---
language:
- it
- en
license: apache-2.0
tags:
- italian
- causal-lm
- small-language-model
- trained-from-scratch
- chatml
- conversational
pipeline_tag: text-generation
---

# ⚛ Quark-50M-v2

**43.8M parameter Italian-first bilingual language model, trained from scratch by ThingAI.**

Quark-50M is an ultra-compact causal language model that speaks fluent Italian. Designed as a proof-of-concept for small, efficient, Italian-centric AI.

## Highlights

- **43.8M parameters** — runs on any device, even CPU
- **Italian-first** — trained on 60% Italian data (books, Wikipedia, web)
- **ChatML format** — `<|im_start|>user`/`<|im_start|>assistant`
- **Custom tokenizer** — 16k BPE, optimized for Italian (4.15 chars/token)
- **Trained from scratch** — architecture, tokenizer, and training pipeline all custom

## Architecture

| Component | Value |
|-----------|-------|
| Parameters | 43.8M |
| Vocabulary | 16,384 (BPE) |
| Dimensions | 512 |
| Layers | 12 |
| Heads | 8 (4 KV heads, GQA) |
| FFN | 1,408 (SwiGLU) |
| Context | 2,048 tokens |
| Normalization | RMSNorm |
| Position | RoPE |
| Weight Tying | Yes |

## Training

**Pretraining:** 5B tokens on a curated mix:

| Dataset | Weight | Type |
|---------|--------|------|
| PleIAs/Italian-PD | 25% | 171K Italian books (public domain) |
| FineWeb-2 Italian | 20% | Cleaned, deduplicated web |
| Wikipedia IT | 15% | Encyclopedia |
| Cosmopedia | 15% | Synthetic educational |
| SmolLM-Corpus | 10% | Curated mix |
| StarCoder Python | 8% | Code |
| OpenWebMath | 7% | Mathematics |

**SFT:** Fine-tuned on [quattro-chiacchiere](https://huggingface.co/datasets/ThingAI/quattro-chiacchiere), a synthetic Italian Q&A dataset generated with [Alembic](https://github.com/skein-labs/Alembic).

## Usage

```python
import torch
from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download
from transformers import PreTrainedTokenizerFast

# Load
ckpt_path = hf_hub_download("ThingAI/Quark-50M", "model.pt")
model_py = hf_hub_download("ThingAI/Quark-50M", "model.py")
tok_file = hf_hub_download("ThingAI/Quark-50M", "tokenizer.json")

# Tokenizer
tokenizer = PreTrainedTokenizerFast(tokenizer_file=tok_file)
tokenizer.eos_token = "<|endoftext|>"

# Model
import importlib.util
spec = importlib.util.spec_from_file_location("model", model_py)
mod = importlib.util.module_from_spec(spec)
spec.loader.exec_module(mod)

ckpt = torch.load(ckpt_path, map_location="cpu", weights_only=False)
cfg = mod.ModelConfig(**ckpt["model_cfg"])
model = mod.Quark(cfg).eval()
model.load_state_dict(ckpt["model"])

# Chat
prompt = "<|im_start|>user\nQual è la capitale d'Italia?<|im_end|>\n<|im_start|>assistant\n"
ids = tokenizer.encode(prompt, return_tensors="pt")
with torch.no_grad():
    for _ in range(100):
        logits = model(ids)[1][:, -1, :].float()
        nxt = logits.argmax(-1, keepdim=True)
        if nxt.item() == tokenizer.convert_tokens_to_ids("<|im_end|>"): break
        ids = torch.cat([ids, nxt], -1)
print(tokenizer.decode(ids[0], skip_special_tokens=True))
# La capitale d'Italia è Roma.
```

## Examples

```
Tu: Qual è la capitale d'Italia?
Quark: La capitale d'Italia è Roma.

Tu: Chi sei?
Quark: Sono Quark, piacere di conoscerti.

Tu: Come ti chiami?
Quark: Mi chiamo Quark, piacere di conoscerti.
```

## Limitations

- **43.8M parameters** — cannot perform complex reasoning or long-form generation
- **Factual accuracy** — may hallucinate facts, especially on niche topics
- **SFT dataset** — currently limited; more data will improve reliability
- **No safety training** — not recommended for production without guardrails

## Related

- [Quark3Tokenizer](https://huggingface.co/ThingAI/Quark3Tokenizer) — the tokenizer
- [quattro-chiacchiere](https://huggingface.co/datasets/ThingAI/quattro-chiacchiere) — the SFT dataset
- [Alembic](https://github.com/skein-labs/Alembic) — the dataset distillation tool
- [Glyph](https://huggingface.co/ThingAI/Glyph) — multi-task text classifier by ThingAI

## Citation

```bibtex
@misc{quark50m,
  author = {ThingAI},
  title  = {Quark-50M-v2: Italian-First Small Language Model},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://huggingface.co/ThingAI/Quark-50M}
}
```

## License

Apache 2.0