We are releasing Limen0.2B, a 222.5M-parameter base language model developed as a research platform for efficient pretraining and superword tokenization at smaller scales.
Limen0.2B was trained from scratch on 50B tokens and uses a compact 16K BoundlessBPE vocabulary. The project explores whether SuperBPE-style tokenization can remain effective in a substantially smaller model and vocabulary regime than those examined in earlier large-scale experiments.
The model also combines a deep-and-narrow transformer design with Exclusive Self-Attention, grouped-query attention, and tied embeddings. Its compact vocabulary reduces the embedding footprint and leaves a larger share of the parameter budget available to the transformer layers.
Despite its relatively modest training budget, Limen0.2B achieves competitive results for its scale across the reported language understanding, commonsense reasoning, and grammatical evaluation tasks. Comparisons with other compact models are provided as context rather than strict rankings, as their training data, token budgets, architectures, and evaluation settings differ.
The release includes the model weights, implementation, training configuration, checkpoint progression, and evaluation results, all under Apache 2.0.
We have released the first version of CompactLMIndex UniversalComputingResearch/clmi, a curated benchmark for smaller language models.
The index evaluates models across six benchmarks covering commonsense, science and world knowledge, and grammatical competence. Scores are normalized for random chance, so results are easier to compare across tasks with different baselines. The composite gives 50% weight to commonsense, 25% to science and world knowledge, and 25% to grammatical competence. BLiMP is macro-averaged across its 12 linguistic categories. Every result includes 95% bootstrap intervals, and rank ranges reflect paired comparisons on matched evaluation items.
The goal is to compare compact models under one fixed, zero-shot evaluation protocol and make differences in architecture, training, and inference visible without treating parameter count as a substitute for quality.
If you have results for a model that fits the benchmark scope, please open a discussion on the Space.