SAVRN Model Hub · Comparisons
gte-reranker-modernbert-base vs ms-marco-electra-base
Gte-reranker-modernbert-base has 150M parameters and ms-marco-electra-base has 109M parameters; both are released under Apache License 2.0; at 16-bit, gte-reranker-modernbert-base needs about 0.4 GB (1x MI300X from $1.85 an hour) and ms-marco-electra-base about 0.3 GB (1x MI300X from $1.85 an hour).
| Field | gte-reranker-modernbert-base Alibaba-NLP/gte-reranker-modernbert-base | ms-marco-electra-base cross-encoder/ms-marco-electra-base |
|---|---|---|
| Publisher | Alibaba-NLP | Sentence Transformers - Cross-Encoders |
| Task | Text ranking | Text ranking |
| Modality | Other | Other |
| Parameters, as reported | 150M parameters | 109M parameters |
| Architecture | ModernBertForSequenceClassification | ElectraForSequenceClassification |
| Library | transformers | sentence-transformers |
| Context length | 8,192 tokens | 512 tokens |
| Repository size | 2.5 GB | 3.8 GB |
| Artifact formats | safetensors, onnx | safetensors, onnx, openvino, pytorch |
| License | apache-2.0 | apache-2.0 |
| Access | Open weights, no gate | Open weights, no gate |
| Memory at 16-bit (weights and margin) | 0.4 GB | 0.3 GB |
| Cheapest GPUs at 16-bit, per hour | 1x MI300X, $1.85 | 1x MI300X, $1.85 |
| Memory at 4-bit (weights and margin) | 0.1 GB | 0.1 GB |
| Cheapest GPUs at 4-bit, per hour | 1x MI300X, $1.85 | 1x MI300X, $1.85 |
| Revision viewed | f7481e605550 | 8b9301757513 |
| Downloads reported by the hub | 2.6M | 531.6k |
| Last observed | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-18 |
An evaluation row appears only where at least two of these models report the same benchmark with the same stated configuration, metric, unit and setup. Different evaluators stay named in each cell. Values are shown as reported: no unit conversion, no ranking.
SAVRN's Notes on gte-reranker-modernbert-base
After the retriever returns its candidates, something must order them, and that is the job of gte-reranker-modernbert-base. It scores a query and a passage as a pair, with an 8,192 token context, so a long passage is judged whole. It needs 0.4 GB at 16-bit, so on the lowest-priced Index configuration, a lone MI300X at $1.85 per hour with 192 GB, it shares a card with the embedding model at no added hardware cost.
Apache 2.0 clears a commercial ranking service: use, modify, redistribute, keep the notices, state significant changes, take the patent grant. Lineage is the check here. The checkpoint is derived from answerdotai/ModernBERT-base, so read that base model's terms, and the paper on file, arXiv:2308.03281, covers the multi-stage contrastive training method. The 15 files total 2.5 GB in safetensors and ONNX against 0.3 GB of 16-bit weights: budget the download, not the memory.
SAVRN's Notes on ms-marco-electra-base
Retrieve first, then re-rank. ms-marco-electra-base is the second step: you pair the query with each candidate passage a first-stage search returned, it scores every pair, and you sort by score. At 16-bit the weights are 0.2 GB and it needs 0.3 GB; at 8-bit both round to 0.1 GB. The cheapest listing, a single 192 GB MI300X at $1.85 an hour on demand, is more card than a 109M parameter reranker needs, so we size on candidates scored per second, not memory.
The license is Apache 2.0: commercial use, modification and redistribution are permitted, the license and copyright notices stay, significant changes get stated, and there is an express patent grant. Check lineage: it is derived from google/electra-base-discriminator and trained on sentence-transformers/msmarco, so its sense of relevance comes from MS MARCO passage ranking. The 512-token context holds query and passage together, so long passages get cut first.
Questions
Which is larger, gte-reranker-modernbert-base or ms-marco-electra-base?
gte-reranker-modernbert-base (150M parameters) is larger than ms-marco-electra-base (109M parameters), by the parameter counts their publishers report.
Which is cheaper to run, gte-reranker-modernbert-base or ms-marco-electra-base?
At 4-bit, gte-reranker-modernbert-base fits on 1x MI300X from $1.85 an hour and ms-marco-electra-base on 1x MI300X from $1.85 an hour, at the lowest on-demand prices the SAVRN Index lists.
Can I use gte-reranker-modernbert-base commercially?
Yes. gte-reranker-modernbert-base is released under Apache License 2.0. The Apache License 2.0 is a permissive open-source license. It permits commercial use, modification and redistribution. It requires keeping the license and copyright notices and any NOTICE file, stating significant changes, and it includes an express patent grant from contributors.
Can I use ms-marco-electra-base commercially?
Yes. ms-marco-electra-base is released under Apache License 2.0. The Apache License 2.0 is a permissive open-source license. It permits commercial use, modification and redistribution. It requires keeping the license and copyright notices and any NOTICE file, stating significant changes, and it includes an express patent grant from contributors.