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tomaarsen
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2
models
5 days ago
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4217
😎 I just published Sentence Transformers v5.1.0, and it's a big one. 2x-3x speedups of SparseEncoder models via ONNX and/or OpenVINO backends, easier distillation data preparation with hard negatives mining, and more:
1️⃣ Faster ONNX and OpenVINO backends for SparseEncoder models
Usage is as simple as
2️⃣ New
This new output format is immediately compatible with the MarginMSELoss and SparseMarginMSELoss for training SentenceTransformer, CrossEncoder, and SparseEncoder losses.
3️⃣ Gathering across devices
When doing multi-GPU training using a loss that has in-batch negatives (e.g. MultipleNegativesRankingLoss), you can now use
4️⃣ Trackio support
If you also upgrade
5️⃣ MTEB Documentation
We've added some documentation on evaluating SentenceTransformer models properly with MTEB. It's rudimentary as the documentation on the MTEB side is already great, but it should get you started.
Plus many more smaller features & fixes (crash fixes, compatibility with datasets v4, FIPS compatibility, etc.).
See the full release notes here: https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/releases/tag/v5.1.0
Big thanks to all of the contributors for helping with the release, many of the features from this release were proposed by others. I have a big list of future potential features that I'd love to add, but I'm
1️⃣ Faster ONNX and OpenVINO backends for SparseEncoder models
Usage is as simple as
backend="onnx" or backend="openvino" when initializing a SparseEncoder to get started, but I also included utility functions for optimization, dynamic quantization, and static quantization, plus benchmarks.2️⃣ New
n-tuple-scores output format from mine_hard_negativesThis new output format is immediately compatible with the MarginMSELoss and SparseMarginMSELoss for training SentenceTransformer, CrossEncoder, and SparseEncoder losses.
3️⃣ Gathering across devices
When doing multi-GPU training using a loss that has in-batch negatives (e.g. MultipleNegativesRankingLoss), you can now use
gather_across_devices=True to load in-batch negatives from the other devices too! Essentially a free lunch, pretty big impact potential in my evals.4️⃣ Trackio support
If you also upgrade
transformers, and you install trackio with pip install trackio, then your experiments will also automatically be tracked locally with trackio. Just open up localhost and have a look at your losses/evals, no logins, no metric uploading.5️⃣ MTEB Documentation
We've added some documentation on evaluating SentenceTransformer models properly with MTEB. It's rudimentary as the documentation on the MTEB side is already great, but it should get you started.
Plus many more smaller features & fixes (crash fixes, compatibility with datasets v4, FIPS compatibility, etc.).
See the full release notes here: https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/releases/tag/v5.1.0
Big thanks to all of the contributors for helping with the release, many of the features from this release were proposed by others. I have a big list of future potential features that I'd love to add, but I'm
tomaarsen
updated
2
models
about 1 month ago
Post
3000
‼️Sentence Transformers v5.0 is out! The biggest update yet introduces Sparse Embedding models, encode methods improvements, Router module for asymmetric models & much more. Sparse + Dense = 🔥 hybrid search performance! Details:
1️⃣ Sparse Encoder Models
Brand new support for sparse embedding models that generate high-dimensional embeddings (30,000+ dims) where <1% are non-zero:
- Full SPLADE, Inference-free SPLADE, and CSR architecture support
- 4 new modules, 12 new losses, 9 new evaluators
- Integration with @elastic-co , @opensearch-project , @NAVER LABS Europe, @qdrant , @IBM , etc.
- Decode interpretable embeddings to understand token importance
- Hybrid search integration to get the best of both worlds
2️⃣ Enhanced Encode Methods & Multi-Processing
- Introduce encode_query & encode_document automatically use predefined prompts
- No more manual pool management - just pass device list directly to encode()
- Much cleaner and easier to use than the old multi-process approach
3️⃣ Router Module & Advanced Training
- Router module with different processing paths for queries vs documents
- Custom learning rates for different parameter groups
- Composite loss logging - see individual loss components
- Perfect for two-tower architectures
4️⃣ Comprehensive Documentation & Training
- New Training Overview, Loss Overview, API Reference docs
- 6 new training example documentation pages
- Full integration examples with major search engines
- Extensive blogpost on training sparse models
Read the comprehensive blogpost about training sparse embedding models: https://huggingface.co/blog/train-sparse-encoder
See the full release notes here: https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/releases/v5.0.0
What's next? We would love to hear from the community! What sparse encoder models would you like to see? And what new capabilities should Sentence Transformers handle - multimodal embeddings, late interaction models, or something else? Your feedback shapes our roadmap!
