Model reference · open weights

Hymba

LLMs nvidia Text gen 1 build Its own licence terms 1k dl/mo

Hymba is an open-weight language model from NVIDIA. Hymba-1.5B-Instruct (BF16) weighs 3.0 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

For self-hosting, compare this build's requirements below with the GPU you plan to rent.

  • Hymba-1.5B-Instruct is a 1.5B parameter text-generation model developed by NVIDIA.
  • It features a hybrid architecture with 32 layers, 25 attention heads, and a context length of 8192 tokens.
  • The model is released under the NVIDIA Open Model License Agreement.

Summary of the nvidia/Hymba-1.5B-Instruct model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released byNVIDIA
Released2024-10-31
Parameters1.5B
VRAM3.0 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for Hymba-1.5B-Instruct (BF16)

3.0 GBweights, file size
41 MBcache per 1K tokens
534 MBruntime overhead, at least
8,192 tokenscontext max
CardRequests at onceContext maxMemory
8K each
RTX 3060 12 GB23all 8K11.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB35all 8K15.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GB59all 8K23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GB58all 8K23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GB81all 8K31.0 GB
L40S 48 GB120all 8K44.0 GB
A100 80 GB222all 8K78.2 GB
H100 80 GB214all 8K78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB260all 8K93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified301all 8K107 GB
H200 141 GB392all 8K138 GB
B200 180 GB505all 8K176 GB
Memory needed at each load
Requests at once8K tokens each
13.9 GB
55.3 GB
86.3 GB
168.9 GB
3214.3 GB
6425.1 GB

One card, with vLLM's small-card settings.

From the model card

What NVIDIA says about Hymba

Read the model card

💾 Github&nbsp&nbsp | &nbsp&nbsp 📄 Paper | &nbsp&nbsp 📜 Blog &nbsp

Model Overview

Hymba-1.5B-Instruct is a 1.5B parameter model finetuned from Hymba-1.5B-Base using a combination of open source instruction datasets and internally collected synthetic datasets. This model is finetuned with supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization.

Hymba-1.5B-Instruct is capable of many complex and important tasks like math reasoning, function calling, and role playing.

This model is ready for commercial use.

Model Developer: NVIDIA

Model Dates: Hymba-1.5B-Instruct was trained between September 4, 2024 and November 10th, 2024.

License: This model is released under the NVIDIA Open Model License Agreement.

Model Architecture

⚡️ We've released a minimal implementation of Hymba on GitHub to help developers understand and implement its design principles in their own models. Check it out! barebones-hymba.

Hymba-1.5B-Instruct has a model embedding size of 1600, 25 attention heads, and an MLP intermediate dimension of 5504, with 32 layers in total, 16 SSM states, 3 full attention layers, the rest are sliding window attention. Unlike the standard Transformer, each attention layer in Hymba has a hybrid combination of standard attention heads and Mamba heads in parallel. Additionally, it uses Grouped-Query Attention (GQA) and Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE).

Features of this architecture:

  • Fuse attention heads and SSM heads within the same layer, offering parallel and complementary processing of the same inputs.

  • Introduce meta tokens that are prepended to the input sequences and interact with all subsequent tokens, thus storing important information and alleviating the burden of "forced-to-attend" in attention.

  • Integrate with cross-layer KV sharing and global-local attention to further boost memory and computation efficiency.

Performance Highlights

  • Hymba-1.5B-Instruct outperforms popular small language models and achieves the highest average performance across all tasks.

Model Usage

Step 1: Environment Setup

Since Hymba-1.5B-Instruct employs FlexAttention, which relies on Pytorch2.5 and other related dependencies, we provide two ways to setup the environment:

  • [Local install] Install the related packages using our provided setup.sh (support CUDA 12.1/12.4):
wget --header="Authorization: Bearer YOUR_HF_TOKEN" https://huggingface.co/nvidia/Hymba-1.5B-Base/resolve/main/setup.sh
bash setup.sh
  • [Docker] A docker image is provided with all of Hymba's dependencies installed. You can download our docker image and start a container using the following commands:
docker pull ghcr.io/tilmto/hymba:v1
docker run --gpus all -v /home/$USER:/home/$USER -it ghcr.io/tilmto/hymba:v1 bash

Step 2: Chat with Hymba-1.5B-Instruct

After setting up the environment, you can use the following script to chat with our Model

from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer, StopStringCriteria, StoppingCriteriaList
import torch

# Load the tokenizer and model
repo_name = "nvidia/Hymba-1.5B-Instruct"

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(repo_name, trust_remote_code=True)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(repo_name, trust_remote_code=True)
model = model.cuda().to(torch.bfloat16)

# Chat with Hymba
prompt = input()

messages = [
    {"role": "system", "content": "You are a helpful assistant."}
]
messages.append({"role": "user", "content": prompt})

# Apply chat template
tokenized_chat = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(messages, tokenize=True, add_generation_prompt=True, return_tensors="pt").to('cuda')
stopping_criteria = StoppingCriteriaList([StopStringCriteria(tokenizer=tokenizer, stop_strings="")])
outputs = model.generate(
    tokenized_chat,
    max_new_tokens=256,
    do_sample=False,
    temperature=0.7,
    use_cache=True,
    stopping_criteria=stopping_criteria
)
input_length = tokenized_chat.shape[1]
response = tokenizer.decode(outputs[0][input_length:], skip_special_tokens=True)

print(f"Model response: {response}")

The prompt template used by Hymba-1.5B-Instruct is as follows, which has been integrated into the tokenizer and can be applied using tokenizer.apply_chat_template:

{system prompt}

{prompt}
{tool response}

Finetuning Hymba

LMFlow is a complete pipeline for fine-tuning large language models. The following steps provide an example of how to fine-tune the Hymba-1.5B-Base models using LMFlow.

  1. Using Docker

      docker pull ghcr.io/tilmto/hymba:v1
      docker run --gpus all -v /home/$USER:/home/$USER -it ghcr.io/tilmto/hymba:v1 bash
    
  2. Install LMFlow

      git clone https://github.com/OptimalScale/LMFlow.git
      cd LMFlow
      conda create -n lmflow python=3.9 -y
      conda activate lmflow
      conda install mpi4py
      pip install -e .
    
  3. Fine-tune the model using the following command.

      cd LMFlow
      bash ./scripts/run_finetune_hymba.sh
    

With LMFlow, you can also fine-tune the model on your custom dataset. The only thing you need to do is transform your dataset into the LMFlow data format. In addition to full-finetuniing, you can also fine-tune hymba efficiently with DoRA, LoRA, LISA, Flash Attention, and other acceleration techniques. For more details, please refer to the [LMFlow for Hymba](https://github

Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.

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