Manacá-1B: An Open, Reproducible Brazilian-Portuguese Language Model and a Tokenizer-Aware, Paired Evaluation

📅 2026-08-30
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
为了解决巴西葡萄牙语开放语言模型缺乏和难以复现的问题,本文通过完全容器化的可复现流程训练并发布了Manacá-1B模型,并对其进行了全面评估。
📝 Abstract
Brazilian Portuguese remains under-served by open language models, and the few that exist are difficult to reproduce and are often compared without measures of uncertainty. We release Manacá-1B, an open decoder-only model of 1.72 billion parameters trained from scratch for Brazilian Portuguese with a fully containerized, reproducible pipeline. The pretraining is stable, with zero skipped or NaN steps and self-recovering loss spikes, and we release its full log and dynamics. We evaluate the model against nine open baselines on four Portuguese benchmarks under a single harness. Every comparison reports a standard error and a paired significance test, and the harness is validated against previously published numbers. On last-word prediction Manacá-1B is the strongest model below the 7B scale, exceeding both Tucano-1b1 and Tucano-2b4 on LAMBADA-PT with large paired margins; it is competitive on commonsense completion and near chance on multiple-choice reasoning, as are all small base models. Along the way we document a concrete evaluation pitfall: converting a SentencePiece tokenizer with case-folding normalization to the HuggingFace fast format silently drops the normalizer, routing every capitalized token to byte-fallback and depressing scores in a way that is invisible in aggregate metrics. The uncorrected tokenizer lowered LAMBADA-PT accuracy from 45.3 to 25.0; we quantify the effect and provide a one-line fix that reproduces the training tokenizer exactly. Code, raw training and evaluation logs, per-example prediction vectors, the model weights, and the corrected tokenizer are released so that every number in this paper can be recomputed.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

Brazilian Portuguese
open language models
reproducibility
uncertainty measures
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Brazilian Portuguese
reproducible pipeline
tokenizer-aware evaluation
paired significance test
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