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Tom Aarsen

tomaarsen

https://linkedin.com/in/tomaarsen

tomaarsen

AI & ML interests

NLP: text embeddings, named entity recognition, few-shot text classification

Articles

Blazing Fast SetFit Inference with 🤗 Optimum Intel on Xeon

22 days ago

• 5

Binary and Scalar Embedding Quantization for Significantly Faster & Cheaper Retrieval

Mar 22

• 26

Organizations

Posts 6

Post

2617

🚀 Sentence Transformers v2.7.0 is out! Featuring a new loss function, easier Matryoshka model inference & evaluation, CrossEncoder improvements & Intel Gaudi2 Accelerator support. Details:

1️⃣ A new loss function: CachedGISTEmbedLoss
This loss function is a combination of CachedMultipleNegativesRankingLoss and the GISTEmbedLoss, both of which are already excellent. The caching mechanism allows for much higher batch sizes with constant memory usage, which boosts training performance. The GIST part introduces a guide model to guide the in-batch negative sample selection. This prevents false negatives, resulting in a stronger training signal.

2️⃣ Automatic Matryoshka model truncation
Matryoshka models produce embeddings that are still useful after truncation. However, this truncation always had to be done manually, until now! We've added a truncate_dim option to the Sentence Transformer constructor. This also allows truncation when using HuggingFaceEmbeddings from LlamaIndex or LangChain.

3️⃣ Additionally, you can now specify truncate_dim in evaluators to get the performance after truncation. (Hint: it's surprisingly good, even for models not trained with MatryoshkaLoss, and it can speed up e.g. clustering, retrieval, etc.)

4️⃣ CrossEncoder improvements
The CrossEncoder now supports 'push_to_hub' to upload trained reranker models to Hugging Face. Additionally, CrossEncoders now support trust_remote_code to load models with custom modelling code.

5️⃣ Inference on Intel Gaudi2
If you have an Intel Gaudi2 Accelerator, Sentence Transformers now uses it automatically for even faster inference. No changes are necessary to your code, the device is automatically detected!

Check out the release notes for all of the details: https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/releases/tag/v2.7.0

I'm very excited for the upcoming releases: I'm making great progress with a notable v3 refactor that should heavily improve the training process for embedding models!

Post

2406

🏅 Quantized Embeddings are here! Unlike model quantization, embedding quantization is a post-processing step for embeddings that converts e.g. float32 embeddings to binary or int8 embeddings. This saves 32x or 4x memory & disk space, and these embeddings are much easier to compare!

Our results show 25-45x speedups in retrieval compared to full-size embeddings, while keeping 96% of the performance!

Learn more about it in our blogpost in collaboration with mixedbread.ai: https://huggingface.co/blog/embedding-quantization
Or try out our demo where we use quantized embeddings to let you search all of Wikipedia (yes, 41,000,000 texts) in 1 second on a CPU Space: sentence-transformers/quantized-retrieval

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