MiniGPT is a decoder-only GPT-style Transformer implemented entirely from scratch in PyTorch. It recreates the core building blocks behind modern large language models including causal self-attention, multi-head attention, Pre-LayerNorm transformer blocks, sinusoidal positional encoding, weight tying, and autoregressive text generation without relying on Hugging Face model abstractions.
Decoder-only GPT · Multi-head causal self-attention · Pre-LayerNorm · Sinusoidal PE · Weight tying · AdamW + cosine LR · FP16 AMP · Top-K / Top-P sampling · Instruction fine-tuning · Gradio UI
Token IDs → Embedding (×√d) → Positional Encoding
→ N × [LayerNorm → Masked MHA → +residual → LayerNorm → FFN(GELU) → +residual]
→ LayerNorm → lm_head (weight-tied) → logits → next-token prediction
flowchart TD
A[Token IDs] --> B[Embedding + Sinusoidal PE]
B --> C[Decoder Block × N]
C --> D[LayerNorm → lm_head]
D --> E{Mode}
E -->|Train| F[Cross-Entropy Loss]
E -->|Infer| G[Temperature · Top-K · Top-P · Sample]
| Component | Implementation | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Attention | softmax(QKᵀ/√d_k) · V, fused QKV projection |
Standard scaled dot-product; multi-head captures parallel patterns |
| Causal mask | Lower-triangular; future tokens → -∞ |
Autoregressive — no peeking at future tokens |
| FFN | Linear → GELU → Linear (4× expansion) |
GPT-2/3 activation choice |
| Pre-LN | Normalize before attention/FFN | Stable training without heavy warmup |
| Weight tying | lm_head.weight = embedding.weight |
Fewer params; shared input/output space |
Training objective: shifted next-token prediction with cross-entropy. Input x predicts target y one position ahead. Perplexity = exp(loss).
Default config: 4 layers · 8 heads · 256 embed · 256 seq_len · 12K vocab (config.py)
Data: corpus.txt → tokenize → build vocab → encode → sliding windows (x, y) → DataLoader
Train: forward → loss → backward → grad clip → AdamW → val eval → checkpoint (model_best.pt, vocab.json)
Generate: prompt → encode → autoregressive loop (repetition penalty → temperature → top-k → top-p → sample) → decode
Fine-tune: load model_best.pt + existing vocab → train on User: …\nAssistant: … pairs → save model_ft.pt
| Training | Choice |
|---|---|
| Optimizer | AdamW (lr=1e-4, weight_decay=0.01) |
| Scheduler | Cosine annealing (per-step) |
| Precision | FP16 AMP on CUDA |
| Gradient clip | max_norm=1.0 |
| Loss | Cross-entropy |
MiniGPT/
├── model.py # Transformer architecture + generate()
├── tokenizer.py # WordTokenizer, CharTokenizer
├── dataset.py # Sliding-window TextDataset
├── train.py # Training, checkpointing, fine-tuning
├── generate.py # CLI inference / REPL
├── config.py # Hyperparameters + presets
├── demo.py # CPU demo (no external data)
├── download_hf_corpus.py # HF datasets → corpus
├── app.py # Gradio playground
├── data/ # corpus.txt, instruction.txt
└── checkpoints/ # vocab.json, *.pt (gitignored)
| Config | Layers | Heads | Embed | Seq Len | Vocab |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
tiny_config() |
2 | 2 | 64 | 64 | 3K |
small_config() |
4 | 8 | 256 | 256 | 12K |
medium_config() |
4 | 8 | 256 | 256 | 12K |
pip install torch # core
pip install gradio datasets # optional: UI + HF download
python demo.py # train + generate (no data needed)
python train.py --data data/corpus.txt --epochs 10
python train.py --finetune --data data/instruction.txt
python generate.py --prompt "Once upon a time" --interactive
python app.py # Gradio UI → http://127.0.0.1:7860Download instruction data:
python download_hf_corpus.py --dataset dolly --out data/corpus.txt| Choice | Rationale |
|---|---|
| Decoder-only | Pure language modeling; matches GPT |
| Sinusoidal PE | Parameter-free baseline (vs RoPE in modern LLMs) |
| Word-level tokenizer | Simple, readable — BPE would handle OOV better |
| Top-K + Top-P | Practical decode quality without beam search |
Future: RoPE, BPE tokenizer, Flash Attention, LoRA, KV-cache, quantization
MIT — see LICENSE. Copyright (c) 2026 Piyush Bafna.