Model reference · open weights
small is an open-weight embedding model from funnel-transformer. small (BF16) weighs 524 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.
Summary of the funnel-transformer/small model card, 2026-10-01
What it is
| Released by | funnel-transformer |
|---|---|
| Released | 2022-03-02 |
| VRAM | 524 MB for the weights |
What it runs on
| Card | Runs | Memory |
|---|---|---|
| RTX 3060 12 GB | fits | 11.6 GB |
| RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB | fits | 15.4 GB |
| RTX 3090 24 GB | fits | 23.4 GB |
| RTX 4090 24 GB | fits | 23.4 GB |
| RTX 5090 32 GB | fits | 31.0 GB |
| L40S 48 GB | fits | 44.0 GB |
| A100 80 GB | fits | 78.2 GB |
| H100 80 GB | fits | 78.1 GB |
| RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB | fits | 93.8 GB |
| DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified | fits | 107 GB |
| H200 141 GB | fits | 138 GB |
| B200 180 GB | fits | 176 GB |
From the model card
Pretrained model on English language using a similar objective objective as ELECTRA. It was introduced in this paper and first released in this repository. This model is uncased: it does not make a difference between english and English.
Disclaimer: The team releasing Funnel Transformer did not write a model card for this model so this model card has been written by the Hugging Face team.
Funnel Transformer is a transformers model pretrained on a large corpus of English data in a self-supervised fashion. This means it was pretrained on the raw texts only, with no humans labelling them in any way (which is why it can use lots of publicly available data) with an automatic process to generate inputs and labels from those texts.
More precisely, a small language model corrupts the input texts and serves as a generator of inputs for this model, and the pretraining objective is to predict which token is an original and which one has been replaced, a bit like a GAN training.
This way, the model learns an inner representation of the English language that can then be used to extract features useful for downstream tasks: if you have a dataset of labeled sentences for instance, you can train a standard classifier using the features produced by the BERT model as inputs.
You can use the raw model to extract a vector representation of a given text, but it's mostly intended to be fine-tuned on a downstream task. See the model hub to look for fine-tuned versions on a task that interests you.
Note that this model is primarily aimed at being fine-tuned on tasks that use the whole sentence (potentially masked) to make decisions, such as sequence classification, token classification or question answering. For tasks such as text generation you should look at model like GPT2.
Here is how to use this model to get the features of a given text in PyTorch:
from transformers import FunnelTokenizer, FunnelModel
tokenizer = FunnelTokenizer.from_pretrained("funnel-transformer/small")
model = FunneModel.from_pretrained("funnel-transformer/small")
text = "Replace me by any text you'd like."
encoded_input = tokenizer(text, return_tensors='pt')
output = model(**encoded_input)
and in TensorFlow:
from transformers import FunnelTokenizer, TFFunnelModel
tokenizer = FunnelTokenizer.from_pretrained("funnel-transformer/small")
model = TFFunnelModel.from_pretrained("funnel-transformer/small")
text = "Replace me by any text you'd like."
encoded_input = tokenizer(text, return_tensors='tf')
output = model(encoded_input)
The BERT model was pretrained on:
@misc{dai2020funneltransformer,
title={Funnel-Transformer: Filtering out Sequential Redundancy for Efficient Language Processing},
author={Zihang Dai and Guokun Lai and Yiming Yang and Quoc V. Le},
year={2020},
eprint={2006.03236},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.LG}
}
Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.