kenpeter123/san-xsmall

SAN x-small

Simple Attention Network — a ~31M-parameter custom LLM, a faithful PyTorch port of the needle architecture (arXiv:2607.18363). Trained locally on an RTX 4070 Ti 12 GB.

This repo contains the released weights for the 12-layer configuration.

Files

file	what
pytorch_model.bin	model state_dict (load via san_model.SimpleAttentionNetwork.load_state_dict)
san_latest.pt	raw training checkpoint (step 137,260): {step, loss, model_state_dict, optimizer_state_dict, config}
config.json	architecture hyperparameters
tokenizer/	SmolLM2-135M tokenizer (vocab 49152)
san_model.py, san_triton.py	model definition (needed to load the weights)
load_example.py	minimal load + forward example

Load

from san_model import SimpleAttentionNetwork, SANConfig
import torch
cfg = SANConfig(num_layers=12)
model = SimpleAttentionNetwork(cfg).eval()
sd = torch.load("pytorch_model.bin", map_location="cpu")
model.load_state_dict(sd)

See load_example.py. Full training/eval code: GitHub kenpeter/x-small.

Architecture (released config)

• params ~31M · d_model 384 · 12 layers · 8 heads / 4 KV heads (GQA)
• vocab 49152 (SmolLM2-135M) · context 2048 · bfloat16
• components: ZCRMSNorm, HadamardMLP, GQA + RoPE + learned gate, Engram n-gram KV memory, Multi-Lane Hyper-Connections (MHC, Sinkhorn routing), MTP head, tied embeddings

Training & eval

• Curriculum over 16 domains; target 100w (1,000,000) steps; eff batch 64.
• Last training step 137,260 (of 1,000,000).
• Last eval (step 123,141) perplexity: mean 23.74 (code 10.25 / math 29.62 / prose 31.34). Perplexity is the usable quality signal at this scale; sample text loops regardless.
• The flat training loss near ~2.0 is curriculum-mix masking, not model stall.

License

MIT (code). Weights released for research use.