IndicBERT-v3

IndicBERT-v3-270M is a multilingual, bidirectional encoder language model based on the Gemma-3 architecture. Unlike standard causal LLMs, these models have been adapted to use bidirectional attention, making them highly effective for encoder-heavy tasks.

Also checkout IndicBERT-v3-1B and IndicBERT-v3-4B.

Model Description

• Architecture: Bidirectional Gemma-3 (Non-causal attention)
• Vocabulary: Standard Gemma-3 vocabulary
• Objective: Masked Next Token Prediction (MNTP)

Training Strategy: Curriculum Learning

The models were trained using a rigid curriculum learning approach to balance English proficiency with Indic language adaptation while preventing catastrophic forgetting.

1. Phase 1 (English Foundation): Continual pre-training on English text (ratio: 0.30).
2. Phase 2 (High/Mid-Resource Adaptation): Adapted to 14 major Indic languages (Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Bengali, Malayalam, Marathi, Kannada, Gujarati, Assamese, Oriya, Punjabi, Sindhi, Urdu, Nepali) with a 0.25 ratio.
3. Phase 3 (Low-Resource Generalization): Introduction of 8 low-resource languages (Bodo, Dogri, Konkani, Kashmiri, Maithili, Manipuri, Sanskrit, Santali) at a 0.15 ratio.
4. Phase 4 (Joint Consolidation): The final 10% of training steps involved joint training on all 23 languages (0.25 ratio) to mitigate catastrophic forgetting.

Training Data

The model was continually pre-trained on approximately 35 Billion tokens (12M samples) sampled from various sources notably Sangraha-Verified, FineWeb-2, IndicCorp-v2 amongst many other datasets. Model was trained upto 4096 sequence length throughout the training.

⚠️ Critical Warning: MNTP vs. MLM

This model was trained with Masked Next Token Prediction (MNTP), not standard Masked Language Modeling (MLM like BERT).

• BERT (MLM): Mask token t_i; predict t_i using the hidden state at position i.
• IndicBERT-v3 (MNTP): Mask token t_i; predict t_i using the hidden state at position i-1.

Implication: When fine-tuning or using this model, you must ensure your data collation logic aligns with this shift.

Note

Internal testing shows the models to be very strong when compared to existing Encoder LLMs. Dedicated text-encoder versions optimized for sentence embeddings and retrieval tasks will be released soon.

Inference

import torch
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

model_path = "ai4bharat/IndicBERT-v3-270M"

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_path)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    model_path, 
    trust_remote_code=True, 
    torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16, 
    device_map="auto"
)

text = "The capital of India is New Delhi."
target_word = " Delhi"

# 1. Tokenize
inputs = tokenizer(text, return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)
input_ids = inputs.input_ids.clone()

# 2. Find target token index
# (Simple heuristic for demonstration)
target_token_id = tokenizer.encode(target_word, add_special_tokens=False)[0]
mask_idx = (input_ids[0] == target_token_id).nonzero(as_tuple=True)[0].item()

# 3. Mask the token
MASK_TOKEN_ID = tokenizer.mask_token_id     #Token ID of the mask is 4
input_ids[0, mask_idx] = MASK_TOKEN_ID

# 4. Predict
with torch.no_grad():
    outputs = model(input_ids=input_ids)
    logits = outputs.logits

# MNTP Rule: Prediction for token `i` comes from logits at `i-1`
pred_logits = logits[0, mask_idx - 1, :]
pred_token_id = torch.argmax(pred_logits).item()

print(f"Masked: {target_word}")
print(f"Predicted: {tokenizer.decode([pred_token_id])}")

MNTP training

import torch
from transformers import (
    AutoTokenizer, 
    AutoModelForCausalLM, 
    Trainer, 
    TrainingArguments,
    DataCollatorForLanguageModeling
)
from datasets import load_dataset

# Configuration
MODEL_ID = "ai4bharat/IndicBERT-v3-270M"
DATA_PATH = "wikitext" # Example dataset
DATA_CONFIG = "wikitext-2-raw-v1"

class MNTPDataCollator:
    """
    Custom Data Collator for Masked Next Token Prediction.
    """
    def __init__(self, tokenizer, mlm_probability=0.15):
        self.tokenizer = tokenizer
        self.mlm_probability = mlm_probability
        self.mask_token_id = tokenizer.mask_token_id    # Token ID of the mask is 4

    def __call__(self, examples):
        # 1. Create Batch
        batch = self.tokenizer.pad(examples, return_tensors="pt")
        input_ids = batch["input_ids"].clone()
        labels = batch["input_ids"].clone()

        # 2. Create Mask
        # Create a probability matrix for masking
        probability_matrix = torch.full(labels.shape, self.mlm_probability)
        
        special_tokens_mask = torch.zeros(labels.shape, dtype=torch.bool)
        
        if self.tokenizer.all_special_ids:
            # We use a loop here which is safe and works across devices once we cast the result
            for special_id in self.tokenizer.all_special_ids:
                special_tokens_mask |= (labels == special_id)
        

        # Set probability to 0 for special tokens so they are never masked
        probability_matrix.masked_fill_(special_tokens_mask, value=0.0)
        
        # 3. Determine which tokens to mask
        masked_indices = torch.bernoulli(probability_matrix).bool()
        
        # 4. Apply Mask to Inputs
        # We replace the token at `i` with [MASK].
        # The label at `i` remains the original token (for prediction).
        input_ids[masked_indices] = self.mask_token_id

        labels[~masked_indices] = -100 # <- Comment this line out if you want to calculate loss on unmasked tokens too.

        # 5. Return Batch
        batch["input_ids"] = input_ids
        batch["labels"] = labels
        return batch

def train():
    # 1. Load Model & Tokenizer
    tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(MODEL_ID)
    
    # Ensure padding token exists
    if tokenizer.pad_token is None:
        tokenizer.pad_token = tokenizer.eos_token

    model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
        MODEL_ID,
        trust_remote_code=True,
        torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16,
        device_map="auto"
    )

    # 2. Load Dataset (Example: Wikitext)
    dataset = load_dataset(DATA_PATH, DATA_CONFIG, split="train[:1000]") # Small subset for demo
    
    def tokenize_function(examples):
        return tokenizer(examples["text"], truncation=True, max_length=512)

    tokenized_datasets = dataset.map(tokenize_function, batched=True, remove_columns=["text"])

    # 3. Setup Collator
    data_collator = MNTPDataCollator(tokenizer, mlm_probability=0.15)

    # 4. Training Arguments
    training_args = TrainingArguments(
        output_dir="./IndicBERT-v3-finetuned",
        per_device_train_batch_size=4,
        gradient_accumulation_steps=4,
        learning_rate=2e-5,
        num_train_epochs=1,
        logging_steps=10,
        fp16=False,
        bf16=True, 
        save_strategy="epoch",
        remove_unused_columns=False, # Important for custom collators
    )

    # 5. Train
    trainer = Trainer(
        model=model,
        args=training_args,
        train_dataset=tokenized_datasets,
        data_collator=data_collator,
    )

    print("Starting Training...")
    trainer.train()
    
    # Save
    trainer.save_model("./final_model")
    tokenizer.save_pretrained("./final_model")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    train()

If you use this model, please consider citing:

@misc{indicbertv3,
  author = {Sidharth Pulipaka and Ashwin Sankar and Raj Dabre},
  title = {{IndicBERT-v3}: Multilingual Bidirectional Encoders for Indic Languages},
  year = {2025},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  journal = {Hugging Face Repository},
  howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/ai4bharat/IndicBERT-v3-270M}},
}