Model reference · open weights

Muse2

LLMs Muse-research Text gen 1 build Open weights 802 dl/mo

Muse2 is an open-weight language model from Muse-research. Muse2-230M (BF16) weighs 392 MB; 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.

  • Muse2 is a compact, auto-regressive language model developed by Muse Research for text generation and edge inference.
  • It features a hybrid convolution and attention architecture with 196M parameters and supports a context length of 128,000 tokens.
  • The model is trained on English text and code, and its weights are released under the Apache-2.0 license.

Summary of the Muse-research/Muse2-230M model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released byMuse-research
Released2026-08-23
Parameters196M
VRAM392 MB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for Muse2-230M (BF16)

392 MBweights, file size
29 MBcache per 1K tokens
534 MBruntime overhead, at least
128,000 tokenscontext max
CardRequests at onceContext maxMemory
8K each32K each
RTX 3060 12 GB4511all 125K11.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB6115all 125K15.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GB9523all 125K23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GB9523all 125K23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GB12832all 125K31.0 GB
L40S 48 GB18345all 125K44.0 GB
A100 80 GB32882all 125K78.2 GB
H100 80 GB31578all 125K78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB38295all 125K93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified440110all 125K107 GB
H200 141 GB570142all 125K138 GB
B200 180 GB732183all 125K176 GB
Memory needed at each load
Requests at once8K tokens each32K tokens each
11.2 GB1.9 GB
52.1 GB5.6 GB
82.8 GB8.4 GB
164.7 GB16.0 GB
328.4 GB31.0 GB
6416.0 GB61.1 GB

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

From the model card

What Muse-research says about Muse2

Read the model card

Model Information

The Muse2 collection is a family of compact language models built entirely from scratch — architecture, tokenizer, and inference stack — for edge and on-device use. Muse2 pairs an LFM2-style hybrid layout (short causal convolutions + grouped-query attention) with a parallel merged SwiGLU MLP per block, chosen for inference efficiency on constrained hardware. The instruction-tuned version is optimized for assistant-like chat, formatting, and structured extraction from developer logs.

Model Developer: Muse Research

Model Architecture: Muse2 is an auto-regressive language model that uses a hybrid convolution/attention architecture implemented from scratch in PyTorch (Muse2ForCausalLM, no transformers code). The tuned version is aligned with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with completion-only loss masking. No RLHF or DPO has been applied.

ParamsInput modalitiesOutput modalitiesContext LengthGQAShared EmbeddingsKnowledge cutoff
Muse2-230M (Base)230M (196.1M)English TextEnglish Text and code8k (128k max)YesYesEarly 2024
Muse2-230M (Instruct)230M (196.1M)English TextEnglish Text and code8k (128k max)YesYesEarly 2024

Supported Languages: English. The model also handles source code and mathematical text.

Muse2 Model Family: All model versions use Grouped-Query Attention (GQA, 16 query / 8 key-value heads) and tied input/output embeddings. The 14-block layout interleaves 8 causal depthwise short-convolution blocks (kernel size 3) with 6 full-attention blocks; RoPE with theta 1e6; RMSNorm; parallel merged SwiGLU MLPs (hidden 1024, ff 2560); vocabulary of 65,536 byte-level BPE tokens trained from scratch (pad=0, bos=1, eos=7, ChatML-style control tokens).

Model Release Date: Aug 23, 2026

Status: This is a static model. Later versions may be released that improve model capabilities.

License: Model weights are released under Apache-2.0.

Intended Use

Intended Use Cases: Muse2 is intended for research and education: studying compact hybrid architectures, edge/on-device inference, structured log-to-JSON extraction, formatting-disciplined output, and as a base for further fine-tuning. The Instruct version is intended for assistant-like chat in resource-constrained environments where a small footprint matters more than factual reliability.

Out of Scope: Production deployment without developer-side evaluation and guardrails. Any safety-critical, medical, legal, or factual-reliance use. Use in any manner that violates applicable laws or the upstream dataset licenses. The model has had no safety alignment, red-teaming, or content filtering applied.

How to use

This repository uses the from-scratch muse package (PyTorch + safetensors only). The config schema follows the LFM2-family layout for edge-tooling compatibility, but the architecture is not a transformers-native class.

import torch
from tokenizers import Tokenizer
from muse import Muse2ForCausalLM
from muse.sft_data import apply_chat_template

model = Muse2ForCausalLM.from_pretrained(".", dtype=torch.float32).eval()
tk = Tokenizer.from_file("tokenizer.json")

messages = [
    {"role": "system", "content": "You are an automated, silent compiler API."},
    {"role": "user", "content": " + "},
]
ids = apply_chat_template(tk, messages)  # ends at the assistant header
out = model.generate(torch.tensor([ids]), max_new_tokens=256,
                     temperature=0.2, top_k=50, eos_token_id=4)  #
print(tk.decode(out[0][len(ids):].tolist(), skip_special_tokens=True))

Interactive chat on a single cloud T4:

modal run modal_app.py::chat

Local CPU chat: python scripts/chat.py --model . --interactive

Responsibility & Safety

Muse2 is a research artifact released without safety fine-tuning, red-teaming, or content classification. It can produce inaccurate, biased, repetitive, or otherwise objectionable output, and it hallucinates facts readily at this model scale. Developers are solely responsible for deployment decisions and should add appropriate input/output safeguards for any application, and should not rely on the model for correctness.

Ethical Considerations and Limitations

Values: Muse2 is intended to make small-scale, from-scratch language-model development accessible — every component (tokenizer, architecture, inference stack) is open and reproducible.

Testing: Safety and capability testing to date is limited to qualitative inspection. It does not cover, nor could it cover, all scenarios. Before any deployment, developers should perform testing appropriate to their use case. Upstream dataset licenses and attribution requirements continue to apply to derivative uses.

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

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