At Azurro, we consistently place importance on using the Open Source technologies, both while working on the projects and in our everyday lives. We have decided to share a base language model trained by us. We are confident that smaller language models have great potential, and direct access to them for all people that are interested in such models democratizes this significant and dynamically changing field even more.

Statements

Training large language models requires a lot of computing power and it is meant for the major players on the market. However, does it mean that individuals or small companies cannot train language models capable of performing specific tasks? We decided to answer this question and train our own language model from scratch. We have made the following statements:

we use 1 consumer graphic card
we train the model only with the Polish corpus
we use manually selected, high quality texts for training the model.

Why have we made such statements? It is worth noting that training a model requires several times more resources than using it. To put it simply, it can be assumed that it is about 3-4 times more. Therefore, if a model can be run with a graphic card that has 6 GB VRAM, then training this model requires about 24 GB VRAM (this is the minimum value).

Many consumer computers are equipped with good quality graphic cards that can be used for training a model at one’s own home. This is why we have decided to use a top consumer graphic card - Nvidia’s RTX 4090 24GB VRAM.

All the currently available language models have been trained mainly with English corpora with a little bit of other languages, including Polish. The effect is that these models are not the best at dealing with the Polish texts. Even the popular GPT-3.5 model from OpenAI often has issues with correct forms. Therefore we have decided to prepare a model based only on the Polish corpus. An additional advantage of using only the Polish corpus is the size of the model - it is better to focus on one language in the case of smaller models.

It is important to remember that models are as good as the data with which they are trained. Having regard to the small size of the model, we trained it with carefully selected texts. This is why we have not used corpora such as Common Crawl that contain a lot of poor quality data. Our team has prepared a set of sources that then have been processed and used for training the model.

Model

APT2-1B-Base is a base model introducing a new series of the APT2 (Azurro Pretrained Transformer) models. It has been trained with the use of an original open source framework called ALLaMo. This framework allows the user to train language models similar to the Meta AI’s LLaMA models quickly and efficiently.

APT2-1B-Base is an autoregressive language model based on the architecture of a transformer. It has been trained with data collected before April 2023.

30 billion tokens have been used for training, and the training dataset (the Polish corpus) has over 7 billion tokens.

A special tokenizer has been prepared and trained for the purpose of training the model.

Model description:

Developed by: Azurro
Language: Polish
Model type: causal decoder-only
License: CC BY NC 4.0 (non-commercial use)

Model details:

Hyperparameter	Value
Model Parameters	954M
Sequence Length	512
Vocabulary Size	8000
Layers	73
Heads	16
d_head	64
d_model	1024
Dropout	0.0
Bias	No
Positional Encoding	RoPE
Activation Function	SwiGLU
Normalizing Function	RMSNorm
Intermediate Size	2816
Norm Epsilon	1e-06

Tokenizer details:

type: BPE
special tokens: 7
alphabet size: 112
vocabulary size: 8000

Training

Training hyperparameters:

Hyperparameter	Value
Micro Batch Size	4
Gradient Accumulation Steps	256
Batch Size	524288
Learning Rate	5e-04
Optimizer	AdamW
β1, β2	0.9, 0.95
Adam_eps	1e−8
Weight Decay	0.1
Grad Clip	1.0

Dataset

Collecting a large amount of high quality training data is a great challenge. Over the past years at Azurro, we have done a lot of projects connected with processing Big Data. Therefore, with our extensive experience, we have been able to prepare carefully selected training dataset quickly and efficiently.

Our training dataset contains:

ebooks: 1600 million tokens
Polish Wikipedia: 970 million tokens
web crawl data: 4600 million tokens

Quickstart

This model can be easily loaded using the AutoModelForCausalLM functionality.

python

from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForCausalLM

model_name = "Azurro/APT2-1B-Base"

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(model_name)

In order to reduce the memory usage, you can use smaller precision (bfloat16).

python

import torch

model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(model_name, torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16)

And then you can use Hugging Face Pipelines to generate text.

python

import transformers

text = "Najważniejszym celem człowieka na ziemi jest"

pipeline = transformers.pipeline("text-generation", model=model, tokenizer=tokenizer)
sequences = pipeline(max_new_tokens=100, do_sample=True, top_k=50, eos_token_id=tokenizer.eos_token_id)
for seq in sequences:
    print(f"Result: {seq['generated_text']}")

Generated output:

Najważniejszym celem człowieka na ziemi jest życie w harmonii z naturą. Człowiek powinien dążyć do tego, aby jego ciało i umysł były zdrowe i sprawne. W życiu należy kierować się zasadami etycznymi. W średniowieczu bardzo popularny był pogląd mówiący o tym, że człowiek jest istotą grzeszną. Poglądy te znalazły swój wyraz w literaturze. W utworach tych możemy odnaleźć motywy cierpienia, miłości, śmierci, życia pozagrobowego.

Limitations and Biases

APT2-1B-Base is not intended for deployment without fine-tuning. It should not be used for human-facing interactions without further guardrails and user consent.

APT2-1B-Base can produce factually incorrect output, and should not be relied on to produce factually accurate information. APT2-1B-Base was trained on various public datasets. While great efforts have been taken to clean the pretraining data, it is possible that this model could generate lewd, biased or otherwise offensive outputs.

License

Because of an unclear legal situation, we have decided to publish the model under CC BY NC 4.0 license - it allows for non-commercial use. The model can be used for scientific purposes and privately, as long as the license conditions are met.

Disclaimer

The license on this model does not constitute legal advice. We are not responsible for the actions of third parties who use this model.

Citation

Please cite this model using the following format:

@online{AzurroAPT2Base,
    author    = {Krzysztof Ociepa, Azurro},
    title     = {Introducing APT2-1B-Base: Polish Language Model},
    year      = {2023},
    url       = {www.azurro.pl/apt2-1b-base-en},
    note      = {Accessed: 2023-10-04}, % change this date
    urldate   = {2023-10-04} % change this date
}