Untied Qwen3 vocabulary tax and depth allocation on 751M budget

#1
by AndrewThompson1233 - opened

Hi Treese,

Pretraining a 751M Qwen3 base model from scratch on 13B tokens across educational web corpora is a solid engineering effort, and logging the benchmark reality on ARC/MMLU is refreshing.

Looking at your architecture parameters:
Vocabulary size is 151,936 at hidden width 1024.
Untying the LM head means holding two full tables: 151,936 * 1024 * 2 = 311.16M parameters.
Lookup tables take 41.4% of your total 751.6M budget, leaving 440.4M for active sequence modeling across 28 layers.
With GQA (16:8) and SwiGLU (intermediate 3072), each transformer block costs roughly 15.73M parameters.

In an open architecture project called Maba (101M reference model: https://huggingface.co/AndrewThompson1233/maba-v1-architecture), we decouple large vocabulary tables from hidden dimensions using low-rank projection:
Projecting 151,936 -> 128 -> 1024 drops table size from 155.58M to ~19.58M parameters.
Even in an asymmetric setup (factorizing only the input table to avoid the output softmax bottleneck while keeping the LM head full rank), you reclaim ~136M parameters.
That saved budget funds 8 to 9 additional Qwen3 layers (expanding depth from 28 to 36-37 layers) within the exact same 751M ceiling and FLOP footprint.

Given that ARC-Challenge and MMLU struggle primarily with multi-step relational depth at this scale, did you benchmark tied vs untied heads before locking in the 28-layer depth?

Best,
Andrew

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