Instructions to use mikecovlee/tinymistral-477m with libraries, inference providers, notebooks, and local apps. Follow these links to get started.

Libraries

How to use mikecovlee/tinymistral-477m with Transformers:

# Use a pipeline as a high-level helper
from transformers import pipeline

pipe = pipeline("text-generation", model="mikecovlee/tinymistral-477m", trust_remote_code=True)
messages = [
    {"role": "user", "content": "Who are you?"},
]
pipe(messages)

# pip install -U transformers accelerate
# Load model directly
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("mikecovlee/tinymistral-477m", trust_remote_code=True, device_map="auto")

Notebooks
Google Colab
Kaggle
Local Apps Settings

vLLM

How to use mikecovlee/tinymistral-477m with vLLM:

Install from pip and serve model

# Install vLLM from pip:
pip install vllm
# Start the vLLM server:
vllm serve "mikecovlee/tinymistral-477m"
# Call the server using curl (OpenAI-compatible API):
curl -X POST "http://localhost:8000/v1/chat/completions" \
	-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
	--data '{
		"model": "mikecovlee/tinymistral-477m",
		"messages": [
			{
				"role": "user",
				"content": "What is the capital of France?"
			}
		]
	}'

Use Docker

docker model run hf.co/mikecovlee/tinymistral-477m

SGLang

How to use mikecovlee/tinymistral-477m with SGLang:

Install from pip and serve model

# Install SGLang from pip:
pip install sglang
# Start the SGLang server:
python3 -m sglang.launch_server \
    --model-path "mikecovlee/tinymistral-477m" \
    --host 0.0.0.0 \
    --port 30000
# Call the server using curl (OpenAI-compatible API):
curl -X POST "http://localhost:30000/v1/chat/completions" \
	-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
	--data '{
		"model": "mikecovlee/tinymistral-477m",
		"messages": [
			{
				"role": "user",
				"content": "What is the capital of France?"
			}
		]
	}'

Use Docker images

docker run --gpus all \
    --shm-size 32g \
    -p 30000:30000 \
    -v ~/.cache/huggingface:/root/.cache/huggingface \
    --env "HF_TOKEN=<secret>" \
    --ipc=host \
    lmsysorg/sglang:latest \
    python3 -m sglang.launch_server \
        --model-path "mikecovlee/tinymistral-477m" \
        --host 0.0.0.0 \
        --port 30000
# Call the server using curl (OpenAI-compatible API):
curl -X POST "http://localhost:30000/v1/chat/completions" \
	-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
	--data '{
		"model": "mikecovlee/tinymistral-477m",
		"messages": [
			{
				"role": "user",
				"content": "What is the capital of France?"
			}
		]
	}'

Docker Model Runner
How to use mikecovlee/tinymistral-477m with Docker Model Runner:
```
docker model run hf.co/mikecovlee/tinymistral-477m
```

tinymistral-477m — 477M dense base

tinymistral-477m is a 477M-parameter dense decoder-only language model — the same-total-parameter, same-everything-else companion to the sparse Mixture-of-Experts model mikecovlee/tinymixtral.

It exists to answer one controlled question: at a fixed total parameter count and fixed data, what does MoE routing buy you? tinymistral-477m (dense, 477.4M total = active) is trained on the exact same data, tokenizer, 4-segment WSD schedule, batch size and LR ladder as the 477.5M-total / 276.1M-active MoE tinymixtral. Only the FFN differs: the four 2048-wide expert FFNs are merged into one 8192-wide dense FFN per layer and the routers are removed.

This is a base (pretrained) model — it has no chat/instruction fine-tuning.

Model details

	`tinymistral-477m`	`tinymixtral` (MoE)
Architecture	Dense SwiGLU FFN	4 routed experts, top-2, aux 1e-3
Total parameters	477,400,064	477,465,600
Active parameters	477,400,064	276,139,008
FFN intermediate	8192 (4 experts merged)	2048 (per expert)
FFN MACs / token / layer	25,165,824	12,582,912 (top-2)
Hidden size	1024	1024
Layers	16	16
Attention	GQA 16 Q / 4 KV heads, head_dim 64	same
Context length	2048	2048
Positional	RoPE θ = 1e6, QK-Norm	same
Norm / embeddings	Pre-RMSNorm (eps 1e-6), tied embeddings	same
Vocab	32,000 (TinyLlama tokenizer)	same
Precision	float32 checkpoint (bf16 training)	same
License	MIT	MIT

The two models differ by exactly the 16 router matrices (16 × 1024 × 4 = 65,536 parameters, 0.014%); everything else is identical. The dense model pays ~1.7× the active FLOPs per token (477.4M vs 276.1M active parameters) — this is a parameter-matched control, not a compute-matched one. The compute-matched sibling is tinymistral-276m.

Training

Tokens: 8.05B, split into 4 strictly disjoint segments (2.00 / 1.94 / 2.20 / 1.91B, zero repetition).
Schedule: WSD per segment — warmup 700 steps → constant → linear decay over the final 10%. LR ladder 5e-4 / 5e-4 / 4e-4 / 3e-4 across S1→S4.
Batch: 48 × 1024 tokens = 49,152 tokens/step.
Optimizer: AdamW β(0.9, 0.95), weight decay 0.1 (no decay on norms/embeddings), grad clip 1.0.
Precision: bf16 autocast + bf16 optimizer states; gradient checkpointing.
Seed: 42. Segment boundaries are the anneal points; AdamW momentum carries across segments.
Hardware: single NVIDIA RTX A5000 (Ampere, 24 GB), ~12k tokens/s.

