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 0.840185 (perplexity: 1.7903) 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 (909s) 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: 5.3 GB
  • MFU: 34.77%
  • 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 0.840185
Perplexity 1.7903
Peak VRAM 5.3 GB
MFU 34.77%

Example Generations

Example 1

Prompt

Once upon a time, 

Generation

Once upon a time, 3 year old girl named Lily. Lily was curious. She thought she was playing and wanted to go out to sleep. She started to feel happy.
One day, Lily's mom saw the shiny Tim and the girl's house. She said, "

Example 2

Prompt

A lonely dragon 

Generation

A lonely dragon 3 year saw her mom and dad's dad playing with the dog. The dog had a big seat under it. The dog said, "Thank you, little sister!" Her dad looked at the slide and wanted to eat it. They all enjoyed the

Example 3

Prompt

The opposite of boy is 

Generation

The opposite of boy is 5 and people from each other. They do not need to go back to the park. They want to be more careful when it is what is important to share and be with each other. They only more important to be careful when playing, you can

Example 4

Prompt

The opposite of queen is 

Generation

The opposite of queen is 3 and now. The family was very nice. The family had learned that sharing with happiness and wonderful memories of friends.<|bos|>One day, a little boy named Tim went to the store. He saw a big box. Tim wanted to play with it

Example 5

Prompt

My name is 

Generation

My name is 4 Blue. Fox. She does not want to be mad. She was sad and angry. She did not want her.
Max wanted to catch the bird, but he did not like the bird. He said, "Please, let me fix your

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/sunny-cloud-66}}
}}

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.

Downloads last month
-
Inference Providers NEW
This model isn't deployed by any Inference Provider. ๐Ÿ™‹ Ask for provider support