Cosmological inflation gives a natural answer for a variety ofcosmological questions, including the horizon problem, the flatnessproblem, and others. However, inflation yields new questions relating tothe flatness of the inflaton potential. Recent studies of `little'fields, a special class of pseudo-Goldstone bosons, have shown it ispossible to protect the mass of a field while still yielding order-oneinteractions with other fields. In this paper, we will show that `littleinflatons' are natural candidates for the slow-roll field of hybridinflation models. We consider both supersymmetric and non-supersymmetricmodels, and give a simple examples based on approximate Abelian symmetrieswhich solve the inflaton flatness problem of supergravity. We also present hybrid models in which components of gauge fields in higher dimensions play the role of theinflaton. Protected by higher-dimensional gauge symmetry, they, too, naturallyhave large couplings while suppressed mass terms. We summarize the implications of the new WMAP data on such models.