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Research

Research
October 2026Blackdrome AI Labs · Preprint

Noma: An Open System One Decision Model from a Sliced Decoder and Trained Heads

Atul Saxena, Divyanshi Sharma

In plain terms

Most systems ask a language model to make a decision and then parse whatever sentence comes back. Noma skips the sentence. It answers with numbers you can threshold on, in about 16 milliseconds, and it can say "none of these" instead of guessing.

//Abstract

Noma is an open decision model. Given a state — a ticket, a log line, an agent’s last step, a contract clause — and a few typed questions, it returns a calibrated probability for every option, a separate "none of these" signal, and a measure of its own uncertainty. It never writes text, so there is nothing to parse and nothing to wait for. The paper documents the architecture and ablates each component across 20 controlled training runs.

//What it found

  • 18 of the backbone’s 32 layers score the same as using all 32 — most of the decoder is not doing decision work.
  • The abstain output needs to be a trained head, not a threshold applied after the fact.
  • End-to-end latency of roughly 16 ms on a single GPU, with the same /v1/systemone API surface as Jev.

//Methods

  • Sliced decoder
  • Trained classification heads
  • Calibration
  • 20 controlled ablation runs

//Keywords

  • decision models
  • calibration
  • abstention
  • open weights
  • low-latency inference