C4 -- RMSNorm instead of LayerNorm

Encoder-decoder transformer written from scratch -- no nn.Transformer, no pretrained weights, tokenizer fitted in-repo -- trained to decipher a binary cipher into English plaintext. One row of a five-configuration ablation in which exactly one architectural choice moves at a time.

configuration C4 -- RMSNorm instead of LayerNorm
positional encoding sinusoidal
attention mha
normalisation rmsnorm
tokenisation unigram LM subword, fitted on the training split
depth 2 encoder / 2 decoder layers
width dim_model 128, 4 heads, dim_ff 512
parameters 2,761,728
windowing 1024-character source windows at stride 768 (25,654 training windows)
best epoch 95 (val loss 0.0932)

Test metrics

metric test test_full gen_test_win gen_test gen_test_full
loss 0.1127 7.0180 -- -- --
perplexity 1.1193 1116.5630 -- -- --
token acc 0.9778 0.2683 0.8427 0.4516 0.1518
bit acc -- -- 0.9582 0.8168 0.2638
seq acc 0.6063 0.0528 0.6996 0.2480 0.0500
levenshtein -- -- 0.9809 17.9300 491.9480
lev / len -- -- 0.0079 0.0263 0.6246
BLEU -- -- 0.9555 0.9372 0.1109
ROUGE-1 -- -- 0.9793 0.9688 0.4146
ROUGE-2 -- -- 0.9625 0.9505 0.3715
ROUGE-L -- -- 0.9793 0.9687 0.4112
  • test -- teacher-forced, per window
  • test_full -- teacher-forced, per whole line
  • gen_test_win -- greedy, per window
  • gen_test -- greedy, windowed and stitched
  • gen_test_full -- greedy, whole line in one pass

Files

  • C4_best.pt -- weights, optimiser state, config and vocabulary sizes, from the best epoch.
  • config.json -- the full ExperimentConfig this was trained under.
  • summary.json -- the run record: the metrics above plus per-epoch history.
  • tokenizer_cipher.json, tokenizer_plain.json -- the fitted unigram vocabularies, when the config uses them. Byte-level configurations have none by construction.

Loading it

The checkpoint is a plain torch.save dict, not a transformers model. The vocabulary sizes travel with it because they are not recoverable from the config -- the tokenizer lands wherever pruning leaves it:

import torch
from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download

from src.config import get_config
from src.models.base import build_model

path = hf_hub_download("winterdewdev/anlp-a1-transformers-C4", "C4_best.pt")
state = torch.load(path, map_location="cpu", weights_only=False)

cfg = get_config(state["config_name"])
model = build_model(cfg, state["src_vocab_size"], state["tgt_vocab_size"])
model.load_state_dict(state["model"])
model.eval()

Trained with python -m src.train --config C4.

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