1️⃣ Sparse Encoder Models
Brand new support for sparse embedding models that generate high-dimensional embeddings (30,000+ dims) where <1% are non-zero:
- Full SPLADE, Inference-free SPLADE, and CSR architecture support
- 4 new modules, 12 new losses, 9 new evaluators
- Integration with @elastic-co , @opensearch-project , @NAVER LABS Europe, @qdrant , @IBM , etc.
- Decode interpretable embeddings to understand token importance
- Hybrid search integration to get the best of both worlds
2️⃣ Enhanced Encode Methods & Multi-Processing
- Introduce encode_query & encode_document automatically use predefined prompts
- No more manual pool management - just pass device list directly to encode()
- Much cleaner and easier to use than the old multi-process approach
3️⃣ Router Module & Advanced Training
- Router module with different processing paths for queries vs documents
- Custom learning rates for different parameter groups
- Composite loss logging - see individual loss components
- Perfect for two-tower architectures
4️⃣ Comprehensive Documentation & Training
- New Training Overview, Loss Overview, API Reference docs
- 6 new training example documentation pages
- Full integration examples with major search engines
- Extensive blogpost on training sparse models
Read the comprehensive blogpost about training sparse embedding models: https://huggingface.co/blog/train-sparse-encoder
See the full release notes here: https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/releases/v5.0.0
What's next? We would love to hear from the community! What sparse encoder models would you like to see? And what new capabilities should Sentence Transformers handle - multimodal embeddings, late interaction models, or something else? Your feedback shapes our roadmap!
change_idf
#1 opened 2 months ago
by
arthurbresnu
tomaarsen
updated
a
model
3 months ago
tomaarsen
published
a
model
3 months ago
Post
4157
I just released Sentence Transformers v4.1; featuring ONNX and OpenVINO backends for rerankers offering 2-3x speedups and improved hard negatives mining which helps prepare stronger training datasets. Details:
🏎️ ONNX, OpenVINO, Optimization, Quantization
- I've added ONNX and OpenVINO support with just one extra argument: "backend" when loading the CrossEncoder reranker, e.g.:
- The
- I've uploaded ~340 ONNX & OpenVINO models for all existing models under the cross-encoder Hugging Face organization. You can use these without having to export when loading.
⛏ Improved Hard Negatives Mining
- Added 'absolute_margin' and 'relative_margin' arguments to
-
-
- Inspired by the excellent NV-Retriever paper from NVIDIA.
And several other small improvements. Check out the full release notes here: https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/releases/tag/v4.1.0
With this release, I introduce near-feature parity between the SentenceTransformer embedding & CrossEncoder reranker models, which I've wanted to do for quite some time! With rerankers very strongly supported now, it's time to look forward to other useful architectures!
🏎️ ONNX, OpenVINO, Optimization, Quantization
- I've added ONNX and OpenVINO support with just one extra argument: "backend" when loading the CrossEncoder reranker, e.g.:
CrossEncoder("cross-encoder/ms-marco-MiniLM-L6-v2", backend="onnx")- The
export_optimized_onnx_model, export_dynamic_quantized_onnx_model, and export_static_quantized_openvino_model functions now work with CrossEncoder rerankers, allowing you to optimize (e.g. fusions, gelu approximations, etc.) or quantize (int8 weights) rerankers.- I've uploaded ~340 ONNX & OpenVINO models for all existing models under the cross-encoder Hugging Face organization. You can use these without having to export when loading.
⛏ Improved Hard Negatives Mining
- Added 'absolute_margin' and 'relative_margin' arguments to
mine_hard_negatives. -
absolute_margin ensures that sim(query, negative) < sim(query, positive) - absolute_margin, i.e. an absolute margin between the negative & positive similarities.-
relative_margin ensures that sim(query, negative) < sim(query, positive) * (1 - relative_margin), i.e. a relative margin between the negative & positive similarities.- Inspired by the excellent NV-Retriever paper from NVIDIA.
And several other small improvements. Check out the full release notes here: https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/releases/tag/v4.1.0
With this release, I introduce near-feature parity between the SentenceTransformer embedding & CrossEncoder reranker models, which I've wanted to do for quite some time! With rerankers very strongly supported now, it's time to look forward to other useful architectures!
