ModernBERT-TR Embed

A 150M-parameter Turkish text-embedding model.

Base model: ytu-ce-cosmos/modernbert-tr-base.
Distilled from Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B.

Results

Model	Params	Retr	Classif	PairCls	Cluster	STS	Bitext	Mean
ModernBERT-TR-Embed (ours)	150M	59.4	76.5	69.2	63.3	77.6	94.1	68.14
ytu-ce-cosmos/turkish-e5-large	560M	61.5	72.6	62.8	60.9	80.0	99.3	67.17
microsoft/harrier-oss-v1-0.6b	600M	60.1	71.1	58.6	63.3	74.5	98.6	65.57
intfloat/multilingual-e5-large	560M	61.7	69.2	65.6	60.8	81.0	99.0	66.56
Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-4B	4B	63.1	70.2	60.1	61.3	77.0	97.8	66.69
Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B	8B	64.4	72.8	62.8	62.9	80.0	98.0	68.59

How was this model trained?

We embedded ~7.9M Turkish passages with the teacher, then trained our model to reproduce those embeddings. A projector maps the teacher's 4096-d vectors down to our model's 768 dimensions. Following Jasper/Stella distillation recipe, a three-term loss aligns the embeddings from both: a per-passage cosine loss, a similarity-matrix loss matching the student's and teacher's Gram matrices within batch, and a CoSENT-style hinge that reproduces the teacher's pairwise-similarity ordering.
From the distilled model we ran three fine-tunings, all supervised by teacher embeddings:
- Retrieval: the student ranks the correct passage above hard negatives for a given query. Trained with an InfoNCE contrastive loss over in-batch and hard negatives, plus a KL term matching the teacher's softmax ranking over each query's candidates.
- Multi-task: the retrieval objective plus Turkish language-understanding tasks: NLI, STS as in CoSENT on teacher cosine, supervised contrastive classification as in SupCon, and a replay of the cosine distillation on classification text.
- Cross-lingual: the multi-task recipe with rebalanced task weights and added English retrieval passages, to improve English-Turkish alignment.
We weight-average the checkpoints described above into a single model.

Usage

sentence-transformers

from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer
model = SentenceTransformer("mrbesher/modernbert-tr-embed")

emb = model.encode(["bir cümle", "başka bir cümle"], normalize_embeddings=True)

q = model.encode(["soru"], prompt_name="query", normalize_embeddings=True)
d = model.encode(["döküman"], normalize_embeddings=True)

The retrieval (see config_sentence_transformers.json): Instruct: Given a web search query, retrieve relevant passages that answer the query\nQuery:{text}.

ONNX Runtime

The onnx/ folder has the grapgh for the token embeddings, it includes 3 graphs: token embeddings, mean-pool and L2-norm.

from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer
model = SentenceTransformer("mrbesher/modernbert-tr-embed", backend="onnx",
                            model_kwargs={"file_name": "onnx/model_fp16.onnx"})

Text Embeddings Inference (TEI)

TEI is L2-normalizes by default. Pass per-request prompts for retrieval queries.

text-embeddings-router --model-id mrbesher/modernbert-tr-embed --dtype float16

Encoderfile

See the companion encoderfile repo.

Training data

Turkish retrieval (msmarco-tr, Squad-TR train/dev), Turkish NLI (boun-tabi/nli_tr train), Turkish STS-B (train), and Turkish classification-domain text (product reviews, news, social), all teacher-supervised. We check for leaks with text-hash against every MTEB(Turkish) test split.