Avey-B
Organizations: Avey AI
Abstract
Compact pretrained bidirectional encoders remain the backbone of industrial NLP under tight compute and memory budgets. Their effectiveness stems from self-attention's ability to deliver high-quality bidirectional contextualization with sequence-level parallelism, as popularized by BERT-style architectures. Recently, Avey was introduced as an autoregressive, attention-free alternative that naturally admits an encoder-only adaptation. In this paper, we reformulate Avey for the encoder-only paradigm and propose several innovations to its architecture, including decoupled static and dynamic parameterizations, stability-oriented normalization, and neural compression. Results show that this reformulated architecture compares favorably to four widely used Transformer-based encoders, consistently outperforming them on standard token-classification and information-retrieval benchmarks while scaling more efficiently to long contexts.
Figures & tables
| Question | Answer | Experiments |
| What is the most effective arrangement of static (S) and dynamic (D) layers? | Interleaved layers with a repeating pattern | Appendix D |
| What is the most effective normalization technique within the dynamic layers, Softmax, RMS Norm, or Row-wise normalization? | Row-wise normalization | Appendix E |
| What are the best values for sequence length , split size , and top splits? | , , | Appendix F |
| Should the ranker operate bidirectionally as well? | No | Appendix C |
| What is the best masking rate? | 20% | Appendix G |
| Model | SC | TC | QA | IR | |||||||||||||
| MNLI | QQP | SST-2 | Avg. | CONLL | Onto. | UNER | Avg. | ReCoRD | SQuAD | SQuAD v2 | Avg. | MLDR | MS MARCO | NQ | Avg. | ||
| Base | Avey - B | 89.81 | 92.94 | 92.88 | 93.80 | 94.10 | 93.59 | 63.83 | 88.14 | 83.62 | 78.53 | ||||||
| BERT | |||||||||||||||||
| RoBERTa | 67.86 | 80.68 | 75.05 | ||||||||||||||
| ModernBERT | 86.72 | 89.61 | 77.36 | ||||||||||||||
| M | NeoBERT | ||||||||||||||||
Appendix figures & tables15 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Dimension | BERT | RoBERTa | ModernBERT | NeoBERT | Avey-B | ||||
| base | large | base | large | base | large | medium | base | large | |
| Parameters | 120M | 350M | 125M | 355M | 149M | 395M | 250M | 165M | 391M |
| Data Sources | BooksCorpus Wikipedia | BooksCorpus OpenWebText Stories / CC-News | Undisclosed | RefinedWeb | FineWeb | ||||
| Pre-training Context Width | 512 | 512 | |||||||
| Inference Sequence Length | 512 | 512 | 8,192 | 4,096 | |||||
| Masking Rate | 15% | 15% | 30% | 20% | 20% | ||||
| Ranker Type | SC | TC | QA | IR | ||||||||||||
| MNLI | QQP | SST-2 | Avg. | CONLL | Onto. | UNER | Avg. | ReCoRD | SQuAD | SQuADv2 | Avg. | MLDR | MS MARCO | NQ | Avg. | |
| Unidirectional ranker | 81.39 | 88.92 | 91.86 | 87.39 | 92.96 | 93.21 | 93.38 | 30.22 | 62.26 | 60.72 | 51.07 | 60.27 | 87.48 | 76.71 | 74.82 | |
| Bi-directional ranker | 94.35 | |||||||||||||||
| Pattern | SC | TC | QA | IR | ||||||||||||
| MNLI | QQP | SST-2 | Avg. | CONLL | Onto. | UNER | Avg. | ReCoRD | SQuAD | SQuADv2 | Avg. | MLDR | MS MARCO | NQ | Avg. | |
| Interleaved, | 81.39 | 88.92 | 91.86 | 87.39 | 92.96 | 93.21 | 93.38 | 30.22 | 62.26 | 60.72 | 51.07 | |||||
| Interleaved, | ||||||||||||||||
| Single dynamic as a head | 89.70 | |||||||||||||||
| Single dynamic as a tail | ||||||||||||||||
| Two - stage stack, | 94.24 | |||||||||||||||