Post
2714
‼️Sentence Transformers v4.0 is out! You can now train and finetune reranker models with multi-GPU training, bf16 support, loss logging, callbacks & much more. I also prove that finetuning on your domain helps much more than you might think.
1️⃣ Reranker Training Refactor
Reranker models can now be trained using an extensive trainer with a lot of powerful features:
- MultiGPU Training (Data Parallelism (DP) and Distributed Data Parallelism (DDP))
- bf16 training support; loss logging
- Evaluation datasets + evaluation loss
- Improved callback support + an excellent Weights & Biases integration
- Gradient checkpointing, gradient accumulation
- Model card generation
- Resuming from a training checkpoint without performance loss
- Hyperparameter Optimization
and much more!
Read my detailed blogpost to learn about the components that make up this new training approach: https://huggingface.co/blog/train-reranker
Notably, the release is fully backwards compatible: all deprecations are soft, meaning that they still work but emit a warning informing you how to upgrade.
2️⃣ New Reranker Losses
- 11 new losses:
- 2 traditional losses: BinaryCrossEntropy and CrossEntropy
- 2 distillation losses: MSE and MarginMSE
- 2 in-batch negatives losses: MNRL (a.k.a. InfoNCE) and CMNRL
- 5 learning to rank losses: Lambda, p-ListMLE, ListNet, RankNet, ListMLE
3️⃣ New Reranker Documentation
- New Training Overview, Loss Overview, API Reference docs
- 5 new, 1 refactored training examples docs pages
- 13 new, 6 refactored training scripts
- Migration guides (2.x -> 3.x, 3.x -> 4.x)
4️⃣ Blogpost
Alongside the release, I've written a blogpost where I finetune ModernBERT on a generic question-answer dataset. My finetunes easily outperform all general-purpose reranker models, even models 4x as big. Finetuning on your domain is definitely worth it: https://huggingface.co/blog/train-reranker
See the full release notes here: https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/releases/v4.0.1
1️⃣ Reranker Training Refactor
Reranker models can now be trained using an extensive trainer with a lot of powerful features:
- MultiGPU Training (Data Parallelism (DP) and Distributed Data Parallelism (DDP))
- bf16 training support; loss logging
- Evaluation datasets + evaluation loss
- Improved callback support + an excellent Weights & Biases integration
- Gradient checkpointing, gradient accumulation
- Model card generation
- Resuming from a training checkpoint without performance loss
- Hyperparameter Optimization
and much more!
Read my detailed blogpost to learn about the components that make up this new training approach: https://huggingface.co/blog/train-reranker
Notably, the release is fully backwards compatible: all deprecations are soft, meaning that they still work but emit a warning informing you how to upgrade.
2️⃣ New Reranker Losses
- 11 new losses:
- 2 traditional losses: BinaryCrossEntropy and CrossEntropy
- 2 distillation losses: MSE and MarginMSE
- 2 in-batch negatives losses: MNRL (a.k.a. InfoNCE) and CMNRL
- 5 learning to rank losses: Lambda, p-ListMLE, ListNet, RankNet, ListMLE
3️⃣ New Reranker Documentation
- New Training Overview, Loss Overview, API Reference docs
- 5 new, 1 refactored training examples docs pages
- 13 new, 6 refactored training scripts
- Migration guides (2.x -> 3.x, 3.x -> 4.x)
4️⃣ Blogpost
Alongside the release, I've written a blogpost where I finetune ModernBERT on a generic question-answer dataset. My finetunes easily outperform all general-purpose reranker models, even models 4x as big. Finetuning on your domain is definitely worth it: https://huggingface.co/blog/train-reranker
See the full release notes here: https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/releases/v4.0.1
Post
6881
An assembly of 18 European companies, labs, and universities have banded together to launch 🇪🇺 EuroBERT! It's a state-of-the-art multilingual encoder for 15 European languages, designed to be finetuned for retrieval, classification, etc.
🇪🇺 15 Languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Italian, Russian, Polish, Portuguese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Dutch, Arabic, Turkish, Hindi
3️⃣ 3 model sizes: 210M, 610M, and 2.1B parameters - very very useful sizes in my opinion
➡️ Sequence length of 8192 tokens! Nice to see these higher sequence lengths for encoders becoming more common.
