CascaMini-350M-C24 is a 339,788,800-parameter base language model trained
from scratch for 15,000,010,752 tokens.
This is the first production CascaMini-350M release. It is a pretrained base
model, not an instruction-tuned or chat-aligned assistant.
Model summary
Property
Value
Parameters
339,788,800
Decoder layers
24
Hidden size
1,024
Query heads
16
KV heads
4
Head dimension
64
SwiGLU intermediate
3,072
Context length
2,048
Vocabulary
49,152
RoPE theta
10,000
Embedding / LM head
tied
Bias / dropout
no / 0
Architecture family
Llama-style decoder-only
The Hugging Face repository is a parity-checked conversion of the accepted
custom CascaMini release to standard Transformers LlamaForCausalLM format.
Tokenizer
The model uses the SmolLM2-49K / cosmo2-tokenizer vocabulary.
The original tokenizer vocabulary and merges are retained. The Hugging Face
model_max_length metadata is set to 2,048 to match the model's actual trained
context length.
Training
Data mixture — CascaMini-CoreMix-v1 / M3
Source
Weight
FineWeb-Edu
55.00%
Wikimedia / Wikipedia
10.00%
peS2O
8.00%
arXiv
5.00%
Stack v2 code
12.00%
Math StackExchange
5.00%
LibreTexts
0.75%
Pressbooks
2.00%
OER Commons
0.75%
DOAB
0.50%
Structured Stack v2
1.00%
The CoreMix source documents were filtered and materialised before training.
The final training sampler used the frozen M3 source weights above.
The production optimizer was VO Muon: Muon applied only to the attention
value and output projection matrices, with auxiliary AdamW for the remaining
parameters.
Muon:
peak LR: 0.0025
minimum LR: 0.00025
cosine schedule
warmup: 0
momentum: 0.95
Newton-Schulz iterations: 5
Muon weight decay: 0
Auxiliary AdamW:
peak LR: 2e-4
minimum LR: 2e-5
warmup: 100 steps
weight decay: 0.1
betas: (0.9, 0.95)
eps: 1e-8
Training used 8 GPUs, BF16, context length 2,048, and 65,536 tokens per global
update.
Reported training throughput was approximately 512,637 tokens/s and the
trainer-reported elapsed time was approximately 9.31 hours.
Final evaluation
The final checkpoint was also the best fixed-validation checkpoint.
Metric
Final value
Final validation loss
2.806850
FineWeb BPB
0.88373602
CoreMix raw-weighted BPB
0.79967575
All raw-weighted BPB
0.80351910
M3 source-weighted BPB
0.83542681
Per-source BPB
Source
BPB
FineWeb-Edu
0.883736
Wikimedia
0.906903
peS2O
0.802241
arXiv
0.809891
Stack v2 code
0.573321
Math StackExchange
0.879759
LibreTexts
0.651555
Pressbooks
0.856434
OER Commons
0.740656
DOAB
0.817797
Structured Stack v2
0.956214
3B -> 15B scaling
Using the same production-selected VO-Muon recipe:
Metric
~3B
15B
Change
M3 weighted BPB
0.894323
0.835427
-6.59%
FineWeb BPB
0.939407
0.883736
-5.93%
Validation loss
2.992783
2.806850
improved
L24 residual RMS
11.302
14.982
increased
Repetition stress tests
Long continuation repetition remains the clearest known weakness.
Generation mode
repeat2
Greedy
0.814915
Sampled (temperature 0.8, top-k 50, top-p 0.95, RP 1.05)
0.196018
Showcase (temperature 0.65, top-k 40, top-p 0.90, RP 1.08)
0.332300
Sampled RP 1.12
0.106421
These are deliberately long-generation stress diagnostics, not downstream
task scores.
No standard downstream benchmark suite is claimed in this release yet.
Geometry diagnostics
Final diagnostic values:
L24 residual RMS: 14.9823
logit RMS: 6.4040
mean Q stable rank: 18.28
mean K stable rank: 13.75
mean V stable rank: 76.87
mean O stable rank: 123.80
The VO-Muon training line remained numerically stable through the full 15B
schedule.
Usage
python
1from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
23repo_id ="beardymcgee/CascaMini-350M-C24-CoreMix-v1-15B-VO-Muon-v1"45tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(repo_id)6model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(7 repo_id,8 device_map="auto",9)1011prompt ="The most important property of a reproducible scientific experiment is"12inputs = tokenizer(prompt, return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)1314output = model.generate(15**inputs,16 max_new_tokens=96,17 do_sample=True,18 temperature=0.8,19 top_k=50,20 top_p=0.95,21 repetition_penalty=1.05,22)2324print(tokenizer.decode(output[0], skip_special_tokens=False))
studying small-model data, optimizer, and scaling behaviour.
It is not presented as a factual authority, safety-aligned assistant, or
production decision system.
Limitations
This is a small base model. It can:
hallucinate or state false information confidently;
repeat phrases or enter repetitive continuation patterns;
generate biased, offensive, unsafe, or otherwise undesirable text;
reproduce fragments resembling training material;
perform poorly on tasks requiring knowledge or reasoning beyond its scale;
fail to follow instructions because it was not instruction-tuned.
The long-generation repetition measurements above are published explicitly
because repetition remains a known weakness of this model family.
Training-data provenance and licensing
The canonical CoreMix JSONLs retained licence_evidence_mode and
licence_fields for 100% of the 6,699,937 CoreMix training records audited
for this release.
The corpus nevertheless contains multiple third-party licence classes,
including CC BY, CC BY-SA, public-domain/CC0/GFDL material, and source code
under many permissive SPDX licences. FineWeb-Edu is tracked separately through
its upstream dataset terms.
For that reason this model card uses:
license: other
rather than implying that one simple permissive licence accurately describes
all provenance and downstream rights questions associated with the release.
The Hugging Face conversion additionally passed original-vs-standard-Llama
logit parity and a fresh local AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained() load.
Project status
This is the frozen 350M first-production release. Future CascaMini work may
use larger or more diverse data corpora, but those are separate experimental
lineages and do not change this release.