| Normalization Scheme | SC | TC | QA | IR | ||||||||||||
| MNLI | QQP | SST-2 | Avg. | CONLL | Onto. | UNER | Avg. | ReCoRD | SQuAD | SQuADv2 | Avg. | MLDR | MS MARCO | NQ | Avg. | |
| Divide-by-sum norm | 81.39 | 88.92 | 91.86 | 87.39 | 92.96 | 93.21 | 93.38 | 30.22 | 62.26 | 60.72 | 51.07 | 76.71 | ||||
| RMS norm | ||||||||||||||||
| Softmax | 89.75 | 75.34 | ||||||||||||||
| Scaled softmax | 91.86 | 94.07 | 62.24 | |||||||||||||
| N | S | SC | TC | QA | IR | |||||||||||||
| MNLI | QQP | SST-2 | Avg. | CONLL | Onto. | UNER | Avg. | ReCoRD | SQuAD | SQuADv2 | Avg. | MLDR | MS MARCO | NQ | Avg. | |||
| 512 | 128 | 1 | 93.08 | 93.85 | 93.20666667 | |||||||||||||
| 3 | 80.95 | 88.89 | 87.15666667 | 92.74 | 60.72 | 90.11 | 75.63 | |||||||||||
| 256 | 1 | 92.32 | 43.70 | 71.25 | 64.06 | 59.67 | 76.29 | |||||||||||
| 1024 | 128 | 1 | 80.79 | |||||||||||||||
| 3 | 92.89 | 94.43 | 93.46 | 90.26 | ||||||||||||||
| Masking % | SC | TC | QA | IR | ||||||||||||
| MNLI | QQP | SST-2 | Avg. | CONLL | Onto. | UNER | Avg. | ReCoRD | SQuAD | SQuADv2 | Avg. | MLDR | MS MARCO | NQ | Avg. | |
| 10% | ||||||||||||||||
| 20% | 80.18 | 88.91 | 86.94 | 93.05 | 93.75 | 42.91 | 71.99 | 64.81 | 59.90 | 90.36 | ||||||
| 30% | 91.97 | 93.75 | 93.07 | 62.16 | ||||||||||||
| 40% | ||||||||||||||||
| 50% | 92.86 | 77.69 | 76.59 | |||||||||||||
| Masking % | SC | TC | QA | IR | ||||||||||||
| MNLI | QQP | SST-2 | Avg. | CONLL | Onto. | UNER | Avg. | ReCoRD | SQuAD | SQuADv2 | Avg. | MLDR | MS MARCO | NQ | Avg. | |
| 10% | ||||||||||||||||
| 20% | 82.12 | 92.32 | 87.88 | 91.54 | ||||||||||||
| 30% | 89.43 | 93.83 | 48.16 | 73.44 | 66.52 | 62.71 | 81.76 | |||||||||
| 40% | 93.13 | 64.09 | 78.80 | |||||||||||||
| 50% | 92.83 | 93.83 | 93.20 | |||||||||||||
| Model | SC | TC | QA | IR | ||||||||||||
| MNLI | QQP | SST - 2 | Avg. | CONLL | Onto. | UNER | Avg. | ReCoRD | SQuAD | SQuAD v2 | Avg. | MLDR | MS MARCO | NQ | Avg. | |
| Avey - B (full design) | 91.97 | 87.2 | 91.84 | 93.09 | 92.72 | 60.48 | 90.38 | |||||||||
| Avey - B w/o normalization | ||||||||||||||||
| Avey - B w/o decoupling | ||||||||||||||||
| Avey - B w/o compression | 80.8 | 89.03 | 93.29 | 42.8 | 70.54 | 57.7 | 60.95 | 76.92 | 75.66 | |||||||
| Avey - B w/o residual | ||||||||||||||||
| Model | SC | TC | QA | IR | |||||||||
| MNLI | QQP | SST-2 | CONLL | Onto. | UNER | ReCoRD | SQuAD | SQuADv2 | MLDR | MSMARCO | NQ | ||
| Base | Avey - B | ||||||||||||
| BERT | |||||||||||||
| RoBERTa | |||||||||||||
| ModernBERT | |||||||||||||
| M | NeoBERT | ||||||||||||
| Coupled | ||||||||||
| Layer | Mean | Std | Min | Median | Max | Abs. Mean | L1 Norm | L2 Norm | Frac. Pos. | Frac. Neg. |
| 1 | ||||||||||
| 2 | ||||||||||
| 3 | ||||||||||
| 4 | ||||||||||
| 5 | ||||||||||
| Model | NIAH-1 | ||||||||
| 1k | 2k | 4k | 8k | 16k | 32k | 64k | 96k | ||
| Base | Avey - B | ||||||||
| ModernBERT | – | – | – | – | |||||
| M | NeoBERT | – | – | – | – | – | |||
| Large | Avey - B | ||||||||
| ModernBERT | oom | – | – | – | – | ||||
| Model | NIAH-2 | ||||||||
| 1k | 2k | 4k | 8k | 16k | 32k | 64k | 96k | ||
| Base | Avey - B | ||||||||
| ModernBERT | – | – | – | – | |||||
| M | NeoBERT | – | – | – | – | – | |||
| Large | Avey - B | ||||||||
| ModernBERT | oom | – | – | – | – | ||||
Language Modeling
Language modeling develops systems that learn patterns in text and other sequences to understand, predict, and generate language.
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