⚙️ Architecture based on Llama, but with bi-directional (non-causal) attention to turn it into an encoder. Flash Attention 2 is supported.
🔥 A new Pareto frontier (stronger *and* smaller) for multilingual encoder models
📊 Evaluated against mDeBERTa, mGTE, XLM-RoBERTa for Retrieval, Classification, and Regression (after finetuning for each task separately): EuroBERT punches way above its weight.
📝 Detailed paper with all details, incl. data: FineWeb for English and CulturaX for multilingual data, The Stack v2 and Proof-Pile-2 for code.
Check out the release blogpost here: https://huggingface.co/blog/EuroBERT/release
* EuroBERT/EuroBERT-210m
* EuroBERT/EuroBERT-610m
* EuroBERT/EuroBERT-2.1B
The next step is for researchers to build upon the 3 EuroBERT base models and publish strong retrieval, zero-shot classification, etc. models for all to use. I'm very much looking forward to it!
🇪🇺 15 Languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Italian, Russian, Polish, Portuguese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Dutch, Arabic, Turkish, Hindi
3️⃣ 3 model sizes: 210M, 610M, and 2.1B parameters - very very useful sizes in my opinion
➡️ Sequence length of 8192 tokens! Nice to see these higher sequence lengths for encoders becoming more common.
⚙️ Architecture based on Llama, but with bi-directional (non-causal) attention to turn it into an encoder. Flash Attention 2 is supported.
🔥 A new Pareto frontier (stronger *and* smaller) for multilingual encoder models
📊 Evaluated against mDeBERTa, mGTE, XLM-RoBERTa for Retrieval, Classification, and Regression (after finetuning for each task separately): EuroBERT punches way above its weight.
📝 Detailed paper with all details, incl. data: FineWeb for English and CulturaX for multilingual data, The Stack v2 and Proof-Pile-2 for code.
Check out the release blogpost here: https://huggingface.co/blog/EuroBERT/release
* EuroBERT/EuroBERT-210m
* EuroBERT/EuroBERT-610m
* EuroBERT/EuroBERT-2.1B
The next step is for researchers to build upon the 3 EuroBERT base models and publish strong retrieval, zero-shot classification, etc. models for all to use. I'm very much looking forward to it!
- 1 reply
tomaarsen
authored
a
paper
7 months ago
Post
2379
I just released Sentence Transformers v3.4.0, featuring a memory leak fix, compatibility between the powerful Cached... losses and the Matryoshka loss modifier, and a bunch of fixes & small features.
🪆 Matryoshka & Cached loss compatibility
It is now possible to combine the powerful Cached... losses (which use in-batch negatives & a caching mechanism to allow for endless batch size & negatives) with the Matryoshka loss modifier which modifies a base loss such that it is trained not only on the maximum dimensionality (e.g. 1024 dimensions), but also on many lower dimensions (e.g. 768, 512, 256, 128, 64, 32).
After training, these models' embeddings can be truncated for faster retrieval, etc.
🎞️ Resolve memory leak when Model and Trainer are reinitialized
Due to a circular dependency between Trainer -> Model -> ModelCardData -> Trainer, deleting both the trainer & model still didn't free up the memory.
This led to a memory leak in scripts where you repeatedly do so.
➕ New Features
Many new small features, e.g. multi-GPU support for 'mine_hard_negatives', a 'margin' parameter to TripletEvaluator, and Matthews Correlation Coefficient in the BinaryClassificationEvaluator.
🐛 Bug Fixes
Also a bunch of fixes, for example that subsequent batches were not sorted when using the "no_duplicates" batch sampler. See the release notes for more details.
Full release notes: https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/releases/tag/v3.4.0
Big thanks to all community members who assisted in this release. 10 folks with their first contribution this time around!
🪆 Matryoshka & Cached loss compatibility
It is now possible to combine the powerful Cached... losses (which use in-batch negatives & a caching mechanism to allow for endless batch size & negatives) with the Matryoshka loss modifier which modifies a base loss such that it is trained not only on the maximum dimensionality (e.g. 1024 dimensions), but also on many lower dimensions (e.g. 768, 512, 256, 128, 64, 32).
After training, these models' embeddings can be truncated for faster retrieval, etc.
🎞️ Resolve memory leak when Model and Trainer are reinitialized
Due to a circular dependency between Trainer -> Model -> ModelCardData -> Trainer, deleting both the trainer & model still didn't free up the memory.
