Model reference · open weights

e5-large

Embeddings intfloat Embeddings 1 build Open weights 2M dl/mo

e5-large is an open-weight embedding model from intfloat. e5-large-v2 (FP32) weighs 670 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

  • e5-large is a sentence-similarity model developed by intfloat and published as intfloat/e5-large-v2.
  • It features 335M parameters, a 512-token context length, and an embedding size of 1024 across 24 layers.
  • The model is designed for English text and is available under the MIT licence.

Summary of the intfloat/e5-large-v2 model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released byintfloat
Released2023-05-19
Parameters335M
VRAM670 MB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for e5-large-v2 (FP32)

670 MBweights, file size
1.1 GBruntime overhead
CardRunsMemory
RTX 3060 12 GBfits11.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GBfits15.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GBfits23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GBfits23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GBfits31.0 GB
L40S 48 GBfits44.0 GB
A100 80 GBfits78.2 GB
H100 80 GBfits78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GBfits93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unifiedfits107 GB
H200 141 GBfits138 GB
B200 180 GBfits176 GB

From the model card

What intfloat says about e5-large

Read the model card

Text Embeddings by Weakly-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training. Liang Wang, Nan Yang, Xiaolong Huang, Binxing Jiao, Linjun Yang, Daxin Jiang, Rangan Majumder, Furu Wei, arXiv 2022

This model has 24 layers and the embedding size is 1024.

Usage

Below is an example to encode queries and passages from the MS-MARCO passage ranking dataset.

import torch.nn.functional as F

from torch import Tensor
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModel

def average_pool(last_hidden_states: Tensor,
                 attention_mask: Tensor) -> Tensor:
    last_hidden = last_hidden_states.masked_fill(~attention_mask[..., None].bool(), 0.0)
    return last_hidden.sum(dim=1) / attention_mask.sum(dim=1)[..., None]

# Each input text should start with "query: " or "passage: ".
# For tasks other than retrieval, you can simply use the "query: " prefix.
input_texts = ['query: how much protein should a female eat',
               'query: summit define',
               "passage: As a general guideline, the CDC's average requirement of protein for women ages 19 to 70 is 46 grams per day. But, as you can see from this chart, you'll need to increase that if you're expecting or training for a marathon. Check out the chart below to see how much protein you should be eating each day.",
               "passage: Definition of summit for English Language Learners. : 1  the highest point of a mountain : the top of a mountain. : 2  the highest level. : 3  a meeting or series of meetings between the leaders of two or more governments."]

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained('intfloat/e5-large-v2')
model = AutoModel.from_pretrained('intfloat/e5-large-v2')

# Tokenize the input texts
batch_dict = tokenizer(input_texts, max_length=512, padding=True, truncation=True, return_tensors='pt')

outputs = model(**batch_dict)
embeddings = average_pool(outputs.last_hidden_state, batch_dict['attention_mask'])

# normalize embeddings
embeddings = F.normalize(embeddings, p=2, dim=1)
scores = (embeddings[:2] @ embeddings[2:].T) * 100
print(scores.tolist())

Training Details

Please refer to our paper at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.03533.pdf.

Benchmark Evaluation

Check out unilm/e5 to reproduce evaluation results on the BEIR and MTEB benchmark.

Support for Sentence Transformers

Below is an example for usage with sentence_transformers.

from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer
model = SentenceTransformer('intfloat/e5-large-v2')
input_texts = [
    'query: how much protein should a female eat',
    'query: summit define',
    "passage: As a general guideline, the CDC's average requirement of protein for women ages 19 to 70 is 46 grams per day. But, as you can see from this chart, you'll need to increase that if you're expecting or training for a marathon. Check out the chart below to see how much protein you should be eating each day.",
    "passage: Definition of summit for English Language Learners. : 1  the highest point of a mountain : the top of a mountain. : 2  the highest level. : 3  a meeting or series of meetings between the leaders of two or more governments."
]
embeddings = model.encode(input_texts, normalize_embeddings=True)

Package requirements

pip install sentence_transformers~=2.2.2

Contributors: michaelfeil

FAQ

1. Do I need to add the prefix "query: " and "passage: " to input texts?

Yes, this is how the model is trained, otherwise you will see a performance degradation.

Here are some rules of thumb:

  • Use "query: " and "passage: " correspondingly for asymmetric tasks such as passage retrieval in open QA, ad-hoc information retrieval.

  • Use "query: " prefix for symmetric tasks such as semantic similarity, paraphrase retrieval.

  • Use "query: " prefix if you want to use embeddings as features, such as linear probing classification, clustering.

2. Why are my reproduced results slightly different from reported in the model card?

Different versions of transformers and pytorch could cause negligible but non-zero performance differences.

3. Why does the cosine similarity scores distribute around 0.7 to 1.0?

This is a known and expected behavior as we use a low temperature 0.01 for InfoNCE contrastive loss.

For text embedding tasks like text retrieval or semantic similarity, what matters is the relative order of the scores instead of the absolute values, so this should not be an issue.

Citation

If you find our paper or models helpful, please consider cite as follows:

@article{wang2022text,
  title={Text Embeddings by Weakly-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training},
  author={Wang, Liang and Yang, Nan and Huang, Xiaolong and Jiao, Binxing and Yang, Linjun and Jiang, Daxin and Majumder, Rangan and Wei, Furu},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.03533},
  year={2022}
}

Limitations

This model only works for English texts. Long texts will be truncated to at most 512 tokens.

Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.

Benchmarks

Reported results

As published on the model card: the maker's own numbers, not measured by AxForge.

TaskDatasetMetricScore
ClassificationMTEB AmazonCounterfactualClassification (en)accuracy79.224
ClassificationMTEB AmazonCounterfactualClassification (en)ap43.208
ClassificationMTEB AmazonCounterfactualClassification (en)f173.278
ClassificationMTEB AmazonPolarityClassificationaccuracy93.748
ClassificationMTEB AmazonPolarityClassificationap90.725
ClassificationMTEB AmazonPolarityClassificationf193.739
ClassificationMTEB AmazonReviewsClassification (en)accuracy48.612
ClassificationMTEB AmazonReviewsClassification (en)f147.612
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamap_at_123.542
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamap_at_1038.208
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamap_at_10039.417
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamap_at_100039.429
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamap_at_333.950
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamap_at_536.329
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamrr_at_123.755
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamrr_at_1038.288
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamrr_at_10039.511
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamrr_at_100039.523
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamrr_at_334.009
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamrr_at_536.434
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnandcg_at_123.542
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnandcg_at_1046.417
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnandcg_at_10051.812
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnandcg_at_100052.137
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