Model reference · open weights
gte-small is an open-weight embedding model from thenlper. gte-small (FP16) weighs 67 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.
Summary of the thenlper/gte-small model card, 2026-10-01
What it is
| Released by | thenlper |
|---|---|
| Released | 2023-07-27 |
| Parameters | 33M |
| VRAM | 67 MB for the weights |
What it runs on
| Card | Runs | Memory |
|---|---|---|
| RTX 3060 12 GB | fits | 11.6 GB |
| RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB | fits | 15.4 GB |
| RTX 3090 24 GB | fits | 23.4 GB |
| RTX 4090 24 GB | fits | 23.4 GB |
| RTX 5090 32 GB | fits | 31.0 GB |
| L40S 48 GB | fits | 44.0 GB |
| A100 80 GB | fits | 78.2 GB |
| H100 80 GB | fits | 78.1 GB |
| RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB | fits | 93.8 GB |
| DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified | fits | 107 GB |
| H200 141 GB | fits | 138 GB |
| B200 180 GB | fits | 176 GB |
From the model card
General Text Embeddings (GTE) model. Towards General Text Embeddings with Multi-stage Contrastive Learning
The GTE models are trained by Alibaba DAMO Academy. They are mainly based on the BERT framework and currently offer three different sizes of models, including GTE-large, GTE-base, and GTE-small. The GTE models are trained on a large-scale corpus of relevance text pairs, covering a wide range of domains and scenarios. This enables the GTE models to be applied to various downstream tasks of text embeddings, including information retrieval, semantic textual similarity, text reranking, etc.
We compared the performance of the GTE models with other popular text embedding models on the MTEB benchmark. For more detailed comparison results, please refer to the MTEB leaderboard.
| Model Name | Model Size (GB) | Dimension | Sequence Length | Average (56) | Clustering (11) | Pair Classification (3) | Reranking (4) | Retrieval (15) | STS (10) | Summarization (1) | Classification (12) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| gte-large | 0.67 | 1024 | 512 | 63.13 | 46.84 | 85.00 | 59.13 | 52.22 | 83.35 | 31.66 | 73.33 |
| gte-base | 0.22 | 768 | 512 | 62.39 | 46.2 | 84.57 | 58.61 | 51.14 | 82.3 | 31.17 | 73.01 |
| e5-large-v2 | 1.34 | 1024 | 512 | 62.25 | 44.49 | 86.03 | 56.61 | 50.56 | 82.05 | 30.19 | 75.24 |
| e5-base-v2 | 0.44 | 768 | 512 | 61.5 | 43.80 | 85.73 | 55.91 | 50.29 | 81.05 | 30.28 | 73.84 |
| gte-small | 0.07 | 384 | 512 | 61.36 | 44.89 | 83.54 | 57.7 | 49.46 | 82.07 | 30.42 | 72.31 |
| text-embedding-ada-002 | - | 1536 | 8192 | 60.99 | 45.9 | 84.89 | 56.32 | 49.25 | 80.97 | 30.8 | 70.93 |
| e5-small-v2 | 0.13 | 384 | 512 | 59.93 | 39.92 | 84.67 | 54.32 | 49.04 | 80.39 | 31.16 | 72.94 |
| sentence-t5-xxl | 9.73 | 768 | 512 | 59.51 | 43.72 | 85.06 | 56.42 | 42.24 | 82.63 | 30.08 | 73.42 |
| all-mpnet-base-v2 | 0.44 | 768 | 514 | 57.78 | 43.69 | 83.04 | 59.36 | 43.81 | 80.28 | 27.49 | 65.07 |
| sgpt-bloom-7b1-msmarco | 28.27 | 4096 | 2048 | 57.59 | 38.93 | 81.9 | 55.65 | 48.22 | 77.74 | 33.6 | 66.19 |
| all-MiniLM-L12-v2 | 0.13 | 384 | 512 | 56.53 | 41.81 | 82.41 | 58.44 | 42.69 | 79.8 | 27.9 | 63.21 |
| all-MiniLM-L6-v2 | 0.09 | 384 | 512 | 56.26 | 42.35 | 82.37 | 58.04 | 41.95 | 78.9 | 30.81 | 63.05 |