This led to a memory leak in scripts where you repeatedly do so.
➕ New Features
Many new small features, e.g. multi-GPU support for 'mine_hard_negatives', a 'margin' parameter to TripletEvaluator, and Matthews Correlation Coefficient in the BinaryClassificationEvaluator.
🐛 Bug Fixes
Also a bunch of fixes, for example that subsequent batches were not sorted when using the "no_duplicates" batch sampler. See the release notes for more details.
Full release notes: https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/releases/tag/v3.4.0
Big thanks to all community members who assisted in this release. 10 folks with their first contribution this time around!
Post
4833
🏎️ Today I'm introducing a method to train static embedding models that run 100x to 400x faster on CPU than common embedding models, while retaining 85%+ of the quality! Including 2 fully open models: training scripts, datasets, metrics.
We apply our recipe to train 2 Static Embedding models that we release today! We release:
2️⃣ an English Retrieval model and a general-purpose Multilingual similarity model (e.g. classification, clustering, etc.), both Apache 2.0
🧠 my modern training strategy: ideation -> dataset choice -> implementation -> evaluation
📜 my training scripts, using the Sentence Transformers library
📊 my Weights & Biases reports with losses & metrics
📕 my list of 30 training and 13 evaluation datasets
The 2 Static Embedding models have the following properties:
🏎️ Extremely fast, e.g. 107500 sentences per second on a consumer CPU, compared to 270 for 'all-mpnet-base-v2' and 56 for 'gte-large-en-v1.5'
0️⃣ Zero active parameters: No Transformer blocks, no attention, not even a matrix multiplication. Super speed!
📏 No maximum sequence length! Embed texts at any length (note: longer texts may embed worse)
📐 Linear instead of exponential complexity: 2x longer text takes 2x longer, instead of 2.5x or more.
🪆 Matryoshka support: allow you to truncate embeddings with minimal performance loss (e.g. 4x smaller with a 0.56% perf. decrease for English Similarity tasks)
Check out the full blogpost if you'd like to 1) use these lightning-fast models or 2) learn how to train them with consumer-level hardware: https://huggingface.co/blog/static-embeddings
The blogpost contains a lengthy list of possible advancements; I'm very confident that our 2 models are only the tip of the iceberg, and we may be able to get even better performance.
Alternatively, check out the models:
* sentence-transformers/static-retrieval-mrl-en-v1
* sentence-transformers/static-similarity-mrl-multilingual-v1
We apply our recipe to train 2 Static Embedding models that we release today! We release:
2️⃣ an English Retrieval model and a general-purpose Multilingual similarity model (e.g. classification, clustering, etc.), both Apache 2.0
🧠 my modern training strategy: ideation -> dataset choice -> implementation -> evaluation
📜 my training scripts, using the Sentence Transformers library
📊 my Weights & Biases reports with losses & metrics
📕 my list of 30 training and 13 evaluation datasets
The 2 Static Embedding models have the following properties:
🏎️ Extremely fast, e.g. 107500 sentences per second on a consumer CPU, compared to 270 for 'all-mpnet-base-v2' and 56 for 'gte-large-en-v1.5'
0️⃣ Zero active parameters: No Transformer blocks, no attention, not even a matrix multiplication. Super speed!
📏 No maximum sequence length! Embed texts at any length (note: longer texts may embed worse)
📐 Linear instead of exponential complexity: 2x longer text takes 2x longer, instead of 2.5x or more.
🪆 Matryoshka support: allow you to truncate embeddings with minimal performance loss (e.g. 4x smaller with a 0.56% perf. decrease for English Similarity tasks)
Check out the full blogpost if you'd like to 1) use these lightning-fast models or 2) learn how to train them with consumer-level hardware: https://huggingface.co/blog/static-embeddings
The blogpost contains a lengthy list of possible advancements; I'm very confident that our 2 models are only the tip of the iceberg, and we may be able to get even better performance.
Alternatively, check out the models:
* sentence-transformers/static-retrieval-mrl-en-v1
* sentence-transformers/static-similarity-mrl-multilingual-v1
- 1 reply
Post
3122
That didn't take long! Nomic AI has finetuned the new ModernBERT-base encoder model into a strong embedding model for search, classification, clustering and more!
Details:
🤖 Based on ModernBERT-base with 149M parameters.
📊 Outperforms both nomic-embed-text-v1 and nomic-embed-text-v1.5 on MTEB!
