Model reference · open weights

ms-marco-MiniLM-L2

Embeddings cross-encoder Reranker 1 build Open weights 935k dl/mo

ms-marco-MiniLM-L2 is an open-weight embedding model from cross-encoder. ms-marco-MiniLM-L2-v2 (FP32) weighs 31 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

  • ms-marco-MiniLM-L2 is a 16M parameter cross-encoder model designed for text-ranking tasks in information retrieval.
  • It processes English text with a context length of 512 tokens and is licensed under apache-2.0.
  • The model was trained on the MS Marco Passage Ranking dataset to sort passages based on query relevance.

Summary of the cross-encoder/ms-marco-MiniLM-L2-v2 model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released bycross-encoder
Released2022-03-02
Parameters16M
VRAM31 MB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for ms-marco-MiniLM-L2-v2 (FP32)

31 MBweights, file size
1.1 GBruntime overhead
CardRunsMemory
RTX 3060 12 GBfits11.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GBfits15.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GBfits23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GBfits23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GBfits31.0 GB
L40S 48 GBfits44.0 GB
A100 80 GBfits78.2 GB
H100 80 GBfits78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GBfits93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unifiedfits107 GB
H200 141 GBfits138 GB
B200 180 GBfits176 GB

From the model card

What cross-encoder says about ms-marco-MiniLM-L2

Read the model card

This model was trained on the MS Marco Passage Ranking task.

The model can be used for Information Retrieval: Given a query, encode the query will all possible passages (e.g. retrieved with ElasticSearch). Then sort the passages in a decreasing order. See SBERT.net Retrieve & Re-rank for more details. The training code is available here: SBERT.net Training MS Marco

Usage with SentenceTransformers

The usage is easy when you have SentenceTransformers installed. Then you can use the pre-trained models like this:

from sentence_transformers import CrossEncoder

model = CrossEncoder('cross-encoder/ms-marco-MiniLM-L2-v2')
scores = model.predict([
    ("How many people live in Berlin?", "Berlin had a population of 3,520,031 registered inhabitants in an area of 891.82 square kilometers."),
    ("How many people live in Berlin?", "Berlin is well known for its museums."),
])
print(scores)
# [ 8.510401 -4.860082]

Usage with Transformers

from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForSequenceClassification
import torch

model = AutoModelForSequenceClassification.from_pretrained('cross-encoder/ms-marco-MiniLM-L2-v2')
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained('cross-encoder/ms-marco-MiniLM-L2-v2')

features = tokenizer(['How many people live in Berlin?', 'How many people live in Berlin?'], ['Berlin has a population of 3,520,031 registered inhabitants in an area of 891.82 square kilometers.', 'New York City is famous for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.'],  padding=True, truncation=True, return_tensors="pt")

model.eval()
with torch.no_grad():
    scores = model(**features).logits
    print(scores)

Performance

In the following table, we provide various pre-trained Cross-Encoders together with their performance on the TREC Deep Learning 2019 and the MS Marco Passage Reranking dataset.

Model-NameNDCG@10 (TREC DL 19)MRR@10 (MS Marco Dev)Docs / Sec
Version 2 models
cross-encoder/ms-marco-TinyBERT-L2-v269.8432.569000
cross-encoder/ms-marco-MiniLM-L2-v271.0134.854100
cross-encoder/ms-marco-MiniLM-L4-v273.0437.702500
cross-encoder/ms-marco-MiniLM-L6-v274.3039.011800
cross-encoder/ms-marco-MiniLM-L12-v274.3139.02960
Version 1 models
cross-encoder/ms-marco-TinyBERT-L267.4330.159000
cross-encoder/ms-marco-TinyBERT-L468.0934.502900
cross-encoder/ms-marco-TinyBERT-L669.5736.13680
cross-encoder/ms-marco-electra-base71.9936.41340
Other models
nboost/pt-tinybert-msmarco63.6328.802900
nboost/pt-bert-base-uncased-msmarco70.9434.75340
nboost/pt-bert-large-msmarco73.3636.48100
Capreolus/electra-base-msmarco71.2336.89340
amberoad/bert-multilingual-passage-reranking-msmarco68.4035.54330
sebastian-hofstaetter/distilbert-cat-margin_mse-T2-msmarco72.8237.88720

Note: Runtime was computed on a V100 GPU.

Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.

© 2026 AxForge · EU-hosted AI infrastructure Pricing Docs Trust Privacy Terms