A student from India shared their first paper on r/LocalLLaMA, proposing Silia, a Transformer architecture for extremely small models. The idea is to merge attention-style dynamic mixing with SwiGLU-like nonlinear transformation, aiming to save parameters in models under roughly 10M parameters. The author frames the work as an early, small-scale exploration, limited by old hardware and restricted access to larger compute.
The article explains how modern LLMs convert text into token IDs, embeddings, and position-aware vectors before passing them through stacked transformer blocks. It covers attention, multi-head attention, KV cache, GQA, feed-forward networks, MoE, residual streams, normalization, and decoding. Its goal is educational: helping readers understand the common architecture behind many current model families and read model cards or papers more confidently.
This classic blog post written by Hugging Face researcher Patrick von Platen takes a deep dive into the Transformer-based Encoder-Decoder model architecture…