🏎️ Immediate FA2 and unpacking support for super efficient inference.
🪆 Trained with Matryoshka support, i.e. 2 valid output dimensionalities: 768 and 256.
➡️ Maximum sequence length of 8192 tokens!
2️⃣ Trained in 2 stages: unsupervised contrastive data -> high quality labeled datasets.
➕ Integrated in Sentence Transformers, Transformers, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Haystack, etc.
🏛️ Apache 2.0 licensed: fully commercially permissible
Try it out here: nomic-ai/modernbert-embed-base
Very nice work by Zach Nussbaum and colleagues at Nomic AI.
Details:
🤖 Based on ModernBERT-base with 149M parameters.
📊 Outperforms both nomic-embed-text-v1 and nomic-embed-text-v1.5 on MTEB!
🏎️ Immediate FA2 and unpacking support for super efficient inference.
🪆 Trained with Matryoshka support, i.e. 2 valid output dimensionalities: 768 and 256.
➡️ Maximum sequence length of 8192 tokens!
2️⃣ Trained in 2 stages: unsupervised contrastive data -> high quality labeled datasets.
➕ Integrated in Sentence Transformers, Transformers, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Haystack, etc.
🏛️ Apache 2.0 licensed: fully commercially permissible
Try it out here: nomic-ai/modernbert-embed-base
Very nice work by Zach Nussbaum and colleagues at Nomic AI.
tomaarsen
authored
a
paper
9 months ago
Post
5871
I just released Sentence Transformers v3.3.0 & it's huge! 4.5x speedup for CPU with OpenVINO int8 static quantization, training with prompts for a free perf. boost, PEFT integration, evaluation on NanoBEIR, and more! Details:
1. We integrate Post-Training Static Quantization using OpenVINO, a very efficient solution for CPUs that processes 4.78x as many texts per second on average, while only hurting performance by 0.36% on average. There's a new
2. We add the option to train with prompts, e.g. strings like "query: ", "search_document: " or "Represent this sentence for searching relevant passages: ". It's as simple as using the
3. Sentence Transformers now supports training PEFT adapters via 7 new methods for adding new adapters or loading pre-trained ones. You can also directly load a trained adapter with SentenceTransformer as if it's a normal model. Very useful for e.g. 1) training multiple adapters on 1 base model, 2) training bigger models than otherwise possible, or 3) cheaply hosting multiple models by switching multiple adapters on 1 base model.
4. We added easy evaluation on NanoBEIR, a subset of BEIR a.k.a. the MTEB Retrieval benchmark. It contains 13 datasets with 50 queries and up to 10k documents each. Evaluation is fast, and can easily be done during training to track your model's performance on general-purpose information retrieval tasks.
Additionally, we also deprecate Python 3.8, add better compatibility with Transformers v4.46.0, and more. Read the full release notes here: https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/releases/tag/v3.3.0
1. We integrate Post-Training Static Quantization using OpenVINO, a very efficient solution for CPUs that processes 4.78x as many texts per second on average, while only hurting performance by 0.36% on average. There's a new
export_static_quantized_openvino_model method to quantize a model.2. We add the option to train with prompts, e.g. strings like "query: ", "search_document: " or "Represent this sentence for searching relevant passages: ". It's as simple as using the
prompts argument in SentenceTransformerTrainingArguments. Our experiments show that you can easily reach 0.66% to 0.90% relative performance improvement on NDCG@10 at no extra cost by adding "query: " before each training query and "document: " before each training answer.3. Sentence Transformers now supports training PEFT adapters via 7 new methods for adding new adapters or loading pre-trained ones. You can also directly load a trained adapter with SentenceTransformer as if it's a normal model. Very useful for e.g. 1) training multiple adapters on 1 base model, 2) training bigger models than otherwise possible, or 3) cheaply hosting multiple models by switching multiple adapters on 1 base model.
4. We added easy evaluation on NanoBEIR, a subset of BEIR a.k.a. the MTEB Retrieval benchmark. It contains 13 datasets with 50 queries and up to 10k documents each. Evaluation is fast, and can easily be done during training to track your model's performance on general-purpose information retrieval tasks.
Additionally, we also deprecate Python 3.8, add better compatibility with Transformers v4.46.0, and more. Read the full release notes here: https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/releases/tag/v3.3.0
Post
7221
📣 Sentence Transformers v3.2.0 is out, marking the biggest release for inference in 2 years! 2 new backends for embedding models: ONNX (+ optimization & quantization) and OpenVINO, allowing for speedups up to 2x-3x AND Static Embeddings for 500x speedups at 10-20% accuracy cost.
