ModernBERT-base-32K

A long-context extension of ModernBERT-base fine-tuned for 32K token context length using YaRN (Yet another RoPE extensioN) scaling.

Model Description

This model extends the original ModernBERT-base from 8,192 tokens to 32,768 tokens context length while preserving the base model's capabilities. It was fine-tuned using specialized techniques to maintain long-range retrieval performance:

• YaRN RoPE Scaling: Factor of 4.0x to extend positional embeddings
• Retrieval-Aware Masking: Custom MLM objective that encourages long-range token dependencies
• Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC): Regularization to prevent catastrophic forgetting
• Conservative Learning Rate: 1e-5 with constant warmup schedule

Model Details

Training

Dataset

• Source: Leooyii/Slimpajama_downsample_32k_1B (subset)
• Samples: ~1B tokens of long-form text (≥32K tokens per document)
• Preprocessing: Concatenated documents with proper sequence boundaries

Hyperparameters

learning_rate: 1e-5
lr_scheduler: constant_with_warmup
warmup_ratio: 0.1
epochs: 1
batch_size: 6
gradient_accumulation: 1
precision: bf16
max_length: 32768

# RoPE Scaling
rope_scaling_type: yarn
rope_scaling_factor: 4.0

# Retrieval Masking
mlm_probability: 0.30
retrieval_probability: 0.10
min_distance_for_retrieval: 512

# EWC Regularization
ewc_lambda: 1000.0
ewc_samples: 200

Training Infrastructure

• Hardware: AMD MI300X GPU (192GB HBM3)
• Framework: PyTorch + Transformers
• Training Time: ~4 hours

Evaluation Results

Comparison with Base Model (at 32K context)

Distance-Based Retrieval Accuracy

Perplexity by Context Length

Usage

Basic Usage

from transformers import AutoModelForMaskedLM, AutoTokenizer

model = AutoModelForMaskedLM.from_pretrained("vllm-sr/modernbert-base-32k")
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("vllm-sr/modernbert-base-32k")

text = "The capital of France is [MASK]."
inputs = tokenizer(text, return_tensors="pt")
outputs = model(**inputs)

# Get predictions
mask_idx = (inputs.input_ids == tokenizer.mask_token_id).nonzero(as_tuple=True)[1]
logits = outputs.logits[0, mask_idx, :]
top_tokens = logits.topk(5).indices[0]
print([tokenizer.decode(t) for t in top_tokens])
# ['Paris', 'Lyon', 'Nancy', ...]

Long Context Usage

# For sequences longer than 8192 tokens, YaRN scaling is automatically applied
long_text = "..." * 10000  # Very long document
inputs = tokenizer(
    long_text, 
    return_tensors="pt", 
    max_length=32768, 
    truncation=True
)
outputs = model(**inputs)

Feature Extraction

from transformers import AutoModel

model = AutoModel.from_pretrained("vllm-sr/modernbert-base-32k")

inputs = tokenizer(text, return_tensors="pt")
outputs = model(**inputs)
embeddings = outputs.last_hidden_state  # [batch, seq_len, 768]

# Mean pooling for sentence embedding
attention_mask = inputs["attention_mask"]
masked_embeddings = embeddings * attention_mask.unsqueeze(-1)
sentence_embedding = masked_embeddings.sum(1) / attention_mask.sum(1, keepdim=True)

Limitations

1. Passkey Retrieval at Long Distances: Like the base model, this model struggles with needle-in-haystack retrieval beyond ~1K tokens. This is a fundamental limitation of MLM architectures, not the fine-tuning.

2. Context Utilization: At very long contexts (16K+), the model may not always benefit from additional context for MLM predictions. This is expected behavior for encoder-only models.

3. Memory Requirements: Processing 32K tokens requires significant GPU memory (~16GB+ for inference).

4. Domain: Trained primarily on web text; may not generalize well to specialized domains without additional fine-tuning.

Intended Use

• Long-document understanding: Processing documents that exceed typical BERT context limits
• Information retrieval: Embedding long documents for semantic search
• Long-form text classification: Sentiment analysis, topic classification on long texts
• Coreference resolution: Resolving references across long documents
• Feature extraction: Getting embeddings for downstream tasks

Training Methodology

This model uses several techniques to preserve long-range capabilities during fine-tuning:

1. YaRN RoPE Scaling

Extends positional embeddings from 8K to 32K using Yet another RoPE extensioN with:

• Scaling factor: 4.0
• Original base frequency: 10000
• Attention scaling for numerical stability

2. Retrieval-Aware Masking

Custom MLM objective that creates explicit long-range dependencies:

• Standard MLM masking (30%)
• Additional masking of tokens that appear in distant context (10% probability)
• Minimum distance threshold: 512 tokens

3. Elastic Weight Consolidation

Prevents catastrophic forgetting by:

• Computing Fisher information matrix on base model
• Penalizing changes to important weights during fine-tuning
• Lambda: 1000.0

Citation

If you use this model, please cite:

@misc{modernbert-32k,
  title={ModernBERT-base-32K: Long-Context Extension of ModernBERT},
  author={LLM Semantic Router},
  year={2026},
  url={https://huggingface.co/vllm-sr/modernbert-base-32k}
}

Also cite the original ModernBERT paper:

@article{modernbert2024,
  title={Smarter, Better, Faster, Longer: A Modern Bidirectional Encoder for Fast, Memory Efficient, and Long Context Finetuning and Inference},
  author={Warner, Benjamin and Chaffin, Antoine and Geiger, Benjamin and Werra, Leandro von and Tunstall, Lewis and Bartolo, Max and Thrush, Tristan},
  journal={arXiv preprint},
  year={2024}
}

License

Apache 2.0 (same as base model)

Acknowledgments

• Answer.AI for the original ModernBERT model
• Leooyii for the SlimPajama dataset
• AMD for the MI300X GPU