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Tom Aarsen

tomaarsen

https://linkedin.com/in/tomaarsen

AI & ML interests

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

Recent Activity

liked a model 23 minutes ago

HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-256M-Instruct

new activity about 1 hour ago

sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2:Should I be concerned about "UserWarning: TypedStorage is deprecated. " when using the model with python 3.11?

posted an update about 2 hours ago

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!

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Articles

Binary and Scalar Embedding Quantization for Significantly Faster & Cheaper Retrieval

Mar 22, 2024

• 70

🪆 Introduction to Matryoshka Embedding Models

Feb 23, 2024

• 71

SetFitABSA: Few-Shot Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis using SetFit

Dec 6, 2023

• 6

🕳️ Attention Sinks in LLMs for endless fluency

Oct 9, 2023

• 7

Organizations

Posts 19

Post

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!

Post

4268

🏎️ 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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