, dense (no loops, no exotic recurrence)
Parameters 23,846,784
Layers 10
Hidden dim 384
FFN dim SwiGLU
Attention heads 6, full attention (no GQA)
Context length 1024 tokens
Vocab size 16,000 (custom BPE)
Positional encoding RoPE (θ=10,000)
Normalization RMSNorm (pre-norm)
Embeddings Tied input/output
Biases None

Nearly every setting above matches v1 on purpose. The point of v2 was to isolate the improvement to data and training, not to a bigger model.


Benchmarks

Benchmarks were run with lm-evaluation-harness via a custom model adapter (previous numbers from an internal script have been superseded by these).

Benchmark v1 v2
WikiText-2 (byte perplexity) ↓ 2.96 2.2250
BLiMP (macro-average, 68 paradigms) ↑ 61.40% 75.09%
ARC-Easy (acc_norm) ↑ 30.85% 39.98%
ARC-Easy (acc) ↑ 43.56%

Every metric improved. The ARC-Easy acc_norm gain (30.85% → 39.98%) is more modest than the raw acc numbers alone suggest, but still a real improvement over v1.

BLiMP paradigm breakdown

Strong on core agreement paradigms:

Paradigm Accuracy
blimp_principle_A_case_1 100.00%
blimp_existential_there_quantifiers_1 99.40%
blimp_anaphor_number_agreement 98.00%
blimp_sentential_negation_npi_licensor_present 97.30%
blimp_determiner_noun_agreement_1 96.90%
blimp_principle_A_domain_1 95.40%

Weaker on long-distance dependencies and island constraints, a known hard case for small models:

Paradigm Accuracy
blimp_wh_vs_that_with_gap_long_distance 17.20%
blimp_existential_there_quantifiers_2 30.20%
blimp_left_branch_island_echo_question 31.40%
blimp_superlative_quantifiers_2 33.20%
blimp_principle_A_reconstruction 36.10%

This pattern, strong local agreement paired with weaker long-distance syntax, is typical for models at this scale.


Does it actually make more sense now?

None of the benchmarks above directly test whether the model's writing holds together as connected text, which was v1's real problem. Sample output, EMA weights, temperature 0.8, top_k 50:

Prompt: "Once upon a time, there was a"

Once upon a time, there was a wise old turtle named Timmy who lived on the coast of South America. In this magical place, no matter how big or large, people could look up at the sea and talk to each other. Timmy asked, "What do you mean, Timmy?" The turtle replied, "Well, I think you might see people talking about ocean creatures. They are like little waves that carry their voices. Sometimes they say they're too big or small to hear." After a few moments, Timmy had an idea. "Can we go on a boat-boat tour? I can't believe all the kids in the village are doing that!" As they sailed further, they saw many beautiful islands and vibrant colors. Each island had its unique culture and traditions. When they reached the top, they saw a group of kids playing and splashing around. "Wow, lookgies!" said Timmy. "They live in a big ocean full of colorful fish and


Training

Data Mix (~12.85B tokens, roughly 8 to 9x more than v1's 1.57B)

v1 was trained Chinchilla-optimal. v2 deliberately overtrains well past that point, since the model is small and cheap to run regardless.

Source Share
HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-edu 50%
HuggingFaceTB/smollm-corpus (cosmopedia-v2) 27%
mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0 8%
SimpleStories/SimpleStories 5%
HuggingFaceTB/finemath (finemath-3plus) 5%

Python-Edu was originally planned as a fifth source, but the actual code text lives behind a gated dataset with no practical way to align it against the sampled subset at this scale, so it was dropped and its share redistributed across the rest.

Hyperparameters

Setting Value
Optimizer Muon (body weights) + AdamW (embeddings, norms)
Muon lr 0.02
AdamW lr 3e-4
LR schedule Warmup-Stable-Decay (WSD)
Weight decay 0.1
Gradient clipping 1.0
Batch size 192 sequences x 1024 tokens (196,608 tokens/step)
Total steps 65,376
Precision bfloat16
Attention PyTorch scaled_dot_product_attention (Flash Attention backend)
Compilation torch.compile, roughly 2x throughput over eager
Final weights EMA (β=0.999) of training trajectory

Hardware

Trained on a single NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell (96GB) in approximately 4.75 hours.


