| title | HRM-Text: Efficient Pretraining Beyond Scaling |
|---|---|
| authors | Guan Wang, Changling Liu, Chenyu Wang, Cai Zhou, Yuhao Sun, Yifei Wu, Shuai Zhen, Luca Scimeca, Yasin Abbasi Yadkori |
| date | 2026-05-20 |
| venue | arXiv (preprint, not peer reviewed) |
| id | arXiv:2605.20613 |
| affiliation | Sapient AI |
| upvotes | 95 (Hugging Face Daily Papers, 2026-11-01) |
| links | abs pdf hf code |
| abstract | The current pretraining paradigm for large language models relies on massive compute and internet-scale raw text, creating a significant barrier to foundational research. In contrast, biological systems demonstrate highly sample-efficient learning through multi-timescale processing, such as the functional organization of the frontoparietal loop. Taking this as inspiration, we introduce HRM-Text, which replaces standard Transformers with a Hierarchical Recurrent Model (HRM) that decouples computation into slow-evolving strategic and fast-evolving execution layers. To stabilize this deep recurrence for language modeling, we introduce MagicNorm and warmup deep credit assignment. Furthermore, instead of standard raw-text pretraining, we train exclusively on instruction-response pairs using a task-completion objective and PrefixLM masking. Serving as an empirical existence proof of efficient pretraining, a 1B-parameter HRM-Text model trained from scratch on only 40 billion unique tokens and $1,500 budget achieves 60.7% on MMLU, 81.9% on ARC-C, 82.2% on DROP, 84.5% on GSM8K, and 56.2% on MATH. Despite utilizing roughly 100-900x fewer training tokens and 96-432x less estimated compute than standard baselines, HRM-Text performs competitively with 2-7B parameter open models. These results demonstrate that co-designing architectures and objectives can radically reduce the compute-to-performance ratio, making pretraining from scratch accessible to the broader research community. |
cite
@misc{wang2026hrm,
title={HRM-Text: Efficient Pretraining Beyond Scaling},
author={Guan Wang and Changling Liu and Chenyu Wang and Cai Zhou and Yuhao Sun and Yifei Wu and Shuai Zhen and Luca Scimeca and Yasin Abbasi Yadkori},
year={2026},
eprint={2605.20613},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20613}
}