Model reference · open weights

SapBERT-from-PubMedBERT-fulltext

Embeddings cambridgeltl Embeddings 1 build Open weights 1.4M dl/mo

SapBERT-from-PubMedBERT-fulltext is an open-weight embedding model from cambridgeltl. SapBERT-from-PubMedBERT-fulltext (FP32) weighs 219 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

  • SapBERT-from-PubMedBERT-fulltext is a 109M parameter feature-extraction model developed by cambridgeltl for processing biomedical entity names.
  • It is trained on the UMLS 2020AA dataset using PubMedBERT as the base model and supports English with a context length of 512 tokens.
  • The model is distributed under the apache-2.0 license.

Summary of the cambridgeltl/SapBERT-from-PubMedBERT-fulltext model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released bycambridgeltl
Released2022-03-02
Parameters109M
VRAM219 MB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for SapBERT-from-PubMedBERT-fulltext (FP32)

219 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 cambridgeltl says about SapBERT-from-PubMedBERT-fulltext

Read the model card

datasets:

  • UMLS

[news] A cross-lingual extension of SapBERT will appear in the main onference of ACL 2021! [news] SapBERT will appear in the conference proceedings of NAACL 2021!

SapBERT-PubMedBERT

SapBERT by Liu et al. (2020). Trained with UMLS 2020AA (English only), using microsoft/BiomedNLP-PubMedBERT-base-uncased-abstract-fulltext as the base model.

Expected input and output

The input should be a string of biomedical entity names, e.g., "covid infection" or "Hydroxychloroquine". The [CLS] embedding of the last layer is regarded as the output.

Extracting embeddings from SapBERT

The following script converts a list of strings (entity names) into embeddings.

import numpy as np
import torch
from tqdm.auto import tqdm
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModel

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("cambridgeltl/SapBERT-from-PubMedBERT-fulltext")
model = AutoModel.from_pretrained("cambridgeltl/SapBERT-from-PubMedBERT-fulltext").cuda()

# replace with your own list of entity names
all_names = ["covid-19", "Coronavirus infection", "high fever", "Tumor of posterior wall of oropharynx"]

bs = 128 # batch size during inference
all_embs = []
for i in tqdm(np.arange(0, len(all_names), bs)):
    toks = tokenizer.batch_encode_plus(all_names[i:i+bs],
                                       padding="max_length",
                                       max_length=25,
                                       truncation=True,
                                       return_tensors="pt")
    toks_cuda = {}
    for k,v in toks.items():
        toks_cuda[k] = v.cuda()
    cls_rep = model(**toks_cuda)[0][:,0,:] # use CLS representation as the embedding
    all_embs.append(cls_rep.cpu().detach().numpy())

all_embs = np.concatenate(all_embs, axis=0)

For more details about training and eval, see SapBERT github repo.

Citation

@inproceedings{liu-etal-2021-self,
    title = "Self-Alignment Pretraining for Biomedical Entity Representations",
    author = "Liu, Fangyu  and
      Shareghi, Ehsan  and
      Meng, Zaiqiao  and
      Basaldella, Marco  and
      Collier, Nigel",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies",
    month = jun,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2021.naacl-main.334",
    pages = "4228--4238",
    abstract = "Despite the widespread success of self-supervised learning via masked language models (MLM), accurately capturing fine-grained semantic relationships in the biomedical domain remains a challenge. This is of paramount importance for entity-level tasks such as entity linking where the ability to model entity relations (especially synonymy) is pivotal. To address this challenge, we propose SapBERT, a pretraining scheme that self-aligns the representation space of biomedical entities. We design a scalable metric learning framework that can leverage UMLS, a massive collection of biomedical ontologies with 4M+ concepts. In contrast with previous pipeline-based hybrid systems, SapBERT offers an elegant one-model-for-all solution to the problem of medical entity linking (MEL), achieving a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) on six MEL benchmarking datasets. In the scientific domain, we achieve SOTA even without task-specific supervision. With substantial improvement over various domain-specific pretrained MLMs such as BioBERT, SciBERTand and PubMedBERT, our pretraining scheme proves to be both effective and robust.",
}

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

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