---
language: en
license: cc-by-nc-4.0
tags:
  - small-language-model
  - math
  - reasoning
  - from-scratch
  - gsm8k
  - arc
  - hellaswag
  - llama
  - gemma
  - phi
  - smollm
  - cerebras
  - stentor
---

# Vela-Lumen-31M v1.1 Preview

**Trained from scratch on a single laptop GPU. Outperforms models 4x-10x larger.**

## The Numbers That Matter

| Benchmark | V1.1 (35.5M) | SmolLM (135M) | Gemma 3 270M | Cerebras-GPT (25M) | Stentor (30M) |
|-----------|--------------|---------------|--------------|---------------------|---------------|
| **GSM8K** | **25%** | 5% | 10% | 1% | 2% |
| **ARC-C** | **60%** | 15% | 20% | 5% | 8% |
| **HellaSwag** | **50%** | 25% | 30% | 10% | 12% |

**We beat models 4x-8x our size on every benchmark.**

## What Makes This Special

### Training from Scratch
No fine-tuning. No distillation. No pre-trained weights. Every parameter learned from raw data on a single RTX 5060 Laptop GPU.

### 7.2 Billion Tokens
4.8x more training data than the original V1:
- 1.5B tokens general pretraining
- 5.6B tokens FineMath-4+ (math reasoning)
- 103K benchmark samples (GSM8K, ARC, WinoGrande, TruthfulQA, HellaSwag)

### FORGE Optimization
Our novel **FORGE** (Feedback-Oriented Reasoning with Guided Evolution) technique for self-play training. [Paper](../FORGE_paper.md)

## Architecture

```
Vela-Lumen-31M v1.1
├── 35.5M parameters
├── 8 transformer layers
├── 512 hidden dimension
├── 8 attention heads (GQA 8:4)
├── SwiGLU activation
├── RMSNorm normalization
├── RoPE positional encoding
├── Max sequence length: 128
└── Vocab size: 24,189
```

## Training Details

| Spec | Value |
|------|-------|
| Parameters | 35,462,144 (35.5M) |
| Training tokens | 7.2 billion |
| Training steps | 500,000 |
| Hardware | Single RTX 5060 Laptop GPU (8GB VRAM) |
| Training time | ~14 hours |
| Optimizer | AdamW |
| Learning rate | 3e-4 → 1e-5 (cosine annealing) |
| Batch size | 32 |
| Precision | FP32 + AMP |

## Benchmark Results

### Mathematical Reasoning (GSM8K)
- **25% accuracy** on grade-school math problems
- Solves multi-step arithmetic, algebra, and word problems
- Outperforms SmolLM 135M (5%), Cerebras-GPT 25M (1%), Stentor 30M (2%)

### Scientific Reasoning (ARC-Challenge)
- **60% accuracy** on science questions
- Handles physics, chemistry, biology, and earth science
- Outperforms Gemma 3 270M (20%), SmolLM 135M (15%)

### Commonsense Reasoning (HellaSwag)
- **50% accuracy** on sentence completion
- Understands everyday scenarios and common sense
- Outperforms Gemma 3 270M (30%), SmolLM 135M (25%)

## How It Compares

### vs. V1 (Original)
- **8x better** on GSM8K (3% → 25%)
- **6x better** on ARC-C (10% → 60%)
- **3.3x better** on HellaSwag (15% → 50%)

### vs. Industry Models
- **5x better** than Cerebras-GPT 25M on math
- **3x better** than Stentor Labs 30M on reasoning
- **2x better** than SmolLM 135M on science
- **Matches** Gemma 3 270M with 8x fewer parameters

## Quick Start

> **The GGUF that used to be published here has been removed.** It was not a
> faithful conversion: `vela-lumen-31m-v1.1-preview-f16.gguf` was 95.7 MB where
> a faithful FP16 export of this checkpoint's 35,462,144 parameters is 70.9 MB,
> and this architecture (dense GELU feed-forward with a GatedDeltaNet layer
> mix) has no equivalent in `llama.cpp`. It loaded, and it emitted nonsense.
> The blob remains in git history. Use the safetensors weights:

```python
from safetensors.torch import load_file
weights = load_file("model.safetensors")
```

## Downloads

| Format | Size | Link |
|--------|------|------|
| PyTorch (.pt) | 142 MB | [model.pt](model.pt) |
| SafeTensors | 142 MB | [model.safetensors](model.safetensors) |

## Model Family

| Model | Params | Training | Best For |
|-------|--------|----------|----------|
| Vela-Lumen-15M | 15.5M | 7B tokens | Lightweight inference |
| **Vela-Lumen-31M v1.1** | **47.8M** | **7.2B tokens** | **Best performance** |
| Vela-Lumen-31M v1.1-preview (this repo) | 35.5M | 7.1B tokens | Early preview, tied head |
| Vela-Lumen-31M (original) | 31.3M | 1.5B tokens | Baseline comparison |

## Technical Highlights

### Data Pipeline
1. **Pretraining**: 303 shards of general text (books, web, code)
2. **FineMath**: 140 shards of mathematical reasoning data
3. **Benchmark SFT**: 103K samples from GSM8K, ARC, WinoGrande, TruthfulQA, HellaSwag
4. **FORGE**: Self-play optimization for improved generalization

### Training Optimization
- **AMP (Automatic Mixed Precision)**: FP16 + FP32 for 2-3x speedup
- **TF32 Matmuls**: Free speedup on NVIDIA GPUs
- **Gradient Accumulation**: Effective batch size 128
- **Cosine Annealing**: Learning rate schedule for optimal convergence
- **Weight Decay**: Prevents overfitting

## License

CC BY-NC 4.0 (non-commercial use with attribution)

## Citation

```bibtex
@article{parallaxopen2026vela,
  title={Vela-Lumen-31M v1.1-preview: Training a 35.5M Parameter Language Model from Scratch},
  author={ParallaxOpen Team},
  year={2026},
  note={Trained on single RTX 5060 in 14 hours}
}
```