TinyWay-1.1.0

TinyWay-1.1.0 is a lightweight decoder-only Transformer language model trained from scratch on limited compute. The project demonstrates that meaningful language modeling behavior can emerge from modest-scale models trained in constrained environments such as Kaggle.

Core idea: Understanding LLM training mechanics end-to-end by building, training, debugging, and deploying a Transformer LM without relying on pretrained weights.

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Model Details

• Architecture: Decoder-only Transformer (GPT-style)
• Parameters: ~83M
• Layers: 10 Transformer blocks
• Hidden size: 512
• Attention heads: 8
• Context length: 256 tokens
• Activation: GELU
• Normalization: Pre-LayerNorm
• Weight tying: Token embedding ↔ LM head
• Precision during training: FP16 (AMP)

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Training

Dataset

• TinyStoriesV2 (cleaned)
• Natural language short stories designed for training small language models

Tokenization

• GPT-2 BPE tokenizer
• Vocabulary size: 50,257

Training Setup

• Optimizer: AdamW
• Learning rate: tuned for stable convergence
• Gradient accumulation: enabled
• Gradient clipping: enabled
• Mixed precision training (AMP)
• Training performed entirely on Kaggle GPU environment (12-hour sessions)

Checkpoints

Models were saved at multiple training steps (5k → 30k). TinyWay-1.1.0 corresponds to the ~25k step checkpoint, which showed the best balance of fluency and stability.

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Example Usage

from transformers import AutoConfig, AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForCausalLM

model_id = "NNEngine/TinyWay-1.1.0"

config = AutoConfig.from_pretrained(model_id, trust_remote_code=True)
tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_id, trust_remote_code=True)
mdl = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(model_id, config=config, trust_remote_code=True)

out = mdl.generate(
    **tok(
        "Once upon a time",
        return_tensors="pt"
    ).to(mdl.device),

    max_new_tokens=200,          # force length
    do_sample=True,              # sampling, not greedy
    temperature=0.8,
    top_k=50,
    repetition_penalty=1.2,

    eos_token_id=None,           # 🔥 disable EOS stopping
    pad_token_id=tok.eos_token_id
)

print(tok.decode(out[0], skip_special_tokens=True))

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Sample Output

Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Lily. She loved to play with her toys and explore the park near her home. One day, she found a shiny red ball hidden behind a tree…

(Outputs vary due to sampling.)

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Intended Use

• Educational purposes
• Research on small-scale language models
• Understanding Transformer internals
• Studying training dynamics under compute constraints

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Limitations

• Not instruction-tuned
• Not aligned for factual accuracy or safety
• May produce repetitive or incoherent text at times
• Trained on a limited dataset

This model is not intended for production use or sensitive applications.

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Ethical Considerations

• The model may generate fictional or incorrect information
• No explicit safety or content filtering was applied
• Users should apply downstream safeguards if deploying

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Citation

If you use this model in academic or technical work, please cite:

@misc{sharma2025tinyway,
  title={TinyWay: Training Decoder-Only Language Models from Scratch on Limited Compute},
  author={Shivam Sharma},
  year={2025},
}

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Author

Shivam Sharma B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering (AIML) ITM Gwalior, India

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Acknowledgements

• Hugging Face Transformers
• Kaggle GPU resources
• Open research community for open-source inspiration