NeoBERT: A Next-Generation BERT

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Breton, Lola Le, Fournier, Quentin, Mezouar, Mariam El, Morris, John X., Chandar, Sarath
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Breton, Lola Le
Fournier, Quentin
Mezouar, Mariam El
Morris, John X.
Chandar, Sarath
author_facet Breton, Lola Le
Fournier, Quentin
Mezouar, Mariam El
Morris, John X.
Chandar, Sarath
contents Recent innovations in architecture, pre-training, and fine-tuning have led to the remarkable in-context learning and reasoning abilities of large auto-regressive language models such as LLaMA and DeepSeek. In contrast, encoders like BERT and RoBERTa have not seen the same level of progress despite being foundational for many downstream NLP applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce NeoBERT, a next-generation encoder that redefines the capabilities of bidirectional models by integrating state-of-the-art advancements in architecture, modern data, and optimized pre-training methodologies. NeoBERT is designed for seamless adoption: it serves as a plug-and-play replacement for existing base models, relies on an optimal depth-to-width ratio, and leverages an extended context length of 4,096 tokens. Despite its compact 250M parameter footprint, it achieves state-of-the-art results on the massive MTEB benchmark, outperforming BERT large, RoBERTa large, NomicBERT, and ModernBERT under identical fine-tuning conditions. In addition, we rigorously evaluate the impact of each modification on GLUE and design a uniform fine-tuning and evaluation framework for MTEB. We release all code, data, checkpoints, and training scripts to accelerate research and real-world adoption.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_19587
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle NeoBERT: A Next-Generation BERT
Breton, Lola Le
Fournier, Quentin
Mezouar, Mariam El
Morris, John X.
Chandar, Sarath
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Recent innovations in architecture, pre-training, and fine-tuning have led to the remarkable in-context learning and reasoning abilities of large auto-regressive language models such as LLaMA and DeepSeek. In contrast, encoders like BERT and RoBERTa have not seen the same level of progress despite being foundational for many downstream NLP applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce NeoBERT, a next-generation encoder that redefines the capabilities of bidirectional models by integrating state-of-the-art advancements in architecture, modern data, and optimized pre-training methodologies. NeoBERT is designed for seamless adoption: it serves as a plug-and-play replacement for existing base models, relies on an optimal depth-to-width ratio, and leverages an extended context length of 4,096 tokens. Despite its compact 250M parameter footprint, it achieves state-of-the-art results on the massive MTEB benchmark, outperforming BERT large, RoBERTa large, NomicBERT, and ModernBERT under identical fine-tuning conditions. In addition, we rigorously evaluate the impact of each modification on GLUE and design a uniform fine-tuning and evaluation framework for MTEB. We release all code, data, checkpoints, and training scripts to accelerate research and real-world adoption.
title NeoBERT: A Next-Generation BERT
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.19587