---

license: apache-2.0

language:

• en

pipeline_tag: text-generation

datasets:

• HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-edu
• HuggingFaceTB/cosmopedia
• HuggingFaceTB/finemath
• HuggingFaceTB/smoltalk
• codeparrot/github-code-clean

tags:

• gguf
• mixture-of-experts
• moe
• deepseek
• multi-head-latent-attention
• mla
• from-scratch
• tiny
• littlekedi
• chat
• instruction-tuned

library_name: gguf

base_model: edededdy/LittleKedi-tiny-instruct

base_model_relation: quantized

quantized_by: edededdy

---

<p align="center"><img src="little_kedi.jpg" alt="LittleKedi logo" width="640"></p>

LittleKedi-tiny-instruct-GGUF

GGUF builds (f16 and q8_0) of LittleKedi-tiny-instruct for llama.cpp, Ollama and LM Studio. The PyTorch weights (model.safetensors), config and tokenizer are in the main repo; the card below describes the model.

LittleKedi-tiny-instruct is the instruction-tuned (chat) version of LittleKedi-tiny-base, a small DeepSeek-V3-style Mixture-of-Experts language model trained from scratch. It has

2.0M parameters in total, of which 1.5M are active per token

(0.50M excluding the embedding table). It was pretrained on a 1,000M-token mix (FineWeb-Edu, Cosmopedia (Stanford), Cosmopedia (OpenStax), Cosmopedia (WikiHow), Cosmopedia (Khan Academy), FineMath 4+, SmolTalk, github-code-clean).

Part of the LittleKedi family. Not affiliated with DeepSeek.

This is the instruction-tuned (chat) model. It answers in a chat format and stops when it's done, but it's still a very small model: answers are fluent and on-topic but often wrong or vague, and it invents facts confidently. It's an educational and research artifact; don't use it for anything that matters.

Chat format

<|system|>You are a helpful assistant.<|end|><|user|>What causes the seasons?<|end|><|assistant|>

The model writes its reply and ends it with <|end|>. The system turn is optional. The GGUF files embed this

template, and chat_template.jinja / tokenizer_config.json carry it for other tools.

The LittleKedi family

LittleKedi is a family of small DeepSeek-V3-style Mixture-of-Experts language models trained from

scratch. Every size comes in three variants that differ in how sparse they are: how many routed experts

they have, and what share of their parameters a token actually passes through.

| Variant | Routed experts |

|---|---|

| standard (<size>) | a few wide experts; the densest variant |

| sparse (<size>-sparse) | many narrower, fine-grained experts, more of them active per token |

| wide-sparse (<size>-wide-sparse) | more experts again; the largest total and smallest active share |

More experts means more total capacity to store knowledge, but each expert

sees fewer tokens (tokens × top-k ÷ experts per layer), so sparser variants need more training data before

their experts are well trained. The variants of a size share a tokenizer and dataset, so they can be

compared directly. Shapes change as the family scales; the table below is generated from the current

presets.

This card is for tiny, the standard tiny model: 1.5M of its 2.0M parameters (78%) are active per token. Its siblings are tiny-sparse and tiny-wide-sparse.

| Model | Variant | Vocab | Total | Active | Active non-emb. | Active % | Routed experts |

|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|

| tiny ← this model | standard | 8K | 2.0M | 1.5M | 0.5M | 78% | 8 × 64, top-2 |

| tiny-sparse | sparse | 8K | 2.6M | 1.6M | 0.5M | 60% | 32 × 32, top-4 |

| tiny-wide-sparse | wide-sparse | 8K | 3.8M | 1.6M | 0.5M | 42% | 64 × 32, top-4 |

| mini | standard | 8K | 9.4M | 4.8M | 3.2M | 51% | 12 × 128, top-3 |

| mini-sparse | sparse | 8K | 19.8M | 4.8M | 3.2M | 24% | 64 × 64, top-6 |

| mini-wide-sparse | wide-sparse | 8K | 36.4M | 4.9M | 3.3M | 13% | 128 × 64, top-6 |

| small | standard | 8K | 12.2M | 6.3M | 4.2M | 52% | 16 × 128, top-4 |

| small-sparse | sparse | 8K | 24.1M | 6.4M | 4.3M | 27% | 80 × 64, top-8 |

| small-wide-sparse | wide-sparse | 8K | 43.9M | 6.5M | 4.4M | 15% | 160 × 64, top-8 |

| moderate | standard | 16K | 49.8M | 18.8M | 12.5M | 38% | 24 × 192, top-4 |

| moderate-sparse | sparse | 16K | 105.8M | 19.1M | 12.8M | 18% | 120 × 96, top-8 |

