cff-version: 1.2.0
title: "Tilelli — a small routed byte-LM with verifiable claims"
message: "If you use this kit, please cite it as below."
version: "0.1.0"
date-released: "2026-05-24"
authors:
  - name: "Tilelli LLM Team"
license: Apache-2.0
repository-code: "https://github.com/TilelliLab/Tilelli-llm"
abstract: >
  A 10 M-parameter byte-level language model with a 3-pathway heterogeneous
  block. Trained on a single GPU, runs on a laptop CPU. Every numerical
  claim in the README is bound to a reproduce script that exits non-zero
  if the bundled checkpoint fails to produce the documented number.
  Ships verified positive results (held-out IDK gate, NEO false-inability
  rate) alongside verified negative results (router-entropy is not free
  metacognition at this scale; abstain heads do not transfer modularly;
  the router cannot be retrained on subset distributions without breaking
  generation).
keywords:
  - small language model
  - mixture of experts
  - routing
  - calibration
  - negative results
  - reproducibility