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Open-weight model · Question answering

distilbert-base-cased-distilled-squad

by DistilBERT community distilbert/distilbert-base-cased-distilled-squad

distilbert-base-cased-distilled-squad is an open-weight model for question answering from DistilBERT community, released under Apache License 2.0. It has 65M parameters and a 512-token context. At 16-bit it needs about 0.2 GB of GPU memory, which fits on 1x MI300X from $1.85 an hour, at the lowest prices in the SAVRN Index. It draws 198.9k downloads a month.

The DistilBERT model was proposed in the blog post Smaller, faster, cheaper, lighter: Introducing DistilBERT, adistilled version of BERT, and the paper DistilBERT, adistilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter.

Parameters65M
Context512
Weights1.3 GB
Licenseapache-2.0
AccessOpen weights
Monthly Downloads198.9k

Runs On

What it takes to serve distilbert-base-cased-distilled-squad (65M parameters): the memory its weights need at each precision, and the cheapest way to rent enough data-center GPUs to hold them.

PrecisionWeightsMemory neededCheapest setupPer hourAlso fits
16-bit 0.1 GB 0.2 GB 1x MI300X (192 GB)
Vultr
$1.85 1x H100 $1.99 · 1x MI325X $2.00
8-bit 0.1 GB 0.1 GB 1x MI300X (192 GB)
Vultr
$1.85 1x H100 $1.99 · 1x MI325X $2.00
4-bit 0.0 GB 0.0 GB 1x MI300X (192 GB)
Vultr
$1.85 1x H100 $1.99 · 1x MI325X $2.00

Memory is the weights at that precision plus 20% for the runtime and a short context; a long context needs more. Prices are the lowest on-demand hourly rates in the SAVRN Index, read Oct 16, 2026.

distilbert-base-cased-distilled-squad on every accelerator the SAVRN Index prices, at every precision

SAVRN's Notes on distilbert-base-cased-distilled-squad

This is DistilBERT fine-tuned for extractive question answering on SQuAD: hand it a passage and a question, and it returns the span that answers it. At 65M parameters it is small enough to answer in milliseconds on a CPU, which is its whole appeal.

Apache 2.0 allows commercial use. It was trained on SQuAD 1.1, so it always returns some span even when the passage has no answer; if your questions may be unanswerable, use a SQuAD 2.0 model such as deepset's DeBERTa-v3 or tinyroberta versions instead.

Model Card

By DistilBERT community, published under apache-2.0, revision 564e9b582944.

Table of Contents

  • Model Details
  • How To Get Started With the Model
  • Uses
  • Risks, Limitations and Biases
  • Training
  • Evaluation
  • Environmental Impact
  • Technical Specifications
  • Citation Information
  • Model Card Authors

Model Details

Model Description: The DistilBERT model was proposed in the blog post Smaller, faster, cheaper, lighter: Introducing DistilBERT, adistilled version of BERT, and the paper DistilBERT, adistilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter. DistilBERT is a small, fast, cheap and light Transformer model trained by distilling BERT base. It has 40% less parameters than bert-base-uncased, runs 60% faster while preserving over 95% of BERT's performances as measured on the GLUE language understanding benchmark.

This model is a fine-tune checkpoint of DistilBERT-base-cased, fine-tuned using (a second step of) knowledge distillation on SQuAD v1.1.

Read the full model card (895 words)

Configuration

Architecture
DistilBertForQuestionAnswering
Context length (tokens)
512
Vocabulary size
28,996
Model type
distilbert

Identity and Version

Repository
distilbert/distilbert-base-cased-distilled-squad
Publisher
DistilBERT community
Task
Question answering
Modality
Text
Library
transformers
Parameters
65M parameters
Languages
en
Revision
564e9b582944a57a3e586bbb98fd6f0a4118db7f
First published
2022-03-02
Last updated
2024-05-06

Files and Weights

14 files, 1.8 GB in total. The weights are 5 files totalling 1.3 GB in bin, h5, ot, safetensors.

Weights5 files · 1.3 GB
Configuration1 file · 473 B
Tokenizer3 files · 649.3 KB
Documentation1 file · 9.5 KB
Other3 files · 483.1 MB
Repository1 file · 399 B
Every file
FileTypeSizeSHA-256
model.safetensorsWeights260.8 MB f198de8ef6e4
openvino_model.binWeights260.8 MB fbe35d48b0d7
pytorch_model.binWeights260.8 MB 4e10bdbc83fd
rust_model.otWeights260.8 MB 8a9f9b2f153a
tf_model.h5Weights260.9 MB 63ee5a014206
config.jsonConfiguration473 B —
README.mdDocumentation9.5 KB —
openvino_model.xmlOther512.9 KB —
saved_model.tar.gzOther241.5 MB f7e26fe22fde
tfjs.tar.gzOther241.1 MB 2e966858819f
.gitattributesRepository399 B —
tokenizer.jsonTokenizer435.8 KB —
tokenizer_config.jsonTokenizer49 B —
vocab.txtTokenizer213.4 KB —

License and Download

License
apache-2.0
Access
Open weights, no gate
Download size
1.3 GB
Download from DistilBERT community

Released by DistilBERT community through its official repository on Hugging Face. Read the license.

Built From

Evaluations

Each result is shown as reported, with the conditions its reporter stated. None is a SAVRN measurement. A comparison lines two results up only when their configuration, unit and setup are all stated and identical.

BenchmarkConditionsResultReported byRevisionDate
squad Configuration plain_textTask Question AnsweringMetric Exact MatchComparison conditions not established 79.5998 distilbert
Publisher reported
Evaluated revision not stated —
squad Configuration plain_textTask Question AnsweringMetric F1Comparison conditions not established 86.9965 distilbert
Publisher reported
Evaluated revision not stated —

Memory Requirements

PrecisionWeights in memory
As published1.3 GB
16-bit0.1 GB
8-bit0.1 GB
4-bit0.0 GB

Weights only, from the published parameter count; the key-value cache and runtime add to this.

Built on This Model

Questions About distilbert-base-cased-distilled-squad

How much GPU memory does distilbert-base-cased-distilled-squad need?

About 0.2 GB at 16-bit and 0 GB at 4-bit: the weights (65M parameters) plus a working margin. A long context needs more.

What is the cheapest GPU to run distilbert-base-cased-distilled-squad on?

At 16-bit, 1x MI300X from $1.85 an hour; at 4-bit, 1x MI300X from $1.85 an hour, at the lowest on-demand prices the SAVRN Index lists.

Can I use distilbert-base-cased-distilled-squad commercially?

Yes. distilbert-base-cased-distilled-squad 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.

What is distilbert-base-cased-distilled-squad's context length?

512 tokens, from the maximum position embeddings in its published configuration.

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