| moderate-wide-sparse | wide-sparse | 16K | 199.0M | 19.4M | 13.1M | 10% | 240 × 96, top-8 |

| medium | standard | 16K | 85.9M | 30.8M | 22.4M | 36% | 24 × 256, top-4 |

| medium-sparse | sparse | 16K | 185.3M | 31.2M | 22.8M | 17% | 120 × 128, top-8 |

| medium-wide-sparse | wide-sparse | 16K | 350.9M | 31.6M | 23.2M | 9% | 240 × 128, top-8 |

| base | standard | 32K | 258.7M | 105.4M | 80.2M | 41% | 32 × 256, top-6 |

| base-sparse | sparse | 32K | 542.8M | 106.3M | 81.2M | 20% | 160 × 128, top-12 |

| base-wide-sparse | wide-sparse | 32K | 1015.9M | 107.6M | 82.4M | 11% | 320 × 128, top-12 |

"Active" counts everything a token passes through: embeddings, attention, the dense layer, shared

experts and its top-k routed experts. "Active non-embedding" leaves out the embedding table (tied with the

output head), which costs memory but almost no compute; it's the fair number for comparing compute

between models.

Architecture

| Component | This model |

|---|---|

| Parameters | 1.99M total, 1.55M active per token (78%), 0.50M active non-embedding |

| Layers / hidden size | 4 / 128 (layer 0 has a dense SwiGLU FFN of 352; layers 1–3 are MoE) |

| Attention | Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA): 4 heads, KV latent 32, decoupled RoPE dim 16, head dims 16+16 (q/k) and 16 (v). The KV cache stores only the 32-dim latent plus a 16-dim RoPE key per token |

| MoE | DeepSeekMoE: 8 routed experts (SwiGLU, 64 hidden), top-2, plus 1 shared expert; sigmoid gating |

| Load balancing | Auxiliary-loss-free bias balancing (update speed 0.001) plus a small sequence-wise loss (α = 0.0001). Over the second half of training the median batch put 1.07× the mean load on the busiest expert (1.08× in the worst layer), and 0.00% of expert assignments were dropped for capacity. |

| Expert dispatch | Training: fixed capacity (capacity factor 2.0; overflow assignments are dropped). Inference is always dropless |

| Embeddings | Input embedding and output head tied |

| Context | 1,024 tokens |

Training

| | |

|---|---|

| Data | 1,000M tokens, 801,792 documents (~502 tokens per parameter, ~646 per active parameter), one pass, sources interleaved throughout (mix below) |

| Tokenizer | Byte-level BPE, 8,196 tokens (~3.75 bytes/token on this mix); digits not split (v1 tokenizer); chat special tokens built in |

| Steps | 15,258 × 65,536 tokens (batch 16 × 1024 × 4 accumulation) |

| Optimizer | Muon (momentum 0.95, Nesterov, 5 Newton-Schulz steps; each expert's matrix orthogonalized separately) for hidden matrices, AdamW (β = 0.9, 0.95) for embeddings, norms and the router; weight decay 0.1, gradient clipping 1.0 |

| Learning rate | 2e-3 peak; WSD: 200 warm-up steps, constant, then linear decay to 0 over the last 20% of steps (schedule set for 15,258 steps) |

| Precision | bf16 autocast, torch.compile |

| Compute | ~3e15 FLOPs (6 × active non-embedding parameters × tokens) |

| Hardware | One AMD Radeon 890M integrated GPU (Ryzen AI 300 laptop), ROCm on Windows: about 8.9 hours at a median ~31.1K tokens/s |

| Source | What it is | Tokens | Share |

|---|---|---|---|

| FineWeb-Edu sample/10BT | educational web pages | 700M | 70% |

| Cosmopedia (Stanford) | synthetic textbooks | 70M | 7% |

| Cosmopedia (OpenStax) | synthetic textbooks | 30M | 3% |

| Cosmopedia (WikiHow) | synthetic how-to articles | 30M | 3% |

| Cosmopedia (Khan Academy) | synthetic lessons | 20M | 2% |

| FineMath 4+ | maths web pages | 80M | 8% |

| SmolTalk | chat conversations | 50M | 5% |

| github-code-clean | source code | 20M | 2% |

Fine-tuning (SFT)

| | |

|---|---|

| Base model | LittleKedi-tiny-base |

| Conversations | 6,730 (6,730 train / 451 validation), 611.6K assistant tokens trained on |

