---
library_name: transformers
language:
  - kn
tags:
  - kannada
  - gpt2
  - language-model
  - low-resource-language
  - dravidian
license: mit
---

# Kannada GPT-2 Small (kannada-gpt2-32m)

A **31.6M parameter GPT-2 style autoregressive language model** trained entirely from scratch on Kannada text. Everything — data pipeline, BPE tokenizer, model weights — built from the ground up on a single NVIDIA RTX 5070.

**No pretrained initialization. No fine-tuning. Pure Kannada.**

## Model Details

### Model Description

This is a small GPT-2 model trained from scratch on Kannada text. It uses a custom BPE tokenizer also trained from scratch on the same data. The model can generate coherent Kannada text and produces useful representations for downstream tasks.

- **Developed by:** AbhiDS16
- **Model type:** GPT-2 (decoder-only transformer)
- **Language:** Kannada (kn)
- **License:** MIT
- **Parameters:** 31,626,240
- **Context length:** 512 tokens
- **Vocabulary size:** 12,000
- **Trained from scratch:** Yes (no pretrained initialization)

### Model Sources

- **Repository:** https://github.com/thorOdinson16/KanLM
- **Demo:** Use the Quick Start code below

## Uses

### Direct Use

The model can be used for:
- Kannada text generation
- Extracting embeddings for downstream tasks (classification, clustering)
- Fine-tuning on task-specific Kannada datasets
- Studying low-resource language model training

### Downstream Use

The model's frozen embeddings achieve **73.5% accuracy** on Kannada sentiment classification with a simple logistic regression head — demonstrating transferable representations.

### Out-of-Scope Use

- Chat/instruction-following (model is not instruction-tuned)
- Production systems requiring high factual accuracy
- Sensitive content generation without safeguards

## Bias, Risks, and Limitations

- **Small model size:** 31.6M parameters limits factual knowledge and reasoning
- **Repetition:** Tends to repeat phrases in longer generations
- **Training data bias:** Web text (news, blogs) reflects biases and code-mixing present in online Kannada
- **Not instruction-tuned:** Raw causal LM — not suitable for chat/QA without fine-tuning
- **Data recency:** Training data from mC4 (2011–2022)

## How to Get Started with the Model

```python
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("AbhiDS16/kannada-gpt2-32m")
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("AbhiDS16/kannada-gpt2-32m")

prompt = "ನಾನು ಇಂದು ಬೆಳಿಗ್ಗೆ"
inputs = tokenizer(prompt, return_tensors="pt")
outputs = model.generate(
    **inputs,
    max_new_tokens=80,
    temperature=0.7,
    do_sample=True,
    top_p=0.9,
    pad_token_id=tokenizer.pad_token_id,
)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0], skip_special_tokens=True))
```

## Training Details

### Training Data

**CulturaX-Kn** — 1.35M documents (~4GB) of Kannada web text from mC4. After filtering (Kannada script ratio ≥ 60%, deduplication, length filtering), **12.6M clean sentences** were used for training.

### Training Procedure

- **Precision:** fp16 mixed
- **Batch size:** 16 (effective 32 with gradient accumulation)
- **Learning rate:** 5e-4 with cosine decay and 1,000 step warmup
- **Optimizer:** AdamW (β₁=0.9, β₂=0.95, weight decay=0.01)
- **Gradient clipping:** 1.0
- **Epochs:** 3
- **Total steps:** 83,874
- **Training tokens:** ~463M

### Speeds, Sizes, Times

- **Hardware:** NVIDIA RTX 5070 (8GB VRAM)
- **Training time:** 7 hours 16 minutes
- **Model size on disk:** ~126MB (safetensors)
- **Throughput:** ~3.2 steps/second

## Evaluation

### Perplexity

| Metric | Value |
|--------|-------|
| Validation loss | 3.4594 |
| Perplexity | **31.80** |
| Evaluation tokens | 4,626,944 |

### Sentiment Classification

| Metric | Value |
|--------|-------|
| Method | Frozen LM + Logistic Regression |
| Accuracy | **73.5%** |
| F1 (macro) | **0.735** |

### Tokenizer Efficiency

Custom BPE tokenizer trained from scratch on Kannada text:

| Tokenizer | Tokens/Word | Improvement |
|-----------|-------------|-------------|
| **Our BPE** | **1.91** | — |
| XLM-R | 2.43 | 21.5% |
| mBERT | 4.00 | 52.2% |

## Environmental Impact

- **Hardware:** NVIDIA RTX 5070 (125W TDP under load)
- **Hours used:** ~7.3 hours
- **Estimated carbon:** ~0.35 kg CO2eq (assuming 0.4 kg/kWh grid average)
- **Cloud provider:** N/A (local desktop)

## Technical Specifications

### Model Architecture

- 8 transformer layers
- 512 hidden dimension
- 8 attention heads
- 2,048 feed-forward dimension
- GELU activation
- 0.1 dropout

### Compute Infrastructure

- **GPU:** NVIDIA RTX 5070 (8GB VRAM)
- **CPU:** Intel Core Ultra 9 285H
- **RAM:** 32GB

### Software

- Python 3.10
- PyTorch 2.10
- Transformers 4.x
- Datasets 3.x
- Tokenizers 0.19

## Citation

```bibtex
@misc{kannada-gpt2-32m,
  author = {AbhiDS16},
  title = {Kannada GPT-2 Small: A From-Scratch Language Model for Kannada},
  year = {2026},
  publisher = {HuggingFace},
  howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/AbhiDS16/kannada-gpt2-32m}},
  note = {Trained entirely from scratch with custom BPE tokenizer}
}
```

## Model Card Contact

Open an issue on GitHub: https://github.com/thorOdinson16/KanLM