Factorized embeddings and 2-pass recycling on micro-parameter budgets (Maba)

#1
by AndrewThompson1233 - opened

Hi IvmeLabs team,

Really enjoyed reading through the v3 card. Pushing past Chinchilla on 15B tokens with Muon on a single Blackwell workstation and digging into XSA (arXiv:2603.09078) is great engineering.

I noticed two specific constraints you hit while balancing the budget:

Vocab tax: Even after narrowing to 16k vocab, embeddings still eat 20.7% of your 24.8M parameters (~5.1M weights), locking capacity that could otherwise go into transformers blocks.

Depth vs width: You pushed to 16 layers for coherence, but were capped by total parameter overhead.

I've been working on an open architecture called Maba that tackles these exact bottlenecks on small compute budgets:

Factorized embeddings: Rank-projected lookup drops the vocab parameter tax to around 4.3% of the total budget, freeing up several million parameters strictly for hidden layers.

2-pass physical block recycling: Passes representations through the physical blocks twice with layer-index conditioning, giving 40 effective layers from a 20-block parameter footprint.

Sub-quadratic scaling: 75% GDN-2 linear recurrence (O(1) state memory) paired with 25% GQA pushes context past 1024 up to 32k-131k tokens without KV-cache explosion.

Native Muon + AdamW training support out of the box.

The PyTorch reference implementation, specs, and weights are here:
https://huggingface.co/AndrewThompson1233/maba-v1-architecture

If you run an exploratory v4 run or want to test low-rank factorized embeddings to claw back that 20.7% vocab overhead, take a look. Curious what you think of block recycling on micro models?

Best,

Andrew

İvmeLabs org

Hi Andrew,

Your architecture is really interesting and I'm sure it could help our models so thank you for your interest and recommendations.

But as IvmeLabs we like to stay on more verified or proven architectures that we think are suitable for our models, and because of that I sadly have to turn down your recommendation.

Maybe we could test your architecture in our ExpIvme line someday but for now, we would like to stay on more stable and proven gains.

Best,

Eren

ereniko changed discussion status to closed

Sign up or log in to comment