luispoveda93/Gala
Gala
Gala is a Catalan-focused conversational model, fine-tuned from Qwen/Qwen3.5-0.8B on Catalan chat data from BSC-LT and projecte-aina.
- Base: Qwen/Qwen3.5-0.8B (chat variant, Apache-2.0, multimodal — the vision tower is untouched; all 192 trained modules are language-model projections)
- Method: LoRA SFT (r=16, α=32, dropout 0.05) on the language model only, merged into full weights before publish
- Data: 43,478 conversations — 35k Catalan slice of BSC-LT/ALIA-2606-SFT (the SFT mix behind BSC's ALIA-40b-instruct), 7,122 projecte-aina/MentorCA train rows converted to chat turns, 1,750 English anchor (~4%); assistant-only loss, packing at 2,048 tokens, 2 epochs (350 steps)
- Hardware: 21 h 22 m on a single T4 (fp16,
flash-linear-attentionkernel active) - Final train loss: 1.496 → 1.074 · eval loss (MentorCA validation): 1.339 · token accuracy 72.6%
Catalan evaluation (Gala vs base Qwen3.5-0.8B)
Generation-based evaluation, letter-parsing for multiple choice, sampled decoding (temp 0.7, topp 0.9, repetition penalty 1.1). Full JSON: private `luispoveda93/Gala-project-report/evalall_v4.json`.
Summary: Gala beats the base model on both core-gate metrics (instruction following and alignment) and on 7 of 10 reported measurements, with the largest gains in Catalan cultural knowledge (Tecla), commonsense (COPA) and instruction following (IFEval_ca).
Limitations (honest)
- Fluency ceiling: long-form Catalan output still contains grammatical errors, invented words and hallucinated content — a limitation of the 0.8B scale and the SFT-only recipe, not fixable by more of the same data. Short conversational turns are noticeably more reliable than long generations.
- Extractive QA regression: on XQuAD-ca the base model's F1 is higher; Gala's chattier style hurts span-extraction tasks.
- CaBBQ is slightly lower than base; MC bias-probe agreement at 0.8B is near chance for both models and should be read cautiously.
- Both models were evaluated with the same harness; small-model MC letter-parsing adds noise to all absolute numbers.
- Multimodal (vision) behaviour is inherited from the base model and was not fine-tuned or evaluated.
Intended use
Catalan-first conversational assistant for experimentation and demos. Not recommended for production factual use without guardrails.
Training data licenses
ALIA-2606-SFT (CC-BY-4.0) · MentorCA (CC-BY-SA-4.0) · English anchor from ALIA-2606-SFT. InstruCAT (CC-BY-NC-ND) was deliberately excluded.
Decision-reasoning report: private repo luispoveda93/Gala-project-report · Training dashboard: https://huggingface.co/spaces/luispoveda93/gala-catalan-sft-trackio
