---
license: apache-2.0
language:
- sw
base_model:
- google/gemma-2-2b-it
pipeline_tag: text-generation
library_name: transformers
tags:
- swahili
- gemma2
- text-generation-inference
- text-generation
inference:
  parameters:
    temperature: 0.7
    top_p: 0.95
    max_new_tokens: 500
    do_sample: true
    eval_mode: true
    model_kwargs:
      eval_mode: true
---





# Gemma2-2B-Swahili-IT

Gemma2-2B-Swahili-IT is a lightweight, efficient open variant of Google's Gemma2-2B-IT model, fine-tuned for natural Swahili language understanding and generation. This model provides a resource-efficient option for Swahili language tasks while maintaining strong performance.

## Model Details

- **Developer:** Alfaxad Eyembe
- **Base Model:** google/gemma-2-2b-it
- **Model Type:** Decoder-only transformer
- **Language(s):** Swahili
- **License:** Apache 2.0
- **Finetuning Approach:** Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA)

## Training Data

The model was fine-tuned on a comprehensive dataset containing:
- 67,017 instruction-response pairs
- 16,273,709 total tokens
- Average 242.83 tokens per example
- High-quality, naturally-written Swahili content


![image/png](https://cdn-uploads.huggingface.co/production/uploads/6375af60e3413701a9f01c0f/7XXsvi8_x5PXZwXcUD-kl.png)

## Performance

### Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) - Swahili
- Base Model: 31.58% accuracy
- Fine-tuned Model: 38.60% accuracy
- Improvement: +7.02%

### Sentiment Analysis
- Base Model: 84.85% accuracy
- Fine-tuned Model: 86.00% accuracy
- Improvement: +1.15%
- Response Validity: 100%

## Intended Use

This model is designed for:
- Basic Swahili text generation
- Question answering
- Sentiment analysis
- Simple creative writing
- General instruction following in Swahili
- Resource-constrained environments

## Usage

```python
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForCausalLM
import torch

# Load tokenizer and model
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("alfaxadeyembe/gemma2-2b-swahili-it")
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    "alfaxadeyembe/gemma2-2b-swahili-it",
    device_map="auto",
    torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16
)

# Always set to eval mode for inference
model.eval()

# Example usage
prompt = "Eleza dhana ya uchumi wa kidijitali na umuhimu wake katika ulimwengu wa leo."
inputs = tokenizer(prompt, return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)

with torch.no_grad():
    outputs = model.generate(
        **inputs,
        max_new_tokens=500,
        do_sample=True,
        temperature=0.7,
        top_p=0.95
    )

response = tokenizer.decode(outputs[0], skip_special_tokens=True)
print(response)
```

## Training Details

- **Fine-tuning Method:** LoRA
- **Training Steps:** 400
- **Batch Size:** 2
- **Gradient Accumulation Steps:** 32
- **Learning Rate:** 2e-4
- **Training Time:** ~8 hours on A100 GPU

## Key Features

- Lightweight and efficient (2B parameters)
- Suitable for resource-constrained environments
- Good performance on basic language tasks
- Fast inference speed
- Low memory footprint

## Advantages

1. Resource Efficiency:
   - Small model size (2B parameters)
   - Lower memory requirements
   - Faster inference time
   - Suitable for deployment on less powerful hardware

2. Task Performance:
   - Strong sentiment analysis capabilities
   - Decent MMLU performance
   - Good instruction following
   - Natural Swahili generation

## Limitations

- Simpler responses compared to 9B/27B variants

## Citation

```bibtex
@misc{gemma2-2b-swahili-it,
  author = {Alfaxad Eyembe},
  title = {Gemma2-2B-Swahili-IT: A Lightweight Swahili Variant of Gemma2-2B-IT},
  year = {2025},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  journal = {Hugging Face Model Hub},
}
```

## Contact

For questions or feedback, please reach out through:
- HuggingFace: [@alfaxadeyembe](https://huggingface.co/alfaxad)
- Twitter: [@alfxad](https://twitter.com/alfxad)