Wiola 13M, a Gated Spiral Attention Architecture for Parameter Efficient Small Language Models

Excerpt

arXiv:2608.14604v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Small language models in the ten to one hundred million parameter range are attractive for on device inference, rapid experimentation, and controlled scientific study, yet most of them reuse the standard transformer block without adaptation to the small scale regime. We present Wiola, a decoder only language model whose novelty is concentrated in three drop in components of every layer. First, Spiral Rotary Positional Encoding perturbs the standa