pico-decoder-medium / README.md
rdiehlmartinez's picture
pico-decoder-medium-1 trained to 50k steps
fe843c0
---
license: apache-2.0
datasets:
- pico-lm/pretokenized-dolma
language:
- en
metrics:
- pico-lm/perplexity
pipeline_tag: text-generation
---
# Pico Decoder Medium
**pico-decoder-medium** is a 181M parameter model in the `pico-decoder` suite, balancing scale and analyzability. Built with [`pico-train`](https://github.com/pico-lm) and instrumented with [`pico-analyze`](https://github.com/pico-lm), it enables detailed studies of layer-wise learning behavior during language model pretraining.
> NOTE: The `pico-decoder-medium-1` branch contains the full commit history for the training run.
## πŸ”§ Model Details
| Field | Value |
|---------------------|------------------------------------|
| **Architecture** | Decoder-only transformer (LLaMA-style) |
| **Parameters** | 181M |
| **Layers** | 12 |
| **Hidden Size** | 768 |
| **Feed Forward Size**| 3072 |
| **Attention Heads** | 12 |
| **Key/Value Heads** | 4 |
## πŸ“š Training
- **Dataset**: [`pretokenized-dolma`](https://github.com/pico-lm)
- **Training steps**: 200,000
- **Batch size**: 1024
- **Sequence length**: 2048
- **Optimizer**: AdamW
- **Learning rate schedule**: Linear decay with warmup
- **Compute**: 16 A100-SXM4-80GB GPUs
## πŸ“ˆ Evaluation and Analysis
This model supports fine-grained analysis using [pico-analyze](https://github.com/pico-lm). This tool enables researchers to understand how learning unfolds over training, even at very small scales.
We also evaluate perplexity of the model on the [pico-paloma-tinsy](https://huggingface.co/datasets/pico-lm/pretokenized-paloma-tinsy) dataset.
## πŸ“„ Citation
```bibtex
@software{pico2025,
author = {Diehl Martinez, Richard},
title = {Pico: A Lightweight Framework for Studying Language Model Learning Dynamics},
year = {2025},
url = {https://github.com/pico-lm}
}