ToMMeR -- Efficient Entity Mention Detection from Large Language Models
Paper • 2510.19410 • Published • 1
ToMMeR is a lightweight probing model extracting emergent mention detection capabilities from early layers representations of any LLM backbone, achieving high Zero Shot recall across a wide set of 13 NER benchmarks.
This model can be plugged at layer 5 of mistral-7b, with a computational overhead not greater than an additional attention head.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Base LLM | mistral-7b |
| Layer | 5 |
| #Params | 528.4K |
To use ToMMeR, you need to install its codebase first.
pip install git+https://github.com/VictorMorand/llm2ner.git
By default, ToMMeR outputs span probabilities, but we also propose built-in options for decoding entities.
from xpm_torch.huggingface import TorchHFHub
from llm2ner import ToMMeR, utils
tommer: ToMMeR = TorchHFHub.from_pretrained("llm2ner/ToMMeR-mistral-7b_L5_R64")
# load Backbone llm, optionnally cut the unused layer to save GPU space.
llm = utils.load_llm( tommer.llm_name, cut_to_layer=tommer.layer,)
tommer.to(llm.device)
#### Raw Inference
text = ["Large language models are awesome"]
print(f"Input text: {text[0]}")
#tokenize in shape (1, seq_len)
tokens = llm.tokenizer(text, return_tensors="pt")["input_ids"].to(llm.device)
# Output raw scores
output = tommer.forward(tokens, llm) # (batch_size, seq_len, seq_len)
print(f"Raw Output shape: {output.shape}")
#use given decoding strategy to infer entities
entities = tommer.infer_entities(tokens=tokens, model=llm, threshold=0.5, decoding_strategy="greedy")
str_entities = [ llm.tokenizer.decode(tokens[0,b:e+1]) for b, e in entities[0]]
print(f"Predicted entities: {str_entities}")
>>>INFO:root:Cut LlamaModel with 16 layers to 7 layers
>>> Input text: Large language models are awesome
>>> Raw Output shape: torch.Size([1, 6, 6])
>>> Predicted entities: ['Large language models']
We also provide inference and plotting utils in llm2ner.plotting.
from xpm_torch.huggingface import TorchHFHub
from llm2ner import ToMMeR, utils, plotting
tommer: ToMMeR = TorchHFHub.from_pretrained("llm2ner/ToMMeR-mistral-7b_L5_R64")
# load Backbone llm, optionnally cut the unused layer to save GPU space.
llm = utils.load_llm( tommer.llm_name, cut_to_layer=tommer.layer,)
tommer.to(llm.device)
text = "Large language models are awesome. While trained on language modeling, they exhibit emergent Zero Shot abilities that make them suitable for a wide range of tasks, including Named Entity Recognition (NER). "
#fancy interactive output
outputs = plotting.demo_inference( text, tommer, llm,
decoding_strategy="threshold", # or "greedy" for flat segmentation
threshold=0.5, # default 50%
show_attn=True,
)
Please visit the repository for more details and a demo notebook.
| dataset | precision | recall | f1 | n_samples |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MultiNERD | 0.1971 | 0.9863 | 0.3285 | 154144 |
| CoNLL 2003 | 0.3067 | 0.9603 | 0.4649 | 16493 |
| CrossNER_politics | 0.2767 | 0.9732 | 0.4309 | 1389 |
| CrossNER_AI | 0.3137 | 0.9691 | 0.474 | 879 |
| CrossNER_literature | 0.3254 | 0.952 | 0.4851 | 916 |
| CrossNER_science | 0.3214 | 0.9699 | 0.4828 | 1193 |
| CrossNER_music | 0.3664 | 0.9659 | 0.5313 | 945 |
| ncbi | 0.1086 | 0.9365 | 0.1946 | 3952 |
| FabNER | 0.2947 | 0.7118 | 0.4169 | 13681 |
| WikiNeural | 0.1919 | 0.9874 | 0.3213 | 92672 |
| GENIA_NER | 0.2072 | 0.9602 | 0.3408 | 16563 |
| ACE 2005 | 0.2799 | 0.4124 | 0.3335 | 8230 |
| Ontonotes | 0.2457 | 0.7294 | 0.3675 | 42193 |
| Aggregated | 0.2136 | 0.9286 | 0.3474 | 353250 |
| Mean | 0.2643 | 0.8857 | 0.3978 | 353250 |
If using this model or the approach, please cite the associated paper:
@misc{morand2025tommerefficiententity,
title={ToMMeR -- Efficient Entity Mention Detection from Large Language Models},
author={Victor Morand and Nadi Tomeh and Josiane Mothe and Benjamin Piwowarski},
year={2025},
eprint={2510.19410},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CL},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.19410},
}
Apache-2.0 (see repository for full text).