Publications By LightOn

Encoder-only transformer models such as BERT offer a great performance-size tradeoff for retrieval and classification tasks with respect to larger decoder-only models. Despite being the workhorse of numerous production pipelines, there have been limited Pareto improvements to BERT since its release. In this paper, we introduce ModernBERT, bringing modern model optimizations to encoder-only models and representing a major Pareto improvement over older encoders. Trained on 2 trillion tokens with a native 8192 sequence length, ModernBERT models exhibit state-of-the-art results on a large pool of evaluations encompassing diverse classification tasks and both single and multi-vector retrieval on different domains (including code). In addition to strong downstream performance, ModernBERT is also the most speed and memory efficient encoder and is designed for inference on common GPUs.

We introduce MonoQwen2-VL-v0.1, the first visual document reranker to enhance the quality of the retrieved visual documents and take these pipelines to the next level. Reranking a small number of candidates with MonoQwen2-VL-v0.1 achieve top results on the ViDoRe leaderboard.

DuckSearch is a lightweight Python library built on DuckDB, designed for efficient document search and filtering with Hugging Face datasets and standard documents.

Over the last few years, multi-vector retrieval methods, spearheaded by ColBERT, have become an increasingly popular approach to Neural IR. By storing representations at the token level rather than at the document level, these methods have demonstrated very strong retrieval performance, especially in out-of-domain settings. However, the storage and memory requirements necessary to store the large number of associated vectors remain an important drawback, hindering practical adoption. In this paper, we introduce a simple clustering-based token pooling approach to aggressively reduce the number of vectors that need to be stored. This method can reduce the space & memory footprint of ColBERT indexes by 50% with virtually no retrieval performance degradation. This method also allows for further reductions, reducing the vector count by 66%-to-75% , with degradation remaining below 5% on a vast majority of datasets. Importantly, this approach requires no architectural change nor query-time processing, and can be used as a simple drop-in during indexation with any ColBERT-like model.

With over 9.3 million annotated images, this dataset offers researchers and AI developers a valuable resource for creating models adapted to real world documents.

We release PyLate, a new user-friendly library for training and experimenting with ColBERT models, a family of models that exhibit strong retrieval capabilities on out-of-domain data.