Introducing the Ettin Reranker Family

Tom Aarsen announced the release of the Ettin Reranker Family, a set of six new state-of-the-art Sentence Transformers CrossEncoder rerankers, each built on Ettin ModernBERT encoders. These models, ranging from 17 million to 1 billion parameters, are designed to enhance the accuracy of document retrieval systems by reordering results based on relevance scores. They employ a pointwise mean squared error (MSE) distillation from a strong teacher model, using a broad dataset of approximately 143 million query-document pairs. The rerankers are particularly efficient due to their architecture, which supports modern attention mechanisms like Flash Attention 2, offering significant speed improvements over previous models. The Ettin rerankers outperform existing models such as the MiniLM series on both MTEB and NanoBEIR benchmarks while maintaining high throughput. The release includes training recipes and data, making it accessible for further development and optimization by the community.