| Data | ~3,950 single-turn question/answer pairs (~28% of assistant tokens) written by Gemma 4 E4B from 1,499 documents sampled from this model's own pretraining data, so every question concerns text it saw; filtered to drop questions that refer back to the source document. Plus ~2,780 general conversations from HuggingFaceTB/smol-smoltalk (everyday small talk in full, plus capped samples of openhermes-50k, smol-constraints and smol-magpie-ultra-short), filtered to remove code and to fit 1,024 tokens. 301 grounded pairs (whole documents) and 150 conversations held out as the test set. |

| Loss | On assistant replies and their closing <|end|> only; prompts and padding are masked |

| Schedule | 842 steps, batch 16, 2 epochs, Muon + AdamW, peak LR 2e-4, cosine decay |

| MoE routing | Load-balancing biases frozen at their pretrained values, with padding excluded from expert-load statistics; experts run dropless |

Validation loss on 451 held-out conversations (assistant tokens only): 4.154 → 3.303.

Evaluation

Zero-shot benchmarks (evals.py)

| Task | acc_norm | acc | Items | Chance |

|---|---|---|---|---|

| SciQ | 55.9% ± 1.6% | 57.5% | 1,000 | 25% |

| ARC-Easy | 32.2% ± 1.0% | 32.8% | 2,376 | 25% |

| HellaSwag | 26.8% ± 0.4% | 26.5% | 10,042 | 25% |

Each answer choice is scored by the log-probability of its text after the prompt, using lm-evaluation-harness

prompts (SciQ includes its supporting passage). acc_norm divides by the answer's length in characters;

acc doesn't. Splits: SciQ test, ARC-Easy test, HellaSwag validation.

MMLU (mmlu_eval.py)

| Format | Accuracy | Questions scored | Average few-shot examples |

|---|---|---|---|

| letter | 25.6% | 14,037 (skipped 5) | 4.5 |

| cloze | 25.5% | 14,037 (skipped 5) | 0.0 |

| Category | Subjects | Questions | Letter | Cloze |

|---|---|---|---|---|

| STEM | 19 | 3,153 | 27.1% | 24.0% |

| Humanities | 13 | 4,705 | 25.2% | 25.4% |

| Social Sciences | 12 | 3,077 | 22.7% | 26.0% |

| Other | 13 | 3,102 | 27.6% | 26.7% |

Biology & medicine (cloze): 27.1% on 2,089 questions, +2.1 points against 25% chance (about 2.2 standard errors, significant). This pools the 10 life-science and health subjects; it isn't an official MMLU category.

In the letter format the model compares " A"–" D", with same-subject examples added while they fit the

context. In the cloze format each answer's text is scored by log-probability per byte; at this size the

cloze results are the meaningful ones. Chance is 25%.

Base vs instruct

Both are scored on the same raw-text prompts, without the chat template, so the numbers are directly comparable. SFT mainly teaches format, turn-taking and when to stop, so large changes in knowledge benchmarks aren't expected. Chance on the multiple-choice tasks is 25%.

| Metric | Base | Instruct |

|---|---|---|

| SciQ (acc_norm) | 56.3% | 55.9% |

| ARC-Easy (acc_norm) | 32.7% | 32.2% |

| HellaSwag (acc_norm) | 26.7% | 26.8% |

| MMLU (letter) | 25.4% | 25.6% |

| MMLU (cloze) | 25.8% | 25.5% |

| MMLU biology & medicine (cloze) | 28.4% | 27.1% |

Compared with its siblings and other small models

| | This model | tiny-wide-sparse | Pythia-70M | GPT-2 | Supra-50M |

|---|---|---|---|---|---|

| Parameters (total) | 2.0M | 3.8M | 70.4M | 124.4M | 51.8M |

| Active non-embedding parameters | 0.5M | 0.5M | 18.9M | 85.1M | 35.4M |

| Training tokens | 1,000M | 1,000M | 300B (the Pile) | undisclosed (WebText) | 20B (FineWeb-Edu) |

| SciQ (acc_norm) | 55.9% | 53.9% | 55.2% | 53.2% | 77.2% |

| ARC-Easy (acc_norm) | 32.2% | 32.4% | 35.0% | 42.0% | 52.2% |

| HellaSwag (acc_norm) | 26.8% | 26.3% | – | 29.5% | 31.8% |

| MMLU (cloze) | 25.5% | 25.7% | – | – | – |

| MMLU biology & medicine (cloze) | 27.1% | 27.8% | – | – | – |

| Validation loss (held-out mix) | – | 3.736 | – | – | – |

LittleKedi columns are measured with this repo's evals.py and mmlu_eval.py on the checkpoints named. Validation

losses are only comparable between models that share a tokenizer and validation set. The other columns are

published figures: Pythia-70M from EleutherAI's evaluations as quoted on the

Wisp-15M card, GPT-2 and Supra-50M from the

Supra-50M-Base card. Their prompts may differ from ours,

so treat gaps of a few points as noise.

