---
language:
- nl
license: apache-2.0
library_name: transformers
tags:
- dutch
- gpt2
- causal-lm
- text-generation
- instruction-tuning
- sft
- trl
- gguf
- llama.cpp
model_name: gpt2-dutch-instruct
pipeline_tag: text-generation
---

# gpt2-dutch-instruct

A GPT-2 small (124M parameter) language model trained **from scratch on Dutch text**, then fine-tuned for instruction following using supervised fine-tuning (SFT). This model understands and generates Dutch.

## Model details

| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Architecture | GPT-2 small |
| Parameters | 123.8M |
| Layers | 12 |
| Attention heads | 12 |
| Hidden dimension | 768 |
| Context length | 512 tokens |
| Vocabulary size | 50,000 (Dutch BPE) |
| Weights | fp16 / safetensors (473 MB) |
| Inference speed (CPU) | 0.9 tok/s |

## Files

| File | Format | Size |
|---|---|---|
| `model.safetensors` | fp16 | 473 MB |
| `dutch-gpt2-f16.gguf` | GGUF F16 | 249 MB |
| `dutch-gpt2-q8_0.gguf` | GGUF Q8_0 | 132 MB |

## Use with llama.cpp

```bash
# Download
wget https://huggingface.co/Thorstin/gpt2-dutch-instruct/resolve/main/dutch-gpt2-q8_0.gguf

# Run
llama-cli -m dutch-gpt2-q8_0.gguf \
  -p "### Instructie:\nWat is de hoofdstad van Nederland?\n### Antwoord:\n" \
  -n 200
```

## Use with Ollama

```bash
# Create Modelfile
cat > Modelfile << 'EOF'
FROM ./dutch-gpt2-q8_0.gguf
TEMPLATE """### Instructie:
{{ .Prompt }}
### Antwoord:
"""
PARAMETER temperature 0.7
PARAMETER top_p 0.9
PARAMETER repeat_penalty 1.3
PARAMETER num_ctx 512
EOF

ollama create dutch-gpt2 -f Modelfile
ollama run dutch-gpt2
```

## Training

### Phase 1 — Pretraining from scratch

- **Dataset:** CC-100 Dutch (~37 GB raw, ~6.6B tokens), streamed
- **Tokenizer:** ByteLevel BPE trained on first 500K CC-100 Dutch documents
- **Hardware:** NVIDIA Tesla T4 (16 GB VRAM)
- **Tokens trained:** ~5B
- **Steps:** 154,000
- **Final loss:** 3.54
- **Duration:** ~70 GPU hours
- **Key settings:** `fp16=True`, `gradient_checkpointing=True`, `batch_size=32`, `lr=5e-4`, cosine scheduler

### Phase 2 — Instruction fine-tuning (SFT)

- **Dataset:** [`BramVanroy/alpaca-cleaned-dutch`](https://huggingface.co/datasets/BramVanroy/alpaca-cleaned-dutch) — 46,163 Dutch instruction/response pairs
- **Framework:** TRL 1.6.0 SFTTrainer
- **Epochs:** 3
- **Steps:** 4,329
- **Loss:** 3.31 → 1.14
- **Duration:** ~1.25 hours

### Instruction format

```
### Instructie:
<vraag of instructie>
### Antwoord:
<antwoord>
```

## Usage

```python
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
import torch

model_id = "Thorstin/gpt2-dutch-instruct"
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_id)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(model_id, torch_dtype=torch.float16)
model.eval()

def chat(instruction: str, max_new_tokens: int = 200) -> str:
    prompt = f"### Instructie:\n{instruction}\n### Antwoord:\n"
    inputs = tokenizer(prompt, return_tensors="pt")
    with torch.no_grad():
        output = model.generate(
            **inputs,
            max_new_tokens=max_new_tokens,
            do_sample=True,
            temperature=0.7,
            top_p=0.9,
            repetition_penalty=1.3,
            pad_token_id=tokenizer.eos_token_id,
        )
    response = tokenizer.decode(output[0], skip_special_tokens=True)
    return response.split("### Antwoord:")[-1].strip()

print(chat("Wat is de hoofdstad van Nederland?"))
```

## Benchmark results (lm-evaluation-harness, limit=200)

| Task | Accuracy | Accuracy (norm) |
|---|---|---|
| hellaswag_nl | 24.50% | 28.50% |
| arc_nl | 19.00% | 29.00% |
| blimp_nl | 80.67% | 79.51% |

Random baseline: 50% for BLiMP-NL (binary), 25% for HellaSwag/ARC (4-way).


## Sample outputs

| Prompt | Response |
|---|---|
| Wat is de hoofdstad van Nederland? | De hoofdstad van Nederland is Amsterdam.... |
| Leg uit wat fotosynthese is. | Fotosynthese is het proces waarbij planten lichtenergie van de zon omzetten in chemische energie die ze gebruiken om koo... |
| Schrijf een kort gedicht over de zee. | De golven slaan tegen het raam, Een kalmerende bries draagt de geur van zout en vers gezette koffie. Het geluid van gebr... |

## Limitations

- 124M parameters is a hard ceiling — expect occasional repetition, factual errors, and shorter coherent responses compared to larger models
- Context window is limited to 512 tokens

## Framework versions

| Package | Version |
|---|---|
| TRL | 1.6.0 |
| Transformers | 4.48 |
| PyTorch | 2.9.1+cu128 |
| Datasets | 2.16 |
| Tokenizers | 0.21 |