AutoResearch-tinystories-depth8

AutoResearch Cover

AutoResearch-tinystories-depth8 is a 285.2M parameter decoder-only Transformer trained from scratch on TinyStories (karpathy/tinystories-gpt4-clean).

This model is part of the AutoResearch project, which focuses on training, evaluating, and releasing efficient language models with reproducible research workflows.


Overview

This is a 8-layer decoder-only Transformer trained on the TinyStories (karpathy/tinystories-gpt4-clean) dataset for 0.3 hours of wall-clock training time. The model achieves a validation bits-per-byte (val_bpb) of 0.594321 (perplexity: 1.5098) on the held-out validation set.


References

Papers

  • NanoGPT / NanoChat architecture patterns

Datasets

Related Projects

WANDB Run


Highlights

  • Trained from scratch
  • 285.2M parameters
  • Trained on 23.6M tokens (45 steps)
  • 8-layer decoder-only Transformer with sliding window attention
  • RoPE positional encoding, RMSNorm, ReLUยฒ activation
  • MuonAdamW optimizer (Muon for matrices, AdamW for embeddings)
  • Mixture of Experts (8 routed + 1 shared, top-2 routing)
  • Hugging Face Transformers compatible

Model Architecture

Property Value
Architecture Decoder-only Transformer
Parameters 285,245,968 (285.2M)
Layers 8
Hidden Size 512
Attention Heads 4
KV Heads 4
Head Dimension 128
Feed Forward Size 2048 (MoE: 8 experts, 1 shared, top-2)
Context Length 2048
Vocabulary Size 16,384
Positional Encoding RoPE
Activation ReLUยฒ
Normalization RMSNorm
Window Pattern SSSL
Weight Tying No

Training

This model was trained from scratch for 0.3 hours (921s) of wall-clock training time.

Training Configuration

Setting Value
Optimizer MuonAdamW (Muon + AdamW)
Precision torch.bfloat16
Learning Rate 0.04 (matrix) / 0.6 (embedding)
Weight Decay 0.2
Batch Size 4 ร— 2048 = 8,192 tokens/step
Gradient Accumulation 64 steps
Total Batch Size 524,288 tokens
Context Length 2048
Vocabulary 16,384 tokens (BPE)
LR Scheduler Linear warmdown (50%)
Activation Checkpointing Enabled

Hardware

  • GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti
  • VRAM: 16.0 GB
  • Peak VRAM Used: 6.3 GB
  • MFU: 34.31%
  • Framework: PyTorch 2.9.1+cu128

Dataset

  • Name: TinyStories (karpathy/tinystories-gpt4-clean)
  • Language: English

Preprocessing

Data is packed into fixed-length sequences of 2048 tokens using the nanochat-compatible BPE tokenizer (16,384 vocabulary, 9 special tokens). No additional filtering or deduplication is applied beyond what is in the source dataset.


Intended Use

This model is intended for:

  • Educational purposes and research
  • Text generation experiments
  • Studying small language model training dynamics

Not recommended for:

  • Production use or safety-critical applications
  • Tasks requiring factual accuracy

Evaluation

Results

Metric Score
Validation BPB 0.594321
Perplexity 1.5098
Peak VRAM 6.3 GB
MFU 34.31%

Example Generations

Example 1

Prompt

Once upon a time, 

Generation

Once upon a time, 3 year old was walking in the forest. She looked around and saw a beautiful beautiful rainbow in the sky. It was so beautiful that she was amazed.
The two had seen such beautiful colors and wonderful things. They had never seen a rainbow like it

Example 2

Prompt

A lonely dragon 

Generation

A lonely dragon 3 year old child wanted to give the dragon a pat.
The dragon smiled and said, "Yes, I had you to give me a hug. But please, please give me back my dragon, I wish I could give you another hug."
The

Example 3

Prompt

The opposite of boy is 

Generation

The opposite of boy is 5 to play with ball.
The ball hit the ball and it broke. The ball fell into the boy and bit into it. The boy cried and cried. The boy ran back to his ball and said sorry to his ball. He promised to be

Example 4

Prompt

The opposite of queen is 

Generation

The opposite of queen is 3 and can't show your big sister. 
When the story arrived, the big sister asked if he could show them the brave, and the story. She said, "No, I tell the story. It's too dangerous. It's too

Example 5

Prompt

My name is 

Generation

My name is 4 of Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird Bird

Usage

import torch
import pickle
import json
from train import GPT, GPTConfig, Tokenizer

# Load config
with open('config.json', 'r') as f:
    config_dict = json.load(f)
config = GPTConfig(**{k: v for k, v in config_dict.items() if k in GPTConfig.__dataclass_fields__})

# Load model
model = GPT(config)
state_dict = torch.load('model.pt', map_location='cpu')['state_dict']
model.load_state_dict(state_dict)
model.eval()

# Load tokenizer
with open('tokenizer.pkl', 'rb') as f:
    tokenizer = pickle.load(f)

# Generate
prompt = 'Once upon a time, '
input_ids = tokenizer.encode(prompt)
x = torch.tensor([input_ids], dtype=torch.long)
with torch.no_grad():
    for _ in range(50):
        logits = model(x)
        probs = torch.softmax(logits[:, -1, :] / 0.8, dim=-1)
        next_token = torch.multinomial(probs, num_samples=1)
        input_ids.append(next_token.item())
        x = torch.tensor([input_ids], dtype=torch.long)
print(tokenizer.decode(input_ids))

Repository Structure

model.pt                  # Model weights
config.json               # Model architecture config
dataset.txt               # Dataset name used for training
token_bytes.pt            # Token byte mappings
tokenizer.pkl             # Trained BPE tokenizer
tokenizer_config.json     # Tokenizer configuration
training_metrics.json     # Training metrics
README.md                 # This file

Limitations

  • Small model size limits language understanding and coherence
  • Trained on a single dataset (TinyStories) โ€” limited domain
  • Fixed time budget training โ€” not fully trained to convergence
  • No RLHF or safety alignment

Ethical Considerations

  • This is a research artifact, not a production model
  • The training data consists of synthetic stories (GPT-4 generated)
  • No harmful content filtering was applied
  • Intended for research and educational use only

Citation

@misc{autoresearch_tinystories_depth8,
  title={AutoResearch-tinystories-depth8},
  author={Dustin Loring},
  year={2026},
  howpublished={\url{https://huggingface.co/quik-models/fragrant-sky-75}}
}}

Version History

Version Date Notes
v1.0 2026-07-28 Initial release

Acknowledgements

Built with the AutoResearch training framework.

Thanks to:

  • Hugging Face
  • PyTorch
  • The creators of the TinyStories dataset
  • The open-source AI research community

License

This model is released under the MIT License unless otherwise specified.

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