What it can and can't do

This is a 0.5M active non-embedding parameter chat model: fine-tuning taught it the shape of a conversation,

but it has almost no knowledge to put in it. It's a research artifact for studying instruction tuning at the

smallest scale, not an assistant.

What it does

• ✅ Replies in the chat format: one short paragraph, then it stops by emitting <|end|> (it did on every one of

our test prompts).

• ✅ Writes grammatical English in the register of an answer ("This process can help…", "It also reduces the

risk of…").

• ✅ Occasionally picks up the topic's vocabulary (asked about stress, it mentions reducing stress and anxiety).

What it can't do

• ❌ Answer the question asked. Most replies are unrelated to the prompt: "Hi! How are you today?" →

"Analyzing aids in food is crucial for maintaining healthy eating habits…".

• ❌ Facts. Even on questions about text from its own pretraining data, answers are invented. Treat every name,

date and number as made up.

• ❌ Arithmetic. "What is 7 + 6?" → "Yes, it's about 8."
• ❌ Creative requests, instructions, multi-turn follow-up, code.

Benchmarks: fine-tuning leaves them where the base model was (SciQ 55.9%, ARC-Easy 32.2%), as expected:

instruction tuning changes the format, not what the model knows.

Decoding: temperature ≈ 0.7, top-p ≈ 0.9, repetition penalty ≈ 1.15 (the GGUF files carry these as defaults).

Usage

llama.cpp (GGUF, llama.cpp's built-in deepseek2 architecture; the chat template is embedded):

llama-cli -m LittleKedi-tiny-instruct-q8_0.gguf -cnv --temp 0.7 --top-p 0.9 --repeat-penalty 1.15

Ollama (uses the bundled template and params files): ollama run hf.co/edededdy/LittleKedi-tiny-instruct-GGUF:Q8_0

PyTorch (needs the littlekedi package from the training code):

import json, torch
from safetensors.torch import load_file
from littlekedi import LittleKediModel, ModelConfig
from littlekedi.chat import END, render_prompt
from littlekedi.tokenizer import BPETokenizer

model = LittleKediModel(ModelConfig.from_dict(json.load(open("config.json")))).eval()
model.load_state_dict(load_file("model.safetensors"))
tok = BPETokenizer.from_file("tokenizer.json")
ids = torch.tensor([render_prompt(tok, [{"role": "user", "content": "What causes the seasons?"}])])
out = model.generate(ids, 200, temperature=0.7, top_p=0.9, repetition_penalty=1.15, stop_ids={tok.token_to_id(END)})
print(tok.decode(out[0, ids.shape[1]:].tolist()).replace(END, "").strip())

Or in a terminal: python chat.py --ckpt <checkpoint>.pt.

Files

| File | Contents |

|---|---|

| LittleKedi-tiny-instruct-f16.gguf | GGUF (f16) for llama.cpp / Ollama / LM Studio |

| LittleKedi-tiny-instruct-q8_0.gguf | GGUF (q8_0) for llama.cpp / Ollama / LM Studio |

| template | Ollama chat template |

| params | Ollama stop tokens and sampling defaults |

| chat_template.jinja | Chat template (Jinja), the same one embedded in the GGUF files |

| little_kedi.jpg | The LittleKedi logo |

Acknowledgements

• The architecture follows DeepSeek-V3 (DeepSeek-AI, 2024): MLA, DeepSeekMoE and auxiliary-loss-free balancing.
• Muon (Keller Jordan et al., 2024) with Moonlight's update scaling (Liu et al., 2025).
• Pretraining data: FineWeb-Edu (ODC-BY 1.0).
• Pretraining data: Cosmopedia (Apache 2.0).
• Pretraining data: FineMath 4+ (ODC-BY 1.0).
• Pretraining data: SmolTalk (Apache 2.0 for its new subsets, with the datasets it includes under their own licenses).
• Pretraining data: github-code-clean (Apache 2.0, with each file under its own open-source license).
• Chat data: see the SFT table above for its sources, each under its own license.

Card generated 2026-10-13 by prepare_release.py from tiny-sft.pt (step 15257).