Surpassing Scale by Efficiency: A Compact 135M Parameter Foundational LLM Natively Adapted for the Bangla Language

Abstract:While the NLP landscape is dominated by multi-billion parameter architectures, their deployment in low-resource, non-Latin scripts remains computationally prohibitive for edge configurations, mobile systems, and decentralized local hardware. This paper presents bangla-smollm-135m, a highly compact 135-million parameter decoder-only foundational model engineered explicitly for high-efficiency language modeling in the Bangla script. By leveraging a deterministic intersect-and-append token merging strategy between TituLLMs and SmolLM2-135M, the model overcomes subword script fragmentation without destabilizing early pretrained parameter states. In zero-shot multi-task benchmark evaluations (PIQA_bn, OpenBookQA_bn, CommonsenseQA_bn, and Bangla_MMLU), bangla-smollm-135m matches or outperforms models twice its size (Gemma-3-270m) and achieves parity with models in the 1B parameter tier. The model is available at rnnandi/bangla-smollm-135m

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2606.16383 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2606.16383v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.16383 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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