1️⃣ ONNX Backend: This backend uses the ONNX Runtime to accelerate model inference on both CPU and GPU, reaching up to 1.4x-3x speedup depending on the precision. We also introduce 2 helper methods for optimizing and quantizing models for (much) faster inference.
2️⃣ OpenVINO Backend: This backend uses Intel their OpenVINO instead, outperforming ONNX in some situations on CPU.
Usage is as simple as
🔒 Another major new feature is Static Embeddings: think word embeddings like GLoVe and word2vec, but modernized. Static Embeddings are bags of token embeddings that are summed together to create text embeddings, allowing for lightning-fast embeddings that don't require any neural networks. They're initialized in one of 2 ways:
1️⃣ via Model2Vec, a new technique for distilling any Sentence Transformer models into static embeddings. Either via a pre-distilled model with
2️⃣ Random initialization. This requires finetuning, but finetuning is extremely quick (e.g. I trained with 3 million pairs in 7 minutes). My final model was 6.6% worse than bge-base-en-v1.5, but 500x faster on CPU.
Full release notes: https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/releases/tag/v3.2.0
Documentation on Speeding up Inference: https://sbert.net/docs/sentence_transformer/usage/efficiency.html
1️⃣ ONNX Backend: This backend uses the ONNX Runtime to accelerate model inference on both CPU and GPU, reaching up to 1.4x-3x speedup depending on the precision. We also introduce 2 helper methods for optimizing and quantizing models for (much) faster inference.
2️⃣ OpenVINO Backend: This backend uses Intel their OpenVINO instead, outperforming ONNX in some situations on CPU.
Usage is as simple as
SentenceTransformer("all-MiniLM-L6-v2", backend="onnx"). Does your model not have an ONNX or OpenVINO file yet? No worries - it'll be autoexported for you. Thank me later 😉🔒 Another major new feature is Static Embeddings: think word embeddings like GLoVe and word2vec, but modernized. Static Embeddings are bags of token embeddings that are summed together to create text embeddings, allowing for lightning-fast embeddings that don't require any neural networks. They're initialized in one of 2 ways:
1️⃣ via Model2Vec, a new technique for distilling any Sentence Transformer models into static embeddings. Either via a pre-distilled model with
from_model2vec or with from_distillation where you do the distillation yourself. It'll only take 5 seconds on GPU & 2 minutes on CPU, no dataset needed.2️⃣ Random initialization. This requires finetuning, but finetuning is extremely quick (e.g. I trained with 3 million pairs in 7 minutes). My final model was 6.6% worse than bge-base-en-v1.5, but 500x faster on CPU.
Full release notes: https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/releases/tag/v3.2.0
Documentation on Speeding up Inference: https://sbert.net/docs/sentence_transformer/usage/efficiency.html
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I've just shipped the Sentence Transformers v3.1.1 patch release, fixing the hard negatives mining utility for some models. This utility is extremely useful to get more performance out of your embedding training data.
⛏ Hard negatives are texts that are rather similar to some anchor text (e.g. a query), but are not the correct match. They're difficult for a model to distinguish from the correct answer, often resulting in a stronger model after training.
🔓 Beyond that, this release removes the numpy<2 restriction from v3.1.0. This was previously required for Windows as not all third-party libraries were updated to support numpy v2. With Sentence Transformers, you can now choose v1 or v2 of numpy.
Check out the full release notes here: https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/releases/tag/v3.1.1
I'm looking forward to releasing v3.2, I have some exciting things planned 🚀
⛏ Hard negatives are texts that are rather similar to some anchor text (e.g. a query), but are not the correct match. They're difficult for a model to distinguish from the correct answer, often resulting in a stronger model after training.
mine_hard_negatives docs: https://sbert.net/docs/package_reference/util.html#sentence_transformers.util.mine_hard_negatives🔓 Beyond that, this release removes the numpy<2 restriction from v3.1.0. This was previously required for Windows as not all third-party libraries were updated to support numpy v2. With Sentence Transformers, you can now choose v1 or v2 of numpy.
Check out the full release notes here: https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/releases/tag/v3.1.1
I'm looking forward to releasing v3.2, I have some exciting things planned 🚀