diff --git a/Dockerfile b/Dockerfile
index e9f005e75e..3240da7ded 100644
--- a/Dockerfile
+++ b/Dockerfile
@@ -26,6 +26,15 @@ RUN if [[ $(uname -m) =~ "aarch64" ]]; then \
 
 WORKDIR /opt/monai
 
+# Patch NVIDIA's pip constraint file:
+#   - keep the base image's numpy pin if present (older images pin numpy==1.26.4 as
+#     their torch was compiled against NumPy 1.x; newer images may ship an empty file)
+#   - add setuptools<71 (setuptools>=71 removed pkg_resources, breaking MetricsReloaded)
+#   - pin urllib3>=2 to prevent inadvertent downgrades by pip-installing legacy packages
+RUN (grep '^numpy' /etc/pip/constraint.txt || true) > /tmp/new_constraints.txt \
+  && printf 'setuptools<71\nurllib3>=2\n' >> /tmp/new_constraints.txt \
+  && cp /tmp/new_constraints.txt /etc/pip/constraint.txt
+
 # install full deps
 COPY requirements.txt requirements-min.txt requirements-dev.txt /tmp/
 RUN cp /tmp/requirements.txt /tmp/req.bak \
diff --git a/requirements-dev.txt b/requirements-dev.txt
index 08fcdc2b0e..b2c36f8de6 100644
--- a/requirements-dev.txt
+++ b/requirements-dev.txt
@@ -18,6 +18,7 @@ black>=26.3.1
 isort>=5.1, <6, !=6.0.0
 ruff>=0.14.11,<0.15
 pybind11
+setuptools<71  # pkg_resources removed in setuptools>=71; needed by MetricsReloaded setup.py
 types-setuptools
 mypy>=1.5.0, <1.12.0
 ninja
@@ -33,8 +34,8 @@ tifffile; platform_system == "Linux" or platform_system == "Darwin"
 pandas
 requests
 einops
-transformers>=4.53.0
-mlflow>=2.12.2,<3.13
+transformers>=4.53.0, <5.0  # 5.x references torch.float8_e8m0fnu absent in older PyTorch builds
+mlflow>=2.12.2, <3.0  # 3.x broken on Python 3.12 (relative import in mlflow.utils.uv_utils)
 clearml>=1.10.0rc0
 matplotlib>=3.6.3
 tensorboardX