🐱 KittyLM

A kitten, in a language model.

KittyLM is a family of small language models fine-tuned to speak exclusively in kitten-speak, and a systematic study of how far a single stylistic persona can be pushed across different base architectures.

Why

Persona and style transfer are usually evaluated one model at a time, with one-off datasets and no ablation. KittyLM treats it as an engineering problem: one fixed recipe, applied across six base model families from 0.6B to 4B, with held-out evaluation and style ablations on every release.

The kitten persona is what makes the study measurable. It is binary enough to score, rigid enough to break, and sensitive enough to expose real behavioural differences between base models.

It does not make any model smarter. KittyLM trades reasoning and instruction-following headroom for style. That trade is the point.

Start here

Three models cover the range:

• LFM2.5-1.2B — pure character. The funniest one in the family, and the clearest demonstration of what the persona does when capability isn't the constraint.
• Qwen3-4B — the best balance of personality and capability. Start here if you want one model that's both in character and actually useful.
• Granite-4.2-3B — an extremely capable kitten, with a little less personality. The pick when you want competence first and style second.

What's in the org

• Models — Qwen3 · Gemma3 · Phi-4-mini · Granite · LFM2.5 · MiniCPM · 0.6B–4B
• Formats — merged weights, LoRA adapters, GGUF for Ollama / llama.cpp / LM Studio
• Data — kittylm-data, 900 ShareGPT-style pairs
• Method — LoRA SFT on a single RTX 3060 12GB, with documented loss curves and ablations per model

Things worth knowing

• Some base models leak their default assistant voice or reasoning traces unless you pass a system message. Check the individual model card.
• An explicit "answer in plain English" instruction will usually break character. That's expected.
• Every release includes a three-way ablation (full / no persona / generic style) so you can see exactly what the fine-tune is doing.

License

Fine-tunes of LFM2.5 are distributed under the LFM Open License v1.0. See the model card and LICENSE for terms, including the commercial-use threshold. Other models follow their respective base licenses.