---
license: apache-2.0
language:
  - en
library_name: transformers
pipeline_tag: text-generation
tags:
  - tiny-lm
  - qwen3
  - value-residual
  - resformer
  - muon
  - ablation
datasets:
  - HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-edu
---

# JugnuLM-110M-R2 (value residuals + Muon)

**What "R2" means.** This is **rung 2 of the JugnuLM phase-2 ablation ladder.** We take
rung **R1** — [JugnuLM-110M-R1](https://huggingface.co/altslate/JugnuLM-110M-R1) (value
residuals) — and add **one** change: we swap the optimizer to **Muon** for the 2D hidden
matrices, holding *everything else fixed* (same value-residual architecture, data, tokens,
schedule shape, batch, seed). The ladder keeps a lever only if it beats the previous rung.
**R2 does, so it's kept.**

## What changed: the Muon optimizer

R0 and R1 trained with AdamW on every parameter. R2 uses **Muon** — Newton-Schulz
**orthogonalized momentum** updates — on the 2D hidden weight matrices (attention + MLP,
81.4M params), and **keeps AdamW** for the rest (tied embedding/head, RMSNorm gains, and
the 22 value-residual `vr_lambda` scalars, 28.3M params). Muon's advantage is known to be
**largest at exactly this scale** (sub-150M) and to shrink as models grow.

Both optimizers ride one shared cosine LR multiplier: Muon peak `2e-2`, AdamW peak `1.5e-3`,
each annealed to 10% of peak.

## Result vs the R1 and R0 rungs

| 110M rung | BLiMP ↑ | ARC-Easy ↑ | WikiText-2 byte-ppl ↓ |
|---|---|---|---|
| R0 — baseline | 81.25 | 52.48 | 1.95 |
| R1 — + value residuals | 81.10 | 54.67 | 1.940 |
| **R2 — + Muon** | 80.78 | **56.10** | **1.932** |

**Muon lifts ARC-Easy by +1.43 over R1 (54.67 → 56.10) and lowers perplexity, at a small
BLiMP dip (−0.32, ~2× SE).** Across the two ladder rungs ARC-Easy has climbed **+3.6**
(52.48 → 56.10) while BLiMP stayed ~flat — steadily closing the reasoning gap to the
125–143M leaderboard models. Evaluated with EleutherAI `lm-evaluation-harness`.

**Training-efficiency note.** Muon's convergence lead was largest early — val-perplexity
was **−26% vs R1 at step 1000** — and compressed to ~−1% by the end of the fixed 8.4B-token
budget (the classic "Muon wins the sprint, converges toward AdamW" pattern). Notably, the
**downstream ARC gain persisted** even as the final perplexity gap narrowed.

## ⚠️ Loading — requires `trust_remote_code`

Value residuals are a **custom attention pathway**, so this model must be loaded with the
included modeling file. Loading it as a stock Qwen3 **silently drops the residual** and
understates quality.

```python
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("altslate/JugnuLM-110M-R2")
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("altslate/JugnuLM-110M-R2", trust_remote_code=True)
ids = tok("The theory of relativity was developed by", return_tensors="pt").input_ids
print(tok.decode(model.generate(ids, max_new_tokens=30, repetition_penalty=1.3)[0], skip_special_tokens=True))
```

## Architecture & training

Identical architecture to R1: Qwen3-arch + value-residual pathway, **23 layers × 576**,
GQA 9/3, RoPE, SwiGLU, RMSNorm, QK-Norm, tied embeddings, SmolLM2 tokenizer (49,152),
z-loss 1e-4. Trained from scratch on ~8.4B tokens of FineWeb-Edu (sample-10BT), shared
cosine schedule (Muon 2e-2, AdamW 1.5e-3, → 10% floor), ~0.5M-token global batch, bf16,
DDP on 4× RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell. Only the optimizer differs from R1.

## Intended use & limitations

Research **base** model (not instruction-tuned). Fluent English continuation and
reasonable recall for its size; limited multi-step reasoning, occasional repetition,
English-only. Not for production.

## Links

- Previous rung: [altslate/JugnuLM-110M-R1](https://huggingface.co/altslate/JugnuLM-110M-R1)
- Baseline: [altslate/JugnuLM-110M](https://huggingface.co/altslate/JugnuLM-110M)
- Training code & ablation ladder: https://github.com/AltSlate-Labs/jugnu

## Paper

This model is described in [*Depth and Scale in the Sub-150M Regime: JugnuLM-53M vs JugnuLM-110M*](https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14715)
(arXiv:2609.14715 · [HF Papers](https://huggingface.co/papers/2609.14715)).

```bibtex
@misc{rajput2026jugnu,
  title         = {Depth and Scale in the Sub-150M Regime: JugnuLM-53M vs JugnuLM-110M},
  author        = {Rajput, Dushyant and Chauhan, Nirdesh and Kosaraju, Siddharth},
  year          = {2026},
  eprint        = {2609.14715},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  primaryClass  = {cs.AI},
  url           = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14715}
}
```