An Exploratory Ablation of a Small MLA--SSM Hybrid Language Model

arXiv:2609.29618 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.IR, cs.LG · Submitted 2026-08-28 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.IR, cs.LG

Submitted: 2026-08-28

Updated: 2026-08-28

Code: https://github.com/unseen1980/talh

Terminology

• Transformer — 23× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Ablation — 14× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Perplexity — 13× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Decode — 5× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• State Space Model — 5× in this paper
• Benchmark — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Multi-head Latent Attention — 4× in this paper
• Ablation study — 3× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Hybrid Architectures — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• KV cache — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Benchmarking — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Edge Deployment — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Fine-Tuning — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Mixture of Experts — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) — 1× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Provenance — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• State Space Models (SSMs) — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Ternary Mixture-of-Experts — 1× in this paper
• Transformer Architecture — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Transformer Models — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• DeepSeek-V2: A Strong, Economical, and Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Language Model
• Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces
• Hungry Hungry Hippos: Towards Language Modeling with State Space Models
• Jamba: A Hybrid Transformer-Mamba Language Model
• Samba: Simple Hybrid State Space Models for Efficient Unlimited Context Language Modeling
• Hymba: A Hybrid-head Architecture for Small Language Models
• Zebra-Llama: Towards Extremely Efficient Hybrid Models
• GQA: Training Generalized Multi-Query Transformer Models from Multi-Head Checkpoints
• BitNet b1.58 2B4T Technical Report
• The FineWeb Datasets: Decanting the Web for the Finest Text Data at Scale
• RULER: What's the Real Context Size of Your Long-Context Language Models?
• CoSMoEs: Compact Sparse Mixture of Experts
• Hybrid Architectures for Language Models: Systematic Analysis and Design Insights

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