Zamba2-2.7B is a hybrid model composed of state-space and transformer blocks. It broadly follows the Zamba architecture which consists of a Mamba backbone alternating with shared transformer blocks (see diagram in Model Details). Zamba2-2.7B possesses three major improvements over Zamba1:

1.) Mamba1 blocks have been replaced with Mamba2 blocks.

2.) Instead of a single shared attention block, we utilize two shared attention blocks which are interleaved in an ABAB pattern throughout the network.

3.) We apply a LoRA projector to each shared MLP block, which allows the network to specialize the MLPs at each invocation of the shared layer across depth. LoRA enables us to add depth-specialization for only a minimal increase in total parameter count.

Zamba2-2.7B uses the Mistral v0.1 tokenizer and was pre-trained on 3T tokens of text and code data sourced from open web-datasets, including Zyda. Subsequently, in a second phase, Zamba2-2.7B was annealed on a mixture of 100B high-quality tokens.

Note: this is a temporary HuggingFace implementation of Zamba2-2.7B. It may not yet be fully compatible with all frameworks and tools intended to interface with HuggingFace models.

A standalone Pytorch implementation of Zamba2-2.7B may be found here.

To use Zamba2-2.7B, install transformers from source:

To install dependencies necessary to run Mamba2 kernels, install mamba-ssm from source (due to compatibility issues with PyTorch) as well as causal-conv1d:

You can run the model without using the optimized Mamba2 kernels, but it is not recommended as it will result in significantly higher latency and memory usage.

Zamba2-2.7B utilizes and extends our original Zamba hybrid SSM-attention architecture. The core Zamba architecture consists of a backbone of Mamba layers interleaved with one or more shared attention layers (one shared attention in Zamba1, two in Zamba2). This attention has shared weights to minimize the parameter cost of the model. We find that concatenating the original model embeddings to the input to this attention block improves performance, likely due to better maintenance of information across depth. The Zamba2 architecture also applies LoRA projection matrices to the shared MLP to gain some additional expressivity in each block and allow each shared block to specialize slightly to its own unique position while keeping the additional parameter overhead small.

Zamba2-2.7B achieves leading and state-of-the-art performance among models of <3B parameters and is competitive with some models of significantly greater size. Moreover, due to its unique hybrid SSM architecture, Zamba2-2.7B achieves extremely low inference latency and rapid generation with a significantly smaller memory footprint than comparable transformer based models.

Zamba2-2.7B's high performance and small inference compute and memory footprint renders it an ideal generalist model for on-device applications.

Zamba2-2.7B is a pretrained base model and therefore does not have any moderation mechanism and may output toxic or otherwise harmful language. In addition, one should not expect good instruct or chat performance, as this model was not fine-tuned for instruction following or chat.