Arabic NanoGPT v2

A small GPT-style character/subword language model trained from scratch on Arabic Wikipedia text, built following the nanoGPT architecture (Karpathy-style decoder-only Transformer).

This is a from-scratch pretrained model, not a fine-tune of an existing LLM — it was trained entirely on the uploader's own data and compute for learning/experimentation purposes.

Model Details

• Architecture: Decoder-only Transformer (GPT-style), custom PyTorch implementation
• Tokenizer: Byte-level BPE, vocab size 8,000, trained on the same Arabic corpus
• Parameters: 35,638,592 (~35.6M)
• Model size: 135.95 MB (float32) / 67.98 MB (float16)
• Context length (block_size): 256 tokens
• Layers: 8
• Attention heads: 8
• Embedding dimension: 512
• Dropout: 0.2

Parameter breakdown

Training Data

Trained on Arabic Wikipedia article text. Note: the corpus has not been fully cleaned of wikitext template/markup artifacts (e.g. occasional leftover strings like "يجب تبديلها أو حذفها" or reference/citation placeholders), so the model can occasionally reproduce these as part of generated text.

Intended Use

This model is intended for educational and experimental purposes — exploring how small GPT models learn Arabic script, morphology, and Wikipedia-style prose structure. It is not suitable for factual use: like any small language model, it generates fluent-looking text without any grounding in truth, and it will confidently produce plausible-sounding but fabricated names, dates, and events.

Limitations

• Hallucination: Generates grammatically plausible but factually invented content (fake names, incorrect dates, invented events).
• No factual grounding: Do not use for question-answering, summarization of real events, or any application requiring accuracy.
• Residual data artifacts: May occasionally emit leftover Wikipedia template/markup text.
• Small scale: At ~35.6M parameters, coherence typically holds for a few sentences before drifting.

How to Use

See inference.py for a complete, ready-to-run script. Quick example:

from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download
import torch, json
from tokenizers import Tokenizer

repo_id = "Hatim2221/arabic-nanogptv2"
config = json.load(open(hf_hub_download(repo_id, "config.json")))
tokenizer = Tokenizer.from_file(hf_hub_download(repo_id, "tokenizer.json"))
weights_path = hf_hub_download(repo_id, "pytorch_model.bin")

# rebuild model architecture (see inference.py for full class definitions), then:
# model.load_state_dict(torch.load(weights_path, map_location=device))

Full working example with model definitions, generation with temperature/top-k/repetition penalty: see inference.py in this repo.

Generation Parameters

Recommended defaults for coherent output:

model.generate(
    context,
    max_new_tokens=300,
    temperature=0.7,
    top_k=40,
    repetition_penalty=1.3,
)

• temperature: lower = more conservative/coherent, higher = more random
• top_k: restricts sampling to the k most likely next tokens
• repetition_penalty: discourages the model from looping on the same word/phrase (recommended 1.2–1.5)

Files in this repository

• pytorch_model.bin — model weights (state_dict)
• config.json — architecture hyperparameters
• tokenizer.json — trained BPE tokenizer
• inference.py — standalone script to load the model and generate text