I made a 1.1M ModernBERT encoder play Doom in real time on a CPU Some time ago, VAGO Solutions released SauerkrautLM-Doom-MultiVec-1.3M, a tiny model trained to play Doom Defend the Center scenario from 31k human gameplay examples.
My first thought: cool! I love both Doom and Small Language Models.
Then another idea: I bet I can do better :-)
What I did? - evaluated the original model and found it's better than reported - changed a bit the architecture - generated SFT data with a scripted oracle - SFT + PPO refinement on consumer hardware
Got a smaller, faster and killer model Can even fit a floppy with int8 quantization š¾
I trained a 210M text-to-image diffusion transformer from scratch on one GPU in 3.5 days, on 4.2M curated images at 256². Same six prompts and seeds at every checkpoint of the run š
What mattered most: captions that fit the images, a timestep shift for the 32-channel FLUX.2 latent, aspect-ratio buckets from step one, register tokens with learned null attention slots, and torch.compile for training.