Model reference · open weights

granite-embedding-sparse

granite-embedding-sparse is an open-weight embedding model from ibm-granite, listed in the AxForge catalogue. AxForge can bring it up on EU-owned hardware for you on request — with the licence handled where one is required.

Embeddings ibm-granite 1 variants 23k downloads/mo
Request this model on EU hardware All served models Not on the shared API today — deployed on request.

About

What granite-embedding-sparse is

Granite-Embedding-30m-Sparse Model Summary: Granite-Embedding-30m-Sparse is a 30M parameter sparse biencoder embedding model from the Granite Experimental suite that can be used to generate high quality text embeddings. This model produces variable length bag-of-word like dictionary, containing expansions of sentence tokens and their corresponding weights and is trained using a combination of open source relevance-pair datasets with permissive, enterprise-friendly license, and IBM collected and generated datasets. While maintaining competitive scores on academic benchmarks such as BEIR, this model also performs well on many enterprise use cases. This model is developed using retrieval oriented pretraining, contrastive finetuning and knowledge distillation for improved performance. - Developers: Granite Embedding Team, IBM - GitHub Repository: ibm-granite/granite-embedding-models - Paper: Techincal Report - Release Date: February 26th, 2025 - License: Apache 2.0 Supported Languages: English. Intended use: The model is designed to produce variable length bag-of-word like dictionary, containing expansions of sentence tokens and their corresponding weights, for a given text, which can be used for text similarity, retrieval, and search applications. Usage with Milvus: The model is compatible with Milvus Vector DB and is very easy to use: First, install the pymilvus library The model can then be used to encode pairs of text and find the similarity between their representations Usage with Sentence Transformers: First install the Sentence Transformers library: Then you can load this model and run inference. Evaluation: Granite-Embedding-30m-Sparse is competive in performance to the naver/splade-v3-distilbert despite being half the parameter size. We also compare the sparse model with similar sized dense embedding counterpart ibm-granite/granite-embedding-30m-english. The performance of the models on MTEB Retrieval (i.e., BEIR) is reported below. To maintain consistency with results reported by naver/splade-v3-distilbert, we do not include CQADupstack and MS-MARCO in the table below. Model Architecture: Granite-Embedding-30m-Sparse is based on an encoder-only RoBERTa lik

Summarised from the published model card. Read the full card on the HuggingFace links below.

Specifications

What it is

Makeribm-granite
TypeEmbedding models
Parameters (lead)30M
Context514 tokens
Variants1
Runs withsentence-transformers
Released2025-02-17
Popularity23k downloads / month
Likes26
LicenceOpen weights

How it works

How embedding models work

Your textsentence / documentEncodermaps meaningVectorlist of numbersAn embedding model turns text into a vector, so similar meanings sit close together — the basis of search and RAG.

Variants

Sizes & precisions

Open weights ship in several sizes and precisions. One page, all the variants — pick the one that fits your GPU. VRAM figures are estimates from model size.

VariantParamsPrecisionVRAMFits 16 GBWeights
granite-embedding-30m-sparse30MBF16~0.1 GBWeights ↗

Using it via the API

Call it like any OpenAI endpoint

Once AxForge deploys granite-embedding-sparse for you, it answers on the OpenAI-compatible API — the same base URL and keys as every other model. (granite-embedding-sparse below is illustrative; you get the exact model name on deployment.)

$ curl -sS https://api.axforge.ai/v1/embeddings \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $AXFORGE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model":"granite-embedding-sparse","input":"text to embed"}'

Details

Languages, data & research

Languages

en

Tags

sentence-transformers pytorch safetensors roberta language granite embeddings sparse-encoder sparse splade feature-extraction en text-embeddings-inference endpoints_compatible

Papers

Licence

Open weights

Open weights under apache-2.0 — commercial use is permitted. Deploy it on AxForge EU hardware on request. Read the licence ↗

Sources

Weights & code

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