Post
72
π€ Announcing the Ettin Reranker family: six new state-of-the-art CrossEncoder rerankers for search from 17M to 1B parameters, plus the full training data and the ~150-line recipe. Built on the Ettin ModernBERT encoders, Apache 2.0. Details:
All six were trained with the same single-stage pointwise MSE distillation recipe, with mixedbread-ai/mxbai-rerank-large-v2 (1.54B) as the teacher. Only the learning rate and per-device batch size change between sizes. The 1B student matches the teacher within 0.0001 NDCG@10 on MTEB(eng, v2) Retrieval, the 150M is the strongest reranker I tested in the under-600M range, and the 17M beats the 33M ms-marco-MiniLM-L12-v2 by +0.051 NDCG@10 at roughly half the parameter count.
Speed matters as much as quality for a reranker, since it determines whether the model fits the latency budget between retrieval and showing results. Our 17M is the fastest reranker in the whole comparison at 7517 pairs/sec on an H100. Our 150M runs 2.3x faster than the two other 150M ModernBERT-base rerankers (gte-reranker-modernbert-base and granite-embedding-reranker-english-r2) because the modular Transformer module propagates unpadded inputs through every layer rather than just the FA2 attention kernel. And our 1B is 2.4x faster than its 1.5B teacher while matching it on quality.
I bootstrapped the training recipe with the new train-sentence-transformers Agent Skill shipped in Sentence Transformers v5.5.0. Install it with
I wrote a blog post walking through usage, results across six embedder pairings, the speed story, and the complete training script. Check it out, or just point your Agent to the URL:
https://huggingface.co/blog/ettin-reranker
Collection: https://huggingface.co/collections/cross-encoder/ettin-rerankers
All six were trained with the same single-stage pointwise MSE distillation recipe, with mixedbread-ai/mxbai-rerank-large-v2 (1.54B) as the teacher. Only the learning rate and per-device batch size change between sizes. The 1B student matches the teacher within 0.0001 NDCG@10 on MTEB(eng, v2) Retrieval, the 150M is the strongest reranker I tested in the under-600M range, and the 17M beats the 33M ms-marco-MiniLM-L12-v2 by +0.051 NDCG@10 at roughly half the parameter count.
Speed matters as much as quality for a reranker, since it determines whether the model fits the latency budget between retrieval and showing results. Our 17M is the fastest reranker in the whole comparison at 7517 pairs/sec on an H100. Our 150M runs 2.3x faster than the two other 150M ModernBERT-base rerankers (gte-reranker-modernbert-base and granite-embedding-reranker-english-r2) because the modular Transformer module propagates unpadded inputs through every layer rather than just the FA2 attention kernel. And our 1B is 2.4x faster than its 1.5B teacher while matching it on quality.
I bootstrapped the training recipe with the new train-sentence-transformers Agent Skill shipped in Sentence Transformers v5.5.0. Install it with
hf skills add train-sentence-transformers --claude and ask Claude Code (or Codex / Cursor / Gemini CLI) to fine-tune a SentenceTransformer, CrossEncoder, or SparseEncoder model on your data.I wrote a blog post walking through usage, results across six embedder pairings, the speed story, and the complete training script. Check it out, or just point your Agent to the URL:
https://huggingface.co/blog/ettin-reranker
Collection: https://huggingface.co/collections/cross-encoder/ettin-rerankers