| contriever-base-msmarco | 0.44 | 768 | 512 | 56.00 | 41.1 | 82.54 | 53.14 | 41.88 | 76.51 | 30.36 | 66.68 |
| sentence-t5-base | 0.22 | 768 | 512 | 55.27 | 40.21 | 85.18 | 53.09 | 33.63 | 81.14 | 31.39 | 69.81 |
Code example
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]
input_texts = [
"what is the capital of China?",
"how to implement quick sort in python?",
"Beijing",
"sorting algorithms"
]
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("thenlper/gte-small")
model = AutoModel.from_pretrained("thenlper/gte-small")
# 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'])
# (Optionally) normalize embeddings
embeddings = F.normalize(embeddings, p=2, dim=1)
scores = (embeddings[:1] @ embeddings[1:].T) * 100
print(scores.tolist())
Use with sentence-transformers:
from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer
from sentence_transformers.util import cos_sim
sentences = ['That is a happy person', 'That is a very happy person']
model = SentenceTransformer('thenlper/gte-large')
embeddings = model.encode(sentences)
print(cos_sim(embeddings[0], embeddings[1]))
This model exclusively caters to English texts, and any lengthy texts will be truncated to a maximum of 512 tokens.
If you find our paper or models helpful, please consider citing them as follows:
@article{li2023towards,
title={Towards general text embeddings with multi-stage contrastive learning},
author={Li, Zehan and Zhang, Xin and Zhang, Yanzhao and Long, Dingkun and Xie, Pengjun and Zhang, Meishan},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.03281},
year={2023}
}
Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.
Benchmarks
As published on the model card: the maker's own numbers, not measured by AxForge.
| Task | Dataset | Metric | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Classification | MTEB AmazonCounterfactualClassification (en) | accuracy | 73.224 |
| Classification | MTEB AmazonCounterfactualClassification (en) | ap | 36.099 |
| Classification | MTEB AmazonCounterfactualClassification (en) | f1 | 67.321 |
| Classification | MTEB AmazonPolarityClassification | accuracy | 91.819 |
| Classification | MTEB AmazonPolarityClassification | ap | 88.524 |
| Classification | MTEB AmazonPolarityClassification | f1 | 91.804 |
| Classification | MTEB AmazonReviewsClassification (en) | accuracy | 48.032 |
| Classification | MTEB AmazonReviewsClassification (en) | f1 | 47.449 |
| Retrieval | MTEB ArguAna | map_at_1 | 30.725 |
| Retrieval | MTEB ArguAna | map_at_10 | 46.604 |
| Retrieval | MTEB ArguAna | map_at_100 | 47.535 |
| Retrieval | MTEB ArguAna | map_at_1000 | 47.538 |
| Retrieval | MTEB ArguAna | map_at_3 | 41.833 |
| Retrieval | MTEB ArguAna | map_at_5 | 44.610 |
| Retrieval | MTEB ArguAna | mrr_at_1 | 31.223 |
| Retrieval | MTEB ArguAna | mrr_at_10 | 46.794 |
| Retrieval | MTEB ArguAna | mrr_at_100 | 47.725 |
| Retrieval | MTEB ArguAna | mrr_at_1000 | 47.727 |
| Retrieval | MTEB ArguAna | mrr_at_3 | 42.070 |
| Retrieval | MTEB ArguAna | mrr_at_5 | 44.812 |
| Retrieval | MTEB ArguAna | ndcg_at_1 | 30.725 |
| Retrieval | MTEB ArguAna | ndcg_at_10 | 55.441 |
| Retrieval | MTEB ArguAna | ndcg_at_100 | 59.134 |
| Retrieval | MTEB ArguAna | ndcg_at_1000 | 59.199 |