Bi-Induct 125M Baseline

This repository contains the Bi-Induct 125M Baseline checkpoint from Induction Signatures Are Not Enough: A Matched-Compute Study of Load-Bearing Structure in In-Context Learning.

This release corresponds to the 0.13B setting in the paper and is a research checkpoint intended for studying matched-compute pretraining, induction-style curricula, and in-context learning behavior. It is not instruction-tuned, alignment-tuned, or safety-tuned.

Variant

Natural-only pretraining baseline with no synthetic copy snippets.

Model overview

• Architecture: decoder-only Transformer
• Positional encoding: RoPE (theta=10000)
• Normalization: pre-norm residual blocks
• MLP: SwiGLU
• Attention: grouped-query / grouped key-value attention
• Precision: bfloat16 training
• Context length: 1024
• Embeddings: untied input/output embeddings

Model specification

Training data

All checkpoints in this family were pretrained on the deduplicated THE PILE in streaming / shuffled mode. A stable MD5-based hash was used to create a fixed held-out evaluation slice, with 0.2% of the corpus reserved for evaluation (roughly 0.4B tokens). Tokenization was truncated to 1024 tokens per sequence.

For the Bi-Induct variants, synthetic snippets were interleaved on top of the natural stream:

• Induction: [S || SEP || S]
• Anti-Induction: [S || SEP || reverse(S)]
• Balanced: each injection randomly chooses induction or anti-induction

The main cross-scale experiments used span length L = 20 and initial mix ratio m0 = 50%, linearly annealed to zero over the full training budget.

Training recipe

• Optimizer: AdamW (beta1=0.9, beta2=0.999, weight decay 0.1)
• Learning rate: peak 1e-3
• Schedule: 3% linear warmup, then cosine decay
• Update size: 2^16 tokens per update
• Token budget: approximately 20N tokens following the Chinchilla-style rule of thumb
• Comparison protocol: iso-FLOPs across curricula at each scale

Evaluation summary for the 125M family

The table below summarizes the main results at this scale. Standard LM benchmarks are evaluated 3-shot and Todd et al. function-style probes are evaluated 10-shot with HITS@1.

This checkpoint: Baseline.

Benchmarks included

Standard LM benchmarks

• MMLU
• Winogrande
• CommonSenseQA
• PIQA
• HellaSwag
• TriviaQA-Wiki
• BBH (CoT)
• OpenBookQA
• ARC-Challenge
• GPQA
• GSM-8K
• MathQA
• BoolQ
• LAMBADA

Todd et al. function-style probes

• alphabetically first 3
• alphabetically first 5
• alphabetically last 3
• alphabetically last 5
• capitalize
• capitalize first letter
• capitalize last letter
• choose first of 3
• choose first of 5
• choose last of 3
• choose last of 5
• choose middle of 3
• choose middle of 5
• lowercase first letter
• lowercase last letter
• next capital letter
• next item
• prev item
• word length

Example usage

from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForCausalLM

repo_id = "MohammedSabry/biinduct-125m-baseline"

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(repo_id)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(repo_id)

prompt = "The capital of France is"
inputs = tokenizer(prompt, return_tensors="pt")
outputs = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=20)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0], skip_special_tokens=True))

Limitations

• These are research checkpoints, not production chat models.
• They were designed to study the relationship between induction-style telemetry and load-bearing ICL behavior under matched compute.
• The synthetic interventions are intentionally lightweight and token-level; results should not be interpreted as ruling out richer data-rewrite strategies.
• Because Bi-Induct replaces a fraction of natural data under iso-FLOPs, some trade-offs may reflect natural-text displacement in addition to mechanistic redundancy.

Citation

If you use this model, please cite:

@misc{sabry2026inductionsignaturesenoughmatchedcompute,
      title={Induction Signatures Are Not Enough: A Matched-Compute Study of Load-Bearing Structure in In-Context Learning}, 
      author={Mohammed Sabry and Anya Belz},
      year={2026},
      eprint={2509.22947},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22947}, 
}