Trained with SPP from token zero, followed by an additional reflection-focused midtraining stage resumed from the SPP-T0 checkpoint (replacing the final learning-rate cooldown).

Synthetic Persona Pretraining (SPP)

Synthetic Persona Pretraining (SPP) installs a target value persona during pretraining rather than only during alignment. Value-laden, first-person reflections, generated against a constitution, are appended to a subset of pretraining documents after a special <assistant> token. Attention masking and RoPE position aliasing keep the reflection from changing the continuation of the original document. This model is trained with SPP.

Instruction-tuned counterpart: dlab-spp/t0-mt-3b-instruct.

Model details

Architecture: Llama-3.2-3B-shaped, trained from scratch.
Tokenizer: the SmolLM2 tokenizer extended with an <assistant> marker and constitution tokens (vocabulary 49280).
Pretraining: ~500B tokens on a subset of the Olmo 3 Dolma 3 mixture, with SPP reflections inserted into the safety-annotated documents within it, followed by a reflection-focused midtraining stage on those annotated documents.

Training checkpoints

Intermediate checkpoints are published as git revisions on this repo, so any point in the trajectory can be loaded by passing revision=:

python

from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
import torch

repo = "dlab-spp/t0-mt-3b-base"
tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(repo)          # identical at every revision
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    repo, revision="step-0", dtype=torch.bfloat16, device_map="auto"
)

Revision	Midtraining step	LR phase
`step-0`	0 / 72,895	— (init from `t0-3b-base` step 225,000)
`step-25000`	25,000 / 72,895	linear decay
`step-50000`	50,000 / 72,895	linear decay
`step-72895`	72,895 / 72,895	linear decay — same weights as `main`

main always holds the finished model (step 72,895). Only model weights are published — optimizer and RNG state are not included, so these revisions support evaluation, probing, and fine-tuning, but not exact resumption of the original run.

Steps are counted from the start of midtraining. Midtraining resumed from pretraining step 225,000, so the earlier part of this model's history is the pretraining trajectory in dlab-spp/t0-3b-base (revisions step-25000 … step-225000). Those checkpoints are shared and are not duplicated here; step-0 is the exact fork point.

Intended use

Research on alignment and safety. As a base model it is meant for continuation, probing, or further fine-tuning; it is not instruction-tuned and can produce incorrect or unsafe content.

Citation

bibtex

@misc{minder2026syntheticpersonapretrainingalignment,
      title={Synthetic Persona Pretraining: Alignment from Token Zero},
      author={Julian Minder and Viktor Moskvoretskii and Raghav Singhal and Difan Jiao and Andy Arditi and Shaobo Cui and Yiderigun Borjigin and Kartik Bali and Stefan Krsteski and Harsh Raj and Huu Nguyen and Jannik Brinkmann and Ashton Anderson and Roland Aydin and Robert West},
      year={2026},
      eprint={2608.13482},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.LG},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13482},
}

License: to be finalised.

dlab-spp/t0-mt-3b-base

SPP-T0-MT — Base (3B)

Synthetic Persona Pretraining (SPP)

Model details

Training checkpoints

Intended use

Links

Citation

dlab-spp/
t0-mt-3b-base