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tomaarsen 
posted an update 3 days ago
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‼️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
tomaarsen 
posted an update 19 days ago
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6583
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!
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tomaarsen 
posted an update 2 months ago
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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!
tomaarsen 
posted an update 2 months ago
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4675
🏎️ 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
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tomaarsen 
posted an update 3 months ago
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3047
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.