Quark-50m-Instruct is a small (≈56M parameters) decoder-only language model, fine-tuned for instruction following.
It is built on the same architecture of “SmolLM” family and was fully pretrained on 5 billion tokens from
HuggingFaceTB/smollm‑corpus.
Model type: Causal Language Model (LLaMA‑style decoder)
Creators:OvercastLab (research & development lab for ML/AI)
Release date: 22 April 2026
Model Summary
Quark-50m-Instruct is designed to be an efficient assistant that can run on consumer GPUs (e.g., RTX 3070 with 8GB VRAM)
and even on CPU for light workloads. It is not competitive with large models on knowledge‑intensive tasks,
but it excels at:
Simple conversational tasks
Code generation and explanation (Python)
Short text rewriting and summarisation
On‑device / edge inference
The architecture closely follows the efficient‑small‑LM blueprint popularised by SmolLM:
Component
Details
Vocab size
49,152
Hidden size
384
Layers
24
Attention
Grouped Query (6 Q heads, 2 KV heads)
FFN
SwiGLU with 1,024 intermediate
Position
RoPE (θ = 10,000)
Normalisation
RMSNorm (pre‑block)
Total trainable parameters: ≈48M (with weight tying).
Benchmark Evaluation Metrics
Category
Benchmark
Metric
Score / Value
Status
Linguistics & Grammar
BLiMP
Accuracy
68.12%
Success
Commonsense & Reasoning
PIQA
Normalized Accuracy
57.83%
Success
COPA
Accuracy
57.00%
Success
BoolQ
Accuracy
52.17%
Success
WinoGrande
Accuracy
47.36%
Success
HellaSwag
Normalized Accuracy
28.49%
Success
RACE
Accuracy
26.41%
Success
CommonsenseQA
Accuracy
20.31%
Success
Academic & Knowledge
SciQ
Normalized Accuracy
49.00%
Success
ARC-Easy
Normalized Accuracy
36.49%
Success
MMLU
Accuracy
25.64%
Success
ARC-Challenge
Normalized Accuracy
25.17%
Success
OpenBookQA
Normalized Accuracy
25.40%
Success
Language Modeling
LAMBADA
Accuracy
15.87%
Success
WikiText-2
Word Perplexity
251.76
Success
Note: The Arithmetic benchmark failed due to outdated script support (arithmetic.py), and SocialIQA failed due to a registration tag error (siqa). Total baseline execution completed successfully for all other 15 tasks.
Uses
Direct Use
The model can be used via the 🤗 Transformers library for standard text generation.
It expects chat‑formatted input (see example below).
Downstream Use
Because of the open Apache‑2.0 license, you may fine‑tune Quark-50m‑Instruct on your own data for
domain‑specific tasks – for instance, a customer‑support bot, a code reviewer, or a story writer.
Limitations
Limited world knowledge (stopped at mid‑2025 pretraining data).
Short context window (2,048 tokens).
Small size means it can make more factual mistakes than larger models.
How to Get Started
fromtransformersimportAutoTokenizer,AutoModelForCausalLMmodel_name="ThingAI/Quark-50m-Instruct"tokenizer=AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name)model=AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(model_name,device_map="auto")messages=[{"role":"system","content":"You are Quark, a helpful assistant."},{"role":"user","content":"Explain group query attention in one sentence."}]inputs=tokenizer.apply_chat_template(messages,tokenize=True,add_generation_prompt=True,return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)outputs=model.generate(inputs,max_new_tokens=128)print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0],skip_special_tokens=True))