Post

This week we released ModernBERT, the first encoder to reach SOTA on most common benchmarks across language understanding, retrieval, and code, while running twice as fast as DeBERTaV3 on short context and three times faster than NomicBERT & GTE on long context.

This is awesome! Are there any docs on how to use ModernBERT for ColBERT?

Thanks. ModernBERT is a base model. It’ll need additional contrastive pretraining to really shine as a retrieval model, but our early results in the paper look promising. Hopefully there will be multiple open source retrieval tuned models to choose from early next year, including ColBERT finetunes.

That’d be sweet. I thought I saw a ColBERT file in the GitHub repo, so wondered what it was. But I get that it’ll need other training. Not my forte sadly, so I look forward to seeing those!

We evaluated ModernBERT on MLDR using ColBERT-style retrieval using that code. That process was smaller scale than a full ColBERT finetune, which would need additional contrastive training, likely use multiple teacher models, etc as detailed here by @bclavie.bsky.social www.answer.ai/posts/2024-0...

Hi, are there any examples or docs on how to use for entailment/NLI--is modernBERT suitable for 0-shot classification?