Tokenizer

Custom byte-level BPE tokenizer trained from scratch on a sample of the pretraining mix. Vocab size 16,000.


Inference

Here's a basic inference code you can run to immediately start using İvme-Conversate-v2-Base

import sys
import torch
from tokenizers import Tokenizer
from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download, snapshot_download

repo_id = "IvmeLabs/Ivme-Conversate-v2-Base"

# Download just the model/ folder (architecture code) into the HF cache,
# then add it to sys.path so `from model import ...` works without the
# user needing to manually copy any files.
repo_local_dir = snapshot_download(repo_id, allow_patterns=["model/*"])
sys.path.append(repo_local_dir)

from model import IvmeConfig, IvmeConversateV2

ckpt_path = hf_hub_download(repo_id, "ckpt_final.pt")
tokenizer_path = hf_hub_download(repo_id, "tokenizer.json")

tokenizer = Tokenizer.from_file(tokenizer_path)

# IvmeConfig is a plain dataclass saved into the checkpoint. Trust this only
# because it's our own checkpoint, produced by our own training code.
torch.serialization.add_safe_globals([IvmeConfig])
ckpt = torch.load(ckpt_path, map_location="cuda")
cfg = ckpt["config"]

model = IvmeConversateV2(cfg)

# Use EMA weights (smoothed), not the raw training weights, for inference.
# Strip torch.compile's "_orig_mod." prefix if the checkpoint was compiled.
state_dict = ckpt["ema_state_dict"]
state_dict = {k.removeprefix("_orig_mod."): v for k, v in state_dict.items()}
model.load_state_dict(state_dict)

model.cuda().eval()

prompt = "Once upon a time, there was a"
ids = tokenizer.encode(prompt).ids
idx = torch.tensor([ids], dtype=torch.long, device="cuda")

eot_id = tokenizer.token_to_id("<|endoftext|>")
with torch.no_grad():
    for _ in range(200):
        idx_cond = idx if idx.size(1) <= cfg.context_len else idx[:, -cfg.context_len:]
        logits, _ = model(idx_cond)
        logits = logits[:, -1, :] / 0.8  # temperature

        v, _ = torch.topk(logits, 50)
        logits[logits < v[:, [-1]]] = -float("inf")

        probs = torch.softmax(logits, dim=-1)
        next_id = torch.multinomial(probs, num_samples=1)
        idx = torch.cat([idx, next_id], dim=1)

        if next_id.item() == eot_id:
            break

print(tokenizer.decode(idx[0].tolist()))

Limitations

  • Base model only, not instruction tuned, will not follow instructions or answer questions
  • English only
  • 1024 token context window
  • Weaker on long-distance syntactic dependencies than on local agreement, see BLiMP breakdown above
  • No code data in the training mix (Python-Edu was dropped, see above)
  • Weak knowledge. While the model has learned syntax and grammar very well, it falls short on knowledge and easily hallucinates. We are expecting to fix this in upcoming variants via distillation.

What's Next

Still on the table for a future version: distillation from a larger teacher model, and a return to the more experimental İvmetron architecture once time allows for the kind of patient debugging a genuinely novel design needs.

You can check our other upcoming models on our organization card!


Citation

@misc{ivme-conversate-v2-24m,
  author       = {IvmeLabs},
  title        = {İvme-Conversate-v2-Base},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Hugging Face},
  url          = {https://huggingface.co/IvmeLabs/Ivme-Conversate-v2-24M-Base}
}

Credits

The apple photo by Matheus Cenali on Unsplash


Built by IvmeLabs. Small models, deliberate choices.

Downloads last month

-

Downloads are not tracked for this model. How to track
Inference Providers NEW
This model isn't deployed by any Inference Provider. 🙋 Ask for provider support

Datasets used to train IvmeLabs/Ivme-Conversate-v2-Base