Modalities, a PyTorch-native Framework For Large-scale LLM Training and Research

Today’s LLM (pre-) training and research workflows typically allocate a significant amount of compute to large-scale ablation studies. Despite the substantial compute costs of these ablations, existing open-source frameworks provide limited tooling for these experiments, often forcing researchers to write their own wrappers and scripts. We propose Modalities, an end-to-end PyTorch-native framework that integrates data-driven LLM research with large-scale model training from two angles. Firstly, by integrating state-of-the-art parallelization strategies, it enables both efficient pretraining and systematic ablations at trillion-token and billion-parameter scale. Secondly, Modalities adopts modular design with declarative, self-contained configuration, enabling reproducibility and extensibility levels that are difficult to achieve out-of-the-box with existing LLM training frameworks.

  • Published in:
    arXiv
  • Type:
    Article
  • Authors:
    Lübbering, Max; Ruland, Timm; Rutmann, Richard; Stollenwerk, Felix; Fitzek, David; Fromm, Michael; Weber, Alexander; Sifa, Rafet; Flores-Herr, Nicolas; Köhler, Joachim; Ali, Mehdi
  • Year:
    2026

Citation information

Lübbering, Max; Ruland, Timm; Rutmann, Richard; Stollenwerk, Felix; Fitzek, David; Fromm, Michael; Weber, Alexander; Sifa, Rafet; Flores-Herr, Nicolas; Köhler, Joachim; Ali, Mehdi: Modalities, a PyTorch-native Framework For Large-scale LLM Training and Research, arXiv, 2026, February, arXiv, Luebbering.etal.2026a,

Associated Lamarr Researchers

Max Lübbering

Dr. Max Lübbering

Scientist NLP to the profile
LAMARR Person - Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Alexander Weber

Author NLP to the profile
Prof. Dr. Rafet Sifa

Prof. Dr. Rafet Sifa

Principal Investigator Hybrid ML to the profile
lamarr institute person Koehler Joachim - Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Dr. Joachim Köhler

Principal Investigator NLP to the profile
Photo. Portrait of Mehdi Ali.

Dr. Mehdi Ali

Lead Scientist Foundation Models NLP to the profile