sSQAT-m: symmetric Sparse Query Attention Transformer mini

Research model for Sparse Query Attention experiments - extension to Grouped Query Attention, that's also reducing the number of used query heads, instead of further reducing key/value heads count (up to Multi Query Attention). That approach results in huge computational complexity reduction and much faster training, while the performance stays on GQA level (almost unnoticeable decrease, when compared to GQA, and noticeable better than MQA).

This version is using 2x query heads reduction factor (same as base SQA), but increased number of key/value heads (compared to base GQA with 4/16 groups)

Research paper - arxiv.org/abs/2510.01817

Architecture details:

• trainable params: ~10.9M
• dim: 256
• layers: 8
• self-attention: Sparse Query Attention
  • heads: 16 (for dimension split)
  • query groups: 8
  • key/value groups: 8
• SwiGLU feed forward with 768 dim
• RoPE
• RMS Norm
• vocab: 10k (english only)
• message length: 1024
• Library: RxNN

Training details:

This model was only trained for research purposes, on a small number of training steps.

• dataset: 50% from english subset of wikimedia/wikipedia (45% train / 5% validation)
• single epoch
• 1.5B processed tokens
• learning rate: 5e-4, cosine annealing scheduler with 25% warmup steps

Results

Validation mean loss/accuracy:

• MHA: 1.1976 / ~77.35%
• GQA: 1.2177 / ~77.12%
• MQA: 1.2497 / ~76.64%
• SQA: 1.2272 / ~76.97%
• sSQA: 1.2201 / ~77.05%

Training time / time per batch:

• MHA: ~269 min / 0.7173s
• GQA: ~258 min / 0.6877s
• MQA: ~261 min / 0.6947s
• SQA: ~241 min / 0.6417s
• sSQA: ~243 min / 0.6468s

Model size difference

SQA has reduced dimensions of query heads linear projection and output projection, which results in a little smaller model sizes:

• MHA: 12M Params
• GQA: 11.2M Params
• MQA: 11M Params
• SQA: 10.7M Params
• sSQA: 10.9M Params

Usage

Model requires our RxLM framework for training/inference. It's integrated with HuggingFace Hub and libraries. Components connected to SQA and classic transformers are free even for commercial usage, while Reactive Transformer components are free only for non-commercial usage (Reactive AI Framework License v1.0)

Inference:

• Install RxNN, PyTorch and dependencies: pip install rxnn torch transformers tokenizers

import torch
from rxlm.experimental.models import ExperimentalAttentionTransformer
from rxlm.transformers.sampler import Sampler, SampleDecoder
from rxlm.training.tokenizer import load_tokenizer_from_hf_hub

model = ExperimentalAttentionTransformer.from_pretrained('ReactiveAI/sSQAT-m')
tokenizer = load_tokenizer_from_hf_hub('ReactiveAI/sSQAT-m')
sampler = Sampler(model, torch.device('cuda' if torch.cuda.is_available() else 'cpu'), end_token_id=3)
sample = SampleDecoder(sampler, tokenizer)

# 0.1 and 0.9 are default values for temperature and top_p
generated = sample('Example model input for text generation...', temperature=0.1, top_p=0.9, max_seq_len=1024)
sample('Example model input for text generation - print streamed response...', temperature=0.1, top_p=0.9, max_seq_len=1024, print_stream=True)

Train:

• Install RxNN, PyTorch and dependencies: pip install rxnn torch transformers tokenizers tensorboard (tensorboard is optional)

import torch
from rxlm.experimental.models import ExperimentalAttentionTransformer
from rxlm.training.tokenizer import load_tokenizer_from_hf_hub
from rxlm.llm_training.dataset import AutoregressiveLMDataset
from rxlm.llm_training.supervised import AutoregressiveTrainer
from rxlm.training.callbacks import PrintLossCallback, PrintAccuracyCallback, TokenCounterCallback, ModelSaveCallback
from rxlm.training.scheduler import get_transformer_lr_scheduler

model = ExperimentalAttentionTransformer.from_pretrained('ReactiveAI/sSQAT-m')
tokenizer = load_tokenizer_from_hf_hub('ReactiveAI/sSQAT-m')

device = torch.device('cuda' if torch.cuda.is_available() else 'cpu')

batch_size = 128 # Require ~40GB GPU Memory (trained on L40S)
epochs = 1
gradient_acc_steps = 1
seq_len = 1024
vocab_size = 10_000

peak_lr = 5e-4 * gradient_acc_steps

train_dataset = AutoregressiveLMDataset.from_hf_hub('hf-dataset-id', 'subset', tokenizer=tokenizer, max_seq_len=seq_len) # split is 'train' by default
valid_dataset = AutoregressiveLMDataset.from_hf_hub('hf-dataset-id', split='validation', tokenizer=tokenizer, max_seq_len=seq_len)

dataset_len = len(train_dataset)

steps_per_epoch = int(dataset_len / batch_size - 1)
total_steps = int((epochs * steps_per_epoch) / gradient_acc_steps)
warmup_steps = int(0.25 * steps_per_epoch)


logs_dir = './tensorboard_logs' # require tensorboard `pip install tensorboard`

print_cb = PrintLossCallback(batches_per_epoch=steps_per_epoch)
count_cb = TokenCounterCallback()
acc_cb = PrintAccuracyCallback()
save_cb = ModelSaveCallback('./path/to/save', push_to_hub=True,
                            hub_model_id='your-model-id', private_repo=True,
                            push_checkpoint_weights=True, final_commit_message='Final commit message', hf_token=YOUR_HF_TOKEN)

trainer = AutoregressiveTrainer(model, device, dataset=train_dataset, validation_dataset=valid_dataset,
                         vocab_size=vocab_size, callbacks=[print_cb, acc_cb, count_cb, save_cb], use_amp=True,
                         dtype=torch.bfloat16, log_dir=logs_dir, gradient_accumulation_steps=gradient_acc_steps)

optimizer = torch.optim.AdamW(model.parameters(), lr=peak_lr, weight_decay=0.01)
scheduler = get_transformer_lr_scheduler(
    optimizer,
    warmup_steps=warmup_steps,
    num_training_steps=total_steps
)

trainer(epochs=epochs, batch_size=batch_size, optimizer=optimizer, scheduler=scheduler)

Summary

According to experiment results, this symmetric variant of SparseQueryAttention has the best results, the closest to base GQA, while the training time is still only a little slower than base SQA. However, symmetric variant may additionally use the optimization dedicated to base Multi Head Attention, so finally, it could be the best option.