Llamba: Scaling Distilled Recurrent Models for Efficient Language Processing

Abstract: We introduce Llamba, a family of efficient recurrent LLMs distilled from Llama-3.x into the Mamba architecture. The series includes Llamba-1B, Llamba-3B, and Llamba-8B, which achieve higher inference throughput and handle significantly larger batch sizes than Transformer-based models while maintaining comparable benchmark performance. Furthermore, Llamba demonstrates the effectiveness of cross-architecture distillation using MOHAWK (Bick et al., 2024), achieving these results with less than 0.1% of the training data typically used for models of similar size. To take full advantage of their efficiency, we provide an optimized implementation of Llamba for resource-constrained devices such as smartphones and edge platforms, offering a practical and memory-efficient alternative to Transformers. Overall, Llamba improves the tradeoff between speed, memory efficiency, and performance, making high-quality LLMs more accessible.