Welcome to my personal page! 🌸 I'm Loubna, a Research Engineer at Hugging Face. I lead efforts on training small Language Models (SmolLM, SmolLM2 & SmolLM3 ) and building pre-training datasets like Cosmopedia and FineWeb-Edu. I'm also the author of The Smol Training Playbook, a comprehensive guide to building world-class small LLMs.

Previously, I was a member of the core team behind BigCode, where I worked on The Stack dataset, the largest open dataset of source code, as well as the StarCoder and StarCoder2 family of models.

I hold the MVA master's degree from ENS Paris Saclay (Paris, France) and an engineering degree from École des Mines de Nancy, with a major in Mathematics (Nancy, France).

I'm based in Paris, but I grew up in Morocco, in a small town called Midelt.

I recently talked about LLMs and the impact of synthetic data on the French IT talkshow Underscore_ – watch the interview here.

Publications

• SmolLM2: When Smol Goes Big -- Data-Centric Training of a Small Language Model. Spoltlight at COLM 2025.
• The FineWeb Datasets: Decanting the Web for the Finest Text Data at Scale. Spoltlight at NeurIPS 2024.
• StarCoder 2 and The Stack v2: The Next Generation. Arxiv.
• StarCoder: May The Source Be With You. TMLR.
• SantaCoder: Don't reach for the stars. Best Paper Award at ICLR 2023 DL4C Workshop.
• The Stack: 3 TB of permissively licensed source code. TMLR - Arxiv.
• SmolVLM: Redefining small and efficient multimodal models. Arxiv.
• Scaling Laws and Compute-Optimal Training Beyond Fixed Training Durations. Arxiv.
• BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model.NeurIPS 2022 - Arxiv.

The full list is available in my Google Scholar Page.

Talks

• December 11th, 2025, in-person Keynote about "Training World-Class LLMs: From Research to Production" at GenerationAI conference. Slides.
• February 14th, 2025, interview at Underscore_ (french IT talkshow) about LLMs and the impact of synthetic data. Youtube video.
• December 11th, 2024, talk about "The State of Synthetic Data and Smol Models in 2024" at Latent Space NeurIPS event in Vancouver. Slides.
• December 11th, 2024, remote panel about Small Language Models at SmallCon.
• November 7th, 2024, podcast about "Code Generation & Synthetic Data" at AI Stories.
• September 24th, 2024, online Keynote about "The age of synthetic data and small LLMs" at NLP Summit 2024. Slides.
• July 16th, 2024, interview with VentureBeat. Hugging Face’s SmolLM models bring powerful AI to your phone, no cloud required.
• May 23rd, 2024, online talk about "Behind the Scenes of LLM Pre-training" at Stanford CS25: Transformers United class. Youtube Recording - Slides.
• April 20th, 2024, in-person Keynote about "Open development of Large Language Models for code with BigCode and StarCoder2" at LLM4Code workshop at ICSE 2024. Slides.
• April 9th, 2024, in-person talk about "The landscape of LLMs for Code and their adaptation to custom codebases" at Qcon London. Slides.
• April 4th, 2024, in-person talk about "Overview of BigCode and the landscape of LLMs for Code" at Station F. Slides.
• February 12th, 2024, in-person talk about "Generative AI: LLMs & Beyond" at Sciences Po Slides.
• October 16th, 2023, talk about Introduction to Machine Leaning for High School students (in French) at Teens in AI. Slides.
• November 24th, 2023, online talk at Al Akhawayn University. Slides.
• September 28th, 2023, in-person Keynote to 1500+ attendeed at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit China 2023. Youtube Recording - Slides.
• September 26th, 2023, in-person talk about Open and Responsible development of Code Models at GOSIM Conference in Shanghai, China. Youtube Recording.
• September 23rd, 2023, in-person talk about Building LLMs for Code at GOSIM Workshop in Shanghai, China. Youtube Recording - Slides.
• September 9th, 2023, in-person talk at DataFest Yerevan in Yerevan, Armenia. Youtube Recording - Slides.
• August 17th, 2023, webinar to Analytics Vidhya. Slides.
• June 21th, 2023, online presentation about StarCoder to Emirates Data Science department.
• May 16th, 2023,webinar about StarCoder to MLOPS Learners. Youtube Recording
• May 5th, 2023, online presentation about SantaCoder paper at the Deep Learning For Code Workshop at ICLR.
• Febrary 22nd, 2023, webinar about BigCode Project and Code LLMs to MoroccoAI.Youtube Recording.
• February 9th, 2023, online talk about The Stack & Code LLMs fine-tuning at the department of innovation of the European Parliament.
• December 19th 2022, online talk about CodeParrot at a research seminar in KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.