diff --git a/MLBaseDockerfile b/MLBaseDockerfile
index 2793bbe..149cd8d 100644
--- a/MLBaseDockerfile
+++ b/MLBaseDockerfile
@@ -1,8 +1,14 @@
 FROM condaforge/miniforge3:25.9.1-0
 
+WORKDIR /app
+RUN mkdir /app/models
 RUN conda install -c conda-forge \
     numpy=1.26.4 \
     pandas=2.3.3 \
     sentence-transformers=3.0.1 \
     keybert=0.9.0 \
     faiss-gpu=1.9.0
+
+# download cross-encoder and sentence-transformer models to cache
+RUN hf download sentence-transformers/all-distilroberta-v1 --local-dir /assets/models/all-distilroberta-v1
+RUN hf download cross-encoder/qnli-distilroberta-base --local-dir /assets/models/qnli-distilroberta-base