Data mix

FineWeb-Edu 44% · DCLM (web) 20% · Cosmopedia v2 12.5% · code (OpenCodeInstruct) 12.5% · math (OpenWebMath) 6% · Wikipedia 6% (shares rounded, sum ≈ 100%).

Evaluation

Same-protocol evaluation (lm_eval 0.4.12, 0-shot, no chat template). Harness = mean of the 7 primary metrics: hellaswag acc_norm, piqa acc_norm, winogrande acc, arc_easy acc, arc_challenge acc_norm, openbookqa acc_norm, lambada acc.

Metric	tinymistral-477m (dense)	tinymixtral (MoE)
7-task harness	0.4013	0.3979
MMLU 5-shot	0.2399	0.2339
TruthfulQA MC1 / MC2	0.2362 / 0.4090	0.2375 / 0.4171

Per-task scores (7-task suite):

Task	tinymistral-477m (dense)	tinymixtral (MoE)
HellaSwag (acc_norm)	0.3414	0.335
PIQA (acc_norm)	0.6355	0.638
WinoGrande (acc)	0.5114	0.515
ARC-Easy (acc)	0.4907	0.478
ARC-Challenge (acc_norm)	0.2568	0.255
OpenBookQA (acc_norm)	0.302	0.296
LAMBADA (acc)	0.2711	0.268

Dense per-segment trajectory (7-task harness / MMLU): 0.3931 / 0.2291 → 0.3918 / 0.2386 → 0.4016 / 0.2337 → 0.4013 / 0.2399.

Harness note. Every figure on this card is computed under the one formula stated above from the campaign artifacts. The tinymistral-276m card quotes its MoE column under a slightly different formula (piqa acc) and an earlier MMLU run, so cross-card means are not bitwise comparable. Here both columns are recomputed under the identical formula.

Takeaway: at fixed total parameters and identical data, removing MoE routing does not hurt — the dense model is +0.34 pp on the 7-task harness and +0.6 pp on MMLU (six of eleven metrics up; the losses are within noise for this scale). Read together with the iso-FLOPs result (tinymistral-276m: the MoE is +0.88 pp at equal active parameters), the conclusion is that the MoE advantage is compute efficiency, not parameter efficiency: a dense model can match or beat the MoE at equal total parameters, but only by spending ~1.7× the FLOPs per token. MMLU / TruthfulQA are near chance for both models and are noise-dominated.

Usage

from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

repo = "mikecovlee/tinymistral-477m"
tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(repo, trust_remote_code=True)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(repo, trust_remote_code=True)

inputs = tok("The capital of France is", return_tensors="pt")
out = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=32, do_sample=False)
print(tok.decode(out[0], skip_special_tokens=True))

Requires transformers and trust_remote_code=True (custom tinymixtral architecture).

Limitations

Base model: no instruction tuning; not a chat model. Outputs should not be used as-is for assistant tasks.
Trained on only 8.05B tokens — far below modern small-model budgets (SmolLM2-360M / Qwen3-0.6B use 2–36T). Knowledge is capacity/budget-bound: MMLU ≈ chance.
English-centric, no safety alignment.
The FFN is unusually wide (8× hidden, a merged-MoE shape); standard dense models at this size use ~2.5–3.5× and more layers. This is deliberate — it keeps the comparison with tinymixtral controlled — but a textbook-shaped 477M dense would likely score slightly differently.

Family

mikecovlee/tinymixtral — 477.5M MoE base (v3.0 flagship)
mikecovlee/tinymixtral-it — MoE instruction-tuned (v3.0-it, 3M SFT)
mikecovlee/tinymistral-276m — 276M dense base (iso-FLOPs ablation)
mikecovlee/tinymistral-276m-it — 276M dense instruction-tuned (3M SFT)
mikecovlee/tinymistral-477m — this model (477M dense base, iso-total-parameter ablation)
mikecovlee/tinymixtral-v1.1-1b — 1B MoE (earlier flagship)
mikecovlee/tinymixtral-v1.1-0.5b — 0.5B-class MoE (data-quality ablation)
mikecovlee/tinymixtral-v2.0-beta — shared-expert experiment (beta)
mikecovlee/tinymixtral-v1.0 — legacy (C4)

Naming. The MoE family is published under tinymixtral; the dense ablation companions use the tinymistral spelling. Both belong to the same project.

Citation

@misc{tinymistral477m2026,
  title  = {TinyMixtral: a small Mixture-of-Experts language-model family},
  author = {Michael Lee},
  year   = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/mikecovlee/tinymistral-477m}}
}

License

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Datasets used to train mikecovlee/tinymistral-477m

Collection including mikecovlee/tinymistral-477m

Tiny Mixtral

Collection

A small Mixtral-style Mixture-of-Experts causal language model for pretraining research on a single consumer GPU. • 9 items • Updated about 17 hours ago • 1