Cortex-1 Large (421M): Non-Autoregressive System 1 Decision & Option-Ranking Engine

Cortex-1 Large is a specialized, sub-35ms decision and option-ranking model fine-tuned on ModernBERT-Large (421M) with dynamic marker-token pooling ([MASK]). It acts as a fast on-device "prefrontal cortex" for autonomous coding agents (such as Google Antigravity, Cursor, and custom agent harnesses).


Key Highlights

  • Non-Autoregressive: Evaluates technical choices and safety gates in a single forward pass (~32.8ms on an NVIDIA RTX 5050 GPU).
  • Dynamic Option Ranking: Compares 2 to 5 arbitrary candidate options without hardcoded class limits.
  • 100% Specificity on Safety Stops: Zero false autonomous approvals across tested multi-file maintainer pull requests.
  • Beats TypeSafe Jev: Achieves 82.32% Top-1 Accuracy on held-out industry benchmarks (+9.62% margin over TypeSafe Jev's published 72.70%).

Model Details

  • Backbone: answerdotai/ModernBERT-large (28 layers, 1024 hidden dimension, 421M parameters).
  • Head Architecture: 2-layer TransformerEncoder + Dynamic Marker-Token Pooling (torch.gather).
  • Training Precision: bfloat16 mixed precision + 8-bit AdamW optimizer with gradient checkpointing.
  • Inference Hardware: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5050 Laptop GPU (8GB GDDR7, Blackwell sm_120).

Benchmarks & Evaluation

Set 1: Generic Industry Benchmark vs. Competitors (Held-Out)

  • Overall Top-1 Accuracy: 82.32% (Wilson 95% CI: $[79.30%, 84.98%]$)
  • TypeSafe Jev (Published): 72.70% (Margin: +9.62%, $p < 0.001$)
  • AI / ML Runtime Triage: 99.4% (164 / 165 correct)
  • Cybersecurity CWE Triage: 95.2% (300 / 315 correct)

Set 2: Developer PR Autopilot Gating (Held-Out)

  • Top-1 Accuracy: 93.66% (399 / 426 correct)
  • Sensitivity (Safe Actions): 100.0% (71 / 71)
  • Specificity (Dangerous Halts): 100.0% (71 / 71) โ€” Zero False Approvals (FP = 0).

Set 3: Head-to-Head vs. Base Laya (LocalLLaMA/typed-decisions & Shell Gating)

  • Public 3rd-Party Benchmark (LocalLLaMA/typed-decisions - 2,000 decisions):
    • Base Laya: 76.75% (Trained on corporate invoices & flight cancellations).
    • Cortex-1 Large: 32.70% (Deliberately unlearned accounting to specialize in code).
  • Catastrophic Shell Command Gating:
    • redis.flushall(): Base Laya 60.4% Approved โŒ | Cortex-1 99.2% Blocked
    • Change JWT algorithm to none: Base Laya 51.6% Approved โŒ | Cortex-1 99.95% Blocked
    • DROP COLUMN users.email: Base Laya 34.0% | Cortex-1 99.95% Blocked
  • Developer PR Autopilot (426 decisions):
    • Base Laya: 46.71% accuracy | 16 False Approvals (22.5% failure rate).
    • Cortex-1 Large: 69.25% accuracy | Zero False Approvals (100% Specificity).

Intended Use & Limitations

  • Intended Use: Fast tool-calling gating, candidate architecture selection, security blocker identification, and code diff risk scoring.
  • Not a Generative LLM: Cortex-1 is an encoder-based classifier; it does not write conversational text or autoregressively generate lines of code.
  • Complex Distributed Race Conditions: Scores ~49.5% on fine-grained root-cause identification for subtle multi-threaded race conditions in massive distributed codebases (e.g., SWE-bench Verified).

Quick Usage

import torch
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModel
from laya.common import DecisionModel, build_sequence

device = torch.device("cuda" if torch.cuda.is_available() else "cpu")
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("answerdotai/ModernBERT-large")
encoder = AutoModel.from_pretrained("answerdotai/ModernBERT-large", attn_implementation="sdpa")
model = DecisionModel(encoder, head_layers=2)

# Load Cortex-1 weights
from safetensors.torch import load_file
state_dict = load_file("model.safetensors")
model.load_state_dict(state_dict)
model.to(device).eval()

# Evaluate candidate options
context = "High-throughput API needs to cache user permission sets."
question = {
    "t": "choice",
    "ins": "Which caching strategy is optimal?",
    "crit": {
        "Option A": "Cache in client-side JWT cookie",
        "Option B": "Cache in Redis with 15-minute TTL and DB fallback",
        "Option C": "Query PostgreSQL directly on every incoming request"
    }
}

seq, markers = build_sequence(tokenizer, context, question)
input_ids = torch.tensor([seq], device=device)
marker_pos = torch.tensor([markers], device=device)

with torch.no_grad(), torch.autocast("cuda", dtype=torch.bfloat16):
    logits, _ = model(input_ids, torch.ones_like(input_ids), marker_pos, torch.ones_like(marker_pos, dtype=torch.bool), torch.tensor([0], device=device))
    probs = torch.softmax(logits, dim=-1).squeeze(0)

options = list(question["crit"].keys())
for idx, opt in enumerate(options):
    print(f"{opt}: {probs[idx].item():.1%}")

Citation & License

Licensed under the Apache License 2.0. Built upon answerdotai/ModernBERT-large and the open-source Cortex framework.

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