Model reference · open weights

dragon-plus-context-encoder

Embeddings facebook Embeddings 1 build Licence not stated 3k dl/mo

dragon-plus-context-encoder is an open-weight embedding model from Meta. dragon-plus-context-encoder (BF16) weighs 438 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

For self-hosting, compare this build's requirements below with the GPU you plan to rent.

  • DRAGON+ is a BERT-base sized dense retriever developed by Meta for feature extraction tasks.
  • It utilizes an asymmetric dual encoder architecture with a context length of 512 tokens.
  • The model was initialized from RetroMAE and further trained on data augmented from the MS MARCO corpus.

Summary of the facebook/dragon-plus-context-encoder model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released byMeta
Released2023-02-15
VRAM438 MB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for dragon-plus-context-encoder (BF16)

438 MBweights, file size
1.1 GBruntime overhead
CardRunsMemory
RTX 3060 12 GBfits11.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GBfits15.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GBfits23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GBfits23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GBfits31.0 GB
L40S 48 GBfits44.0 GB
A100 80 GBfits78.2 GB
H100 80 GBfits78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GBfits93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unifiedfits107 GB
H200 141 GBfits138 GB
B200 180 GBfits176 GB

From the model card

What Meta says about dragon-plus-context-encoder

Read the model card

DRAGON+ is a BERT-base sized dense retriever initialized from RetroMAE and further trained on the data augmented from MS MARCO corpus, following the approach described in How to Train Your DRAGON: Diverse Augmentation Towards Generalizable Dense Retrieval.

The associated GitHub repository is available here https://github.com/facebookresearch/dpr-scale/tree/main/dragon. We use asymmetric dual encoder, with two distinctly parameterized encoders. The following models are also available:

ModelInitializationMARCO DevBEIRQuery Encoder PathContext Encoder Path
DRAGON+Shitao/RetroMAE39.047.4facebook/dragon-plus-query-encoderfacebook/dragon-plus-context-encoder
DRAGON-RoBERTaRoBERTa-base39.447.2facebook/dragon-roberta-query-encoderfacebook/dragon-roberta-context-encoder

Usage (HuggingFace Transformers)

Using the model directly available in HuggingFace transformers .

import torch
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModel
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained('facebook/dragon-plus-query-encoder')
query_encoder = AutoModel.from_pretrained('facebook/dragon-plus-query-encoder')
context_encoder = AutoModel.from_pretrained('facebook/dragon-plus-context-encoder')

# We use msmarco query and passages as an example
query =  "Where was Marie Curie born?"
contexts = [
    "Maria Sklodowska, later known as Marie Curie, was born on November 7, 1867.",
    "Born in Paris on 15 May 1859, Pierre Curie was the son of Eugène Curie, a doctor of French Catholic origin from Alsace."
]
# Apply tokenizer
query_input = tokenizer(query, return_tensors='pt')
ctx_input = tokenizer(contexts, padding=True, truncation=True, return_tensors='pt')
# Compute embeddings: take the last-layer hidden state of the [CLS] token
query_emb = query_encoder(**query_input).last_hidden_state[:, 0, :]
ctx_emb = context_encoder(**ctx_input).last_hidden_state[:, 0, :]
# Compute similarity scores using dot product
score1 = query_emb @ ctx_emb[0]  # 396.5625
score2 = query_emb @ ctx_emb[1]  # 393.8340

Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.

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