---
license: mit
language:
- en
library_name: transformers
pipeline_tag: text-generation
tags:
- llama
- historical
- causal-lm
- knowledge-distillation
- synthetic-data
- babylm
---

# Edgar-base

Edgar-base is a 632M-parameter language model trained from scratch on English text
from 1786–1849, augmented with synthetic data derived from that same material. This is a 
non instruction-tuned checkpoint. 

## Model details

- **Developed by:** Craig Messner, Johns Hopkins University Center for Digital Humanities
- **Model type:** decoder-only transformer (`LlamaForCausalLM`), trained from scratch
- **Language:** English (late 18th to mid 19th century)
- **License:** MIT
- **Code:** built on [historical-perspectival-lm](https://github.com/comp-int-hum/historical-perspectival-lm)

### Architecture

| | |
|---|---|
| Parameters | 631,504,512 |
| Layers | 42 |
| Hidden size | 1152 |
| Feed-forward size | 3072 |
| Attention heads | 18 (head dim 64) |
| Key/value heads | 6 (grouped-query attention, 3:1) |
| Max positions | 1024 |
| Vocabulary | 32,000 (BPE) |
| Embeddings | tied input/output |
| Weights | float32, safetensors |

The design is deep and thin with grouped-query attention and tied embeddings, scaled up from
the BabyLlama-2 recipe.

## Intended uses

- Text continuation in the register of 1786–1849 English prose and verse.
- A lightweight base for further fine-tuning (instruction tuning, and especially author-specific adaptation).
- Research on leakage and fidelity in domain-limited models.

## How to use

```python
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("hplm/edgar-base")
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("hplm/edgar-base")

prompt = "It was upon a dreary evening in the autumn of the year"
inputs = tok(prompt, return_tensors="pt")
out = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=120, do_sample=True, top_p=0.95, temperature=0.8)
print(tok.decode(out[0], skip_special_tokens=True))
```

## Training data

The corpus mixes two streams:

- **Real:** English-language texts dated 1786–1849. Primarily Gutenberg derived, with some news articles.
- **Synthetic:** gated synthetic rewrites and augmentations.

The assembled training set is 363.7M tokens; the dev set is 5.8M tokens.

## Training procedure

Training follows the BabyLlama-style ensemble distillation recipe:

1. A single 32k BPE tokenizer was trained on the corpus.
2. Two teacher models of the same architecture were trained independently on the corpus.
3. The student (this model) was trained on the same corpus with an equal-weight blend of
   cross-entropy on the data and KL divergence to the averaged teacher logits.

Overparamaterization relative to data sizing is intentional; the lever is high weight decay

| Hyperparameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Epochs | 4 (about 1.45B tokens seen) |
| Optimizer steps | 22,196 |
| Sequence length | 512 |
| Effective batch size | 128 |
| Learning rate | 7e-4 |
| Weight decay | 5.0 |
| Warmup steps | 600 |
| Distillation alpha / temperature | 0.5 / 1.0 |
| Precision | bf16 |

## Evaluation

Results on the held-out dev set at the end of training:

| Model | Cross-entropy loss | Perplexity |
|---|---|---|
| Teacher 1 | 3.297 | 27.0 |
| Teacher 2 | 3.295 | 27.0 |
| **Student (this model)** | **3.202** | **24.6** |

Filtered BLIMP: 0.72

## Limitations and biases

- The model reflects the language, knowledge and attitudes of its source period, including
  views that are offensive or false by present standards. It has no knowledge of anything
  after 1849 by design.

## Citation

Currently, if you use this model, please cite the paper the training framework accompanies:
*Pretraining Language Models for Diachronic Linguistic Change Discovery*.
An additional preprint will come shortly.