Model reference · open weights

modernbert-embed-large-unsupervised

Embeddings lightonai Embeddings 1 build Open weights 516 dl/mo

modernbert-embed-large-unsupervised is an open-weight embedding model from lightonai. modernbert-embed-large-unsupervised (FP32) weighs 790 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.

  • modernbert-embed-large-unsupervised is a 395M parameter sentence-similarity model developed by lightonai.
  • It is trained on 235M weakly-supervised contrastive pairs using the contrastors library and supports an 8192 token context length for English text.
  • The model is released under the apache-2.0 license.

Summary of the lightonai/modernbert-embed-large-unsupervised model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released bylightonai
Released2025-01-13
Parameters395M
VRAM790 MB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for modernbert-embed-large-unsupervised (FP32)

790 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 lightonai says about modernbert-embed-large-unsupervised

Read the model card

modernbert-embed-unsupervised-large is the unsupervised checkpoint trained with the contrastors library for 1 epoch over the 235M weakly-supervised contrastive pairs curated in Nomic Embed.

We suggest using moderbert-embed-large for embedding tasks.

Performance

ModelAverage (56)Classification (12)Clustering (11)Pair Classification (3)Reranking (4)Retrieval (15)STS (10)Overall
nomic-embed-text-v1_unsup59.971.242.583.755.048.080.830.7
modernbert-embed-base-unsupervised60.0372.1144.3482.7855.047.0580.3331.2
modernbert-embed-large-unsupervised60.7172.9044.9683.4455.5447.9080.9529.86

Acknowledgment

We wanted to thank Zach Nussbaum from Nomic AI for building and sharing the Nomic Embed recipe and tools and its support during the training of this model!

The training has been run on Orange Business Cloud Avenue infrastructure.

Citation

If you find the model, dataset, or training code useful, please considering citing ModernBERT as well as Nomic Embed:

@misc{modernbert,
      title={Smarter, Better, Faster, Longer: A Modern Bidirectional Encoder for Fast, Memory Efficient, and Long Context Finetuning and Inference},
      author={Benjamin Warner and Antoine Chaffin and Benjamin Clavié and Orion Weller and Oskar Hallström and Said Taghadouini and Alexis Gallagher and Raja Biswas and Faisal Ladhak and Tom Aarsen and Nathan Cooper and Griffin Adams and Jeremy Howard and Iacopo Poli},
      year={2024},
      eprint={2412.13663},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.13663},
}
@misc{nussbaum2024nomic,
      title={Nomic Embed: Training a Reproducible Long Context Text Embedder},
      author={Zach Nussbaum and John X. Morris and Brandon Duderstadt and Andriy Mulyar},
      year={2024},
      eprint={2402.01613},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL}
}

And if you want to cite this fine-tuning in particular, please use:

@misc{ModernBERT-embed-large,
  title={ModernBERT-embed-large},
  author={Chaffin, Antoine},
  url={https://huggingface.co/lightonai/modernbert-embed-large},
  year={2025}
}

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

Benchmarks

Reported results

As published on the model card: the maker's own numbers, not measured by AxForge.

TaskDatasetMetricScore
ClassificationMTEB AmazonCounterfactualClassification (en)accuracy76.642
ClassificationMTEB AmazonCounterfactualClassification (en)ap39.438
ClassificationMTEB AmazonCounterfactualClassification (en)f170.473
ClassificationMTEB AmazonPolarityClassificationaccuracy91.830
ClassificationMTEB AmazonPolarityClassificationap88.836
ClassificationMTEB AmazonPolarityClassificationf191.825
ClassificationMTEB AmazonReviewsClassification (en)accuracy47.864
ClassificationMTEB AmazonReviewsClassification (en)f147.281
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamap_at_126.885
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamap_at_1041.525
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamap_at_10042.610
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamap_at_100042.617
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamap_at_2042.422
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamap_at_336.143
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamap_at_539.215
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamrr_at_127.169
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamrr_at_1041.659
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamrr_at_10042.737
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamrr_at_100042.743
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamrr_at_2042.549
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamrr_at_336.202
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamrr_at_539.342
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnandcg_at_126.885
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnandcg_at_1050.515
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