English

Nautile-370M: Spectral Memory Meets Attention in a Small Reasoning Model

Machine Learning 2026-04-29 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

We present Nautile-370M, a 371-million-parameter small language model designed for efficient reasoning under strict parameter and inference budgets. Nautile-370M uses a hybrid backbone in which two SeqCond Attention (SCA) layers, a linear-time spectral sequence operator inspired by SeqCondenser, alternate with one transformer layer. This design aims to retain the long-context efficiency and state-tracking benefits of structured sequential models while preserving the expressive token-to-token routing of attention. The model was trained on a single Cloud TPU v4-64 pod slice provided through the Google TPU Research Cloud (TRC) program; the subsequent reinforcement learning stage was carried out on a single NVIDIA DGX Spark. We prove that the SCA readout mechanism can exactly retrieve any individual token from the prefix summary and can reproduce any output of softmax attention as a special case, establishing that SCA is at least as expressive as full self-attention in the continuous limit. We also describe the training data pipeline and outline a reinforcement learning stage specialized for reasoning, verification, and response quality.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.24809,
  title  = {Nautile-370M: Spectral Memory Meets Attention in a Small Reasoning Model},
  author = {Maixent Chenebaux},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.24809},
  year   = {2026}
}