olegphenomenon/hdc-brain-v14.1-finetune-v3
HDC-Brain v14.1 — Instruction Finetune v3
A 299M-parameter hyperdimensional language model, instruction-finetuned on 75M tokens of filtered prompt-response data. Responds in the `### Instruction: ... ### Response: ...` template.
Paper: HDC-Brain: A 300M Hyperdimensional Language Model with Bipolar Codebook (Hasjanov, 2026) — Zenodo DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19653726. Code: https://github.com/OlegPhenomenon/hdc-brain Base: hdc-brain-v14.1-base
What is this
HDC-Brain replaces three components of a standard transformer with HDC-native primitives (bipolar codebook, multi-head binding attention, thought loops, parallel-scan HDC memory). This checkpoint is the base pretrain finetuned for instruction following.
Key numbers
Dataset filtering: 30–1000 char responses, ASCII ≥ 92%, no code/math blocks, no role-marker artefacts. See `prep_quality_v3.py`.
Usage
Prompt format:
### Instruction:
{your question}
### Response:Interactive CLI (CPU / MPS / CUDA):
git clone https://github.com/OlegPhenomenon/hdc-brain.git
cd hdc-brain
pip install torch sentencepiece numpy
# place best_finetune_v3_v14_1.pt in hdc-brain-v14.1/weights/
cd hdc-brain-v14.1
python chat.py # CPU
python chat.py --device mps # Apple Silicon (9–18 tok/s on M3)
python chat.py --device cuda # NVIDIA GPUMinimal programmatic use:
import torch, sys
sys.path.insert(0, "hdc-brain-v14.1")
from hdc_brain_v14_1 import create_model
ckpt = torch.load("best_finetune_v3_v14_1.pt", map_location="cpu", weights_only=True)
model, _ = create_model(32000, ckpt["config"])
model.load_state_dict(ckpt["model"])
model.eval()Qualitative behaviour (honest)
What works:
- Correct instruction-response formatting
- Heavily-reinforced facts (e.g. "What is the capital of France?" → "Paris")
- Short coherent generations (definitions, short poems, simple descriptions)
What fails (typical small-model 300M failure modes):
- Arbitrary factual recall: "What is the capital of Russia?" → "Tokyo"
- Arithmetic: "2 + 2" → garbled
- Code generation: produces syntactically plausible but semantically broken code
These are not HDC-specific — they reflect the scale (299M) and pretrain corpus (3B tokens, FineWeb-Edu only, no Wikipedia/Books). Full discussion in paper §5.1, §6.3.
Tokenizer
32K English BPE (SentencePiece). Ship the tokenizer with the code repo: `bpe_en_32k.model`.
Limitations
- Single run, no hyperparameter sweep, no seed averaging
- Factual grounding is weak (undertrained base + small SFT corpus)
- Compute advantage of the bipolar codebook requires custom XNOR/POPCNT kernels — not implemented here; only storage advantage is realised
- Inference speed reported on Apple MPS, not representative of edge CPU
Citation
@misc{hasjanov2026hdcbrain,
author = {Oleg Hasjanov},
title = {HDC-Brain: A 300M Hyperdimensional Language Model with Bipolar Codebook},
publisher = {Zenodo},
year = {2026},
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.19653726},
url = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19653726}
}License
Weights: CC BY-NC 4.0 — free for research, academic, and personal non-commercial use. Commercial use requires a separate license. Contact: oleg.phenomenon@gmail.com.
The code at https://github.com/OlegPhenomenon/hdc-brain is released under Apache 2.0 and is unrestricted.
