Minerva is the first family of LLMs pretrained from scratch on Italian developed by Sapienza NLP in collaboration with Future Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) and CINECA. Notably, the Minerva models are truly-open (data and model) Italian-English LLMs, with approximately half of the pretraining data including Italian text.

Minerva LLMs - website

Description

This is the model card for Minerva-7B-base-v1.0, a 7 billion parameter model trained on almost 2.5 trillion tokens (1.14 trillion in Italian, 1.14 trillion in English, and 200 billion in code).

This model is part of the Minerva LLM family:

🚨⚠️🚨 Bias, Risks, and Limitations 🚨⚠️🚨

This section identifies foreseeable harms and misunderstandings.

This is a foundation model, not subject to alignment. Model may:

Overrepresent some viewpoints and underrepresent others
Contain stereotypes
Contain personal information
Generate:
- Racist and sexist content
- Hateful, abusive, or violent language
- Discriminatory or prejudicial language
- Content that may not be appropriate for all settings, including sexual content
Make errors, including producing incorrect information or historical facts as if it were factual
Generate irrelevant or repetitive outputs

We are aware of the biases and potential problematic/toxic content that current pretrained large language models exhibit: more specifically, as probabilistic models of (Italian and English) languages, they reflect and amplify the biases of their training data. For more information about this issue, please refer to our survey:

Biases in Large Language Models: Origins, Inventory, and Discussion

How to use Minerva with Hugging Face transformers

python

import transformers
import torch

model_id = "sapienzanlp/Minerva-7B-base-v1.0"

# Initialize the pipeline.
pipeline = transformers.pipeline(
    "text-generation",
    model=model_id,
    model_kwargs={"torch_dtype": torch.bfloat16},
    device_map="auto",
)

# Input text for the model.
input_text = "La capitale dell'Italia è"

# Compute the outputs.
output = pipeline(
  input_text,
  max_new_tokens=128,
)

output

[{'generated_text': "La capitale dell'Italia è la città di Roma, che si trova a [...]"}]

Model Architecture

Minerva-7B-base-v1.0 is a Transformer model based on the Mistral architecture. Please look at the configuration file for a detailed breakdown of the hyperparameters we chose for this model.

The Minerva LLM family is composed of:

Model Name	Tokens	Layers	Hidden Size	Attention Heads	KV Heads	Sliding Window	Max Context Length
Minerva-350M-base-v1.0	70B (35B it + 35B en)	16	1152	16	4	2048	16384
Minerva-1B-base-v1.0	200B (100B it + 100B en)	16	2048	16	4	2048	16384
Minerva-3B-base-v1.0	660B (330B it + 330B en)	32	2560	32	8	2048	16384
Minerva-7B-base-v1.0	2.48T (1.14T it + 1.14T en + 200B code)	32	4096	32	8	None	4096

Model Training

Minerva-7B-base-v1.0 was trained using llm-foundry 0.8.0 from MosaicML. The hyperparameters used are the following:

Model Name	Optimizer	lr	betas	eps	weight decay	Scheduler	Warmup Steps	Batch Size (Tokens)	Total Steps
Minerva-350M-base-v1.0	Decoupled AdamW	2e-4	(0.9, 0.95)	1e-8	0.0	Cosine	2%	4M	16,690
Minerva-1B-base-v1.0	Decoupled AdamW	2e-4	(0.9, 0.95)	1e-8	0.0	Cosine	2%	4M	47,684
Minerva-3B-base-v1.0	Decoupled AdamW	2e-4	(0.9, 0.95)	1e-8	0.0	Cosine	2%	4M	157,357
Minerva-7B-base-v1.0	AdamW	3e-4	(0.9, 0.95)	1e-5	0.1	Cosine	2000	4M	591,558

Model Evaluation

For Minerva's evaluation process, we utilized ITA-Bench, a new evaluation suite to test the capabilities of Italian-speaking models. ITA-Bench is a collection of 18 benchmarks that assess the performance of language models on various tasks, including scientific knowledge, commonsense reasoning, and mathematical problem-solving.

Training Data

Minerva-7B-base-v1.0 is trained on 1.14T Italian tokens, 1.14T English tokens, and 200B code tokens.

The training data is a mixture of the following datasets:

Dataset	Tokens	Language	Epochs
RedPajama-Data-V2	687,952,502,784	Italian	1.3
CulturaX	158,201,876,480	Italian	1.5
Wikipedia	1,265,135,616	Italian	1.0
Gutenberg/Wikisource	147,017,728	Italian	2.0
EurLex	1,647,013,888	Italian	1.0
Gazzetta Ufficiale	1,654,013,952	Italian	1.0
FineWeb	1,076,406,624,256	English	1.0
Wikipedia	5,259,501,568	English	1.0
ArXiv	33,231,106,048	English	1.0
Gutenberg	6,947,893,248	English	1.0
StackExchange	22,069,268,480	English	1.0
The Stack V2	200,754,900,992	Code	1.0

Tokenizer Fertility

The tokenizer fertility measures the average amount of tokens produced per tokenized word. A tokenizer displaying high fertility values in a particular language typically indicates that it segments words in that language extensively. The tokenizer fertility is strictly correlated with the inference speed of the model with respect to a specific language, as higher values mean longer sequences of tokens to generate and thus lower inference speed.

Fertility computed over a sample of Cultura X (CX) data and Wikipedia (Wp):

Model	Voc. Size	Fertility IT (CX)	Fertility EN (CX)	Fertility IT (Wp)	Fertility EN (Wp)
Mistral-7B-v0.1	32000	1.87	1.32	2.05	1.57
gemma-7b	256000	1.42	1.18	1.56	1.34
Minerva-3B-base-v1.0	32768	1.39	1.32	1.66	1.59
Minerva-7B-base-v1.0	51200	1.32	1.26	1.56	1.51

Notice

Minerva-7B-base-v1.0 is a pretrained base model and, therefore, has no moderation mechanisms.

The Sapienza NLP Team

Riccardo Orlando: data preprocessing, model training
Pere-Lluis Huguet Cabot: data preprocessing, vocabulary, evaluation
Luca Moroni: data curation, data analysis, downstream tasks, evaluation
Simone Conia: data curation, evaluation, project supervision
Edoardo Barba: data preprocessing, downstream tasks, project supervision
Roberto Navigli: project lead and coordination

Special thanks for their support

Giuseppe Fiameni, Nvidia
Sergio Orlandini, CINECA

Acknowledgments

This work was funded by the PNRR MUR project PE0000013-FAIR and the CREATIVE PRIN project, which is funded by the MUR Progetti di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale programme (PRIN 2020). We acknowledge the CINECA award "IscB_medit" under the ISCRA initiative for the availability of high-performance computing resources and support.