Model reference · open weights

Agent-ModernColBERT-no-prefix

Agent-ModernColBERT-no-prefix is an open-weight embedding model from lightonai, listed in the AxForge catalogue. AxForge can bring it up on EU-owned hardware for you on request — with the licence handled where one is required.

Embeddings lightonai 1 variants 39 downloads/mo
Request this model on EU hardware All served models Not on the shared API today — deployed on request.

About

What Agent-ModernColBERT-no-prefix is

[](https://lighton.ai) [](https://www.linkedin.com/company/lighton/) [](https://x.com/LightOnIO) Tl;Dr A few weeks ago, we evaluatedReason-ModernColBERT, a 150M late-interaction model trained on ReasonIR data nearly solved BrowseComp-Plus, reaching 87.56% accuracy with GPT-5 (a +7.59 absolute jump over the previous SOTA) while topping recall and calibration error, while not being trained for agentic retrieval at all (and being one year old). We now present Agent-ModernColBERT, a model specifically fine-tuned for agentic retrieval using the AgentIR dataset released alongside AgentIR. You can find the training boilerplate [here](https://github.com/lightonai/pylate/blob/main/examples/train/agentmoderncolbert.py ). This very lightweight fine-tuning adds increase the performance of Reason-ModernColBERT by another 10%, which allows, when exposing the getdocument function and the GPT-OSS-120B model, to beat the original GPT-5 + Qwen3-8B runs, while using a retriever model 54× smaller and an open source LLM. How it works Before issuing a query, deep research agents generate explicit reasoning traces describing what they're looking for and why. Conventional retrievers throw all of that away. The AgentIR paper introduced Reasoning-Aware Retrieval: instead of discarding those reasoning traces, concatenate them to the query you send to the retriever. To enable this, the authors generated trajectories from a deep-research agent and released them (the Tevatron/AgentIR-data dataset), then trained AgentIR-4B, a 4B dense model that beats much larger baselines including ReasonIR-8B and rerank pipelines. BrowseComp-Plus Results The getdocument column indicates whether the LLM was exposed to the possibility of using the getdocument function that allows, in addition to the usual search function that returns a snippet of the top-5 documents for a given query (the beginning of the document), to request the full content of a document using its id. It allows the model to get more information when needed, but can also add noise to the process if the model reads full documents that are irrelevant, and thus require a precise retrieval signal. A few things worth highlighting: - With the get

Summarised from the published model card. Read the full card on the HuggingFace links below.

Specifications

What it is

Makerlightonai
TypeEmbedding models
Parameters (lead)149M
Context8k tokens
Variants1
Runs withPyLate
Based onlightonai/GTE-ModernColBERT-v1
Released2026-05-12
Popularity39 downloads / month
Likes4
LicenceOpen weights

How it works

How embedding models work

Your textsentence / documentEncodermaps meaningVectorlist of numbersAn embedding model turns text into a vector, so similar meanings sit close together — the basis of search and RAG.

Variants

Sizes & precisions

Open weights ship in several sizes and precisions. One page, all the variants — pick the one that fits your GPU. VRAM figures are estimates from model size.

VariantParamsPrecisionVRAMFits 16 GBWeights
Agent-ModernColBERT-no-prefix149MBF16~0.3 GBWeights ↗

Using it via the API

Call it like any OpenAI endpoint

Once AxForge deploys agent-moderncolbert-no-prefix for you, it answers on the OpenAI-compatible API — the same base URL and keys as every other model. (agent-moderncolbert-no-prefix below is illustrative; you get the exact model name on deployment.)

$ curl -sS https://api.axforge.ai/v1/embeddings \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $AXFORGE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model":"agent-moderncolbert-no-prefix","input":"text to embed"}'

Details

Languages, data & research

Languages

en

Trained / evaluated on

Tevatron/AgentIR-data

Tags

PyLate safetensors modernbert ColBERT sentence-transformers sentence-similarity feature-extraction generated_from_trainer dataset_size:5238 loss:CachedContrastive en dataset:Tevatron/AgentIR-data text-embeddings-inference endpoints_compatible

Papers

Licence

Open weights

Open weights under apache-2.0 — commercial use is permitted. Deploy it on AxForge EU hardware on request. Read the licence ↗

Sources

Weights & code

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