Model reference · open weights
biomedbert-embeddings is an open-weight embedding model from NeuML. AxForge deploys and operates it for you on dedicated EU-owned hardware — with the licence handled where one is required.
Available as managed deployment — configured and operated for you on dedicated EU hardware, quoted per deployment.
What it is
| Released by | NeuML |
|---|---|
| Type | Embedding models |
| Task | Embeddings |
| Parameters (lead) | 109M |
| Context | 512 tokens |
| Runs with | sentence-transformers |
| Based on | NeuML/pubmedbert-base-embeddings |
| Released | 2026-04-28 |
| Popularity | 939 downloads / month |
| Licence | Open weights |
About
This is the PubMedBERT-base-embeddings model fined-tuned using sentence-transformers. It maps sentences & paragraphs to a 768 dimensional dense vector space and can be used for tasks like clustering or semantic search.
The training dataset was generated using a random sample of PubMed title-abstract pairs along with similar title pairs. The training workflow was a distillation process as follows.
This model gives the original PubMedBERT Embeddings model an accuracy boost via the same method uses to train smaller model variants.
This model can be used to build embeddings databases with txtai for semantic search and/or as a knowledge source for retrieval augmented generation (RAG).
import txtai
embeddings = txtai.Embeddings(path="neuml/biomedbert-base-embeddings", content=True)
embeddings.index(documents())
# Run a query
embeddings.search("query to run")
Alternatively, the model can be loaded with sentence-transformers.
from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer
sentences = ["This is an example sentence", "Each sentence is converted"]
model = SentenceTransformer("neuml/biomedbert-base-embeddings")
embeddings = model.encode(sentences)
print(embeddings)
The model can also be used directly with Transformers.
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModel
import torch
# Mean Pooling - Take attention mask into account for correct averaging
def meanpooling(output, mask):
embeddings = output[0] # First element of model_output contains all token embeddings
mask = mask.unsqueeze(-1).expand(embeddings.size()).float()
return torch.sum(embeddings * mask, 1) / torch.clamp(mask.sum(1), min=1e-9)
# Sentences we want sentence embeddings for
sentences = ['This is an example sentence', 'Each sentence is converted']
# Load model from HuggingFace Hub
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("neuml/biomedbert-base-embeddings")
model = AutoModel.from_pretrained("neuml/biomedbert-base-embeddings")
# Tokenize sentences
inputs = tokenizer(sentences, padding=True, truncation=True, return_tensors='pt')
# Compute token embeddings
with torch.no_grad():
output = model(**inputs)
# Perform pooling. In this case, mean pooling.
embeddings = meanpooling(output, inputs['attention_mask'])
print("Sentence embeddings:")
print(embeddings)
Performance of this model compared to the top base models on the MTEB leaderboard is shown below. A popular smaller model was also evaluated along with the most downloaded PubMed similarity model on the Hugging Face Hub.
The following datasets were used to evaluate model performance.
Evaluation results are shown below. The Pearson correlation coefficient is used as the evaluation metric.
| Model | PubMed QA | PubMed Subset | PubMed Summary | Average |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| all-MiniLM-L6-v2 | 90.40 | 95.92 | 94.07 | 93.46 |
| biomedbert-base-colbert | 94.59 | 97.18 | 96.21 | 95.99 |
| biomedbert-base-embeddings | 94.60 | 98.39 | 97.61 | 96.87 |
| biomedbert-base-reranker | 97.66 | 99.76 | 98.81 | 98.74 |
| biomedbert-small-colbert | 93.51 | 97.20 | 95.85 | 95.52 |
| biomedbert-small-embeddings | 93.25 | 97.93 | 96.65 | 95.94 |
| biomedbert-hash-nano-embeddings | 90.39 | 96.29 | 95.32 | 94.00 |
| pubmedbert-base-embeddings | 93.27 | 97.00 | 96.58 | 95.62 |
This model gives a sizable accuracy boost over the original PubMedBERT Embeddings model.
SentenceTransformer(
(0): Transformer({'max_seq_length': 512, 'do_lower_case': False, 'architecture': 'BertModel'})
(1): Pooling({'word_embedding_dimension': 768, 'pooling_mode_cls_token': False, 'pooling_mode_mean_tokens': True, 'pooling_mode_max_tokens': False, 'pooling_mode_mean_sqrt_len_tokens': False, 'pooling_mode_weightedmean_tokens': False, 'pooling_mode_lasttoken': False, 'include_prompt': True})
)
Read more about the model in this article.
From the published model card. Full card on the HuggingFace links in the sidebar.
Using it via the API
Once AxForge deploys biomedbert-embeddings for you, it answers on the OpenAI-compatible API — the same base URL and keys as every other model. (biomedbert-embeddings 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":"biomedbert-embeddings","input":"text to embed"}'
Create an account — your API key is available in the console. 3M free tokens every 30 days with every new account.