Model reference · open weights

msmarco-bert-dot

Embeddings sentence-transformers Embeddings 1 build Licence not stated 459k dl/mo

msmarco-bert-dot is an open-weight embedding model from sentence-transformers. msmarco-bert-base-dot-v5 (FP32) weighs 219 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

  • msmarco-bert-base-dot-v5 is a sentence-transformers model designed for semantic search that maps sentences and paragraphs to a 768-dimensional vector space.
  • It has 109M parameters, supports a context length of 512 tokens, and operates in English.
  • The model was trained on 500K query-answer pairs from the MS MARCO dataset and uses mean pooling with dot-product scoring.

Summary of the sentence-transformers/msmarco-bert-base-dot-v5 model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released bysentence-transformers
Released2022-03-02
Parameters109M
VRAM219 MB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for msmarco-bert-base-dot-v5 (FP32)

219 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 sentence-transformers says about msmarco-bert-dot

Read the model card

This is a sentence-transformers model: It maps sentences & paragraphs to a 768 dimensional dense vector space and was designed for semantic search. It has been trained on 500K (query, answer) pairs from the MS MARCO dataset. For an introduction to semantic search, have a look at: SBERT.net - Semantic Search

Usage (Sentence-Transformers)

Using this model becomes easy when you have sentence-transformers installed:

pip install -U sentence-transformers

Then you can use the model like this:

from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer, util

query = "How many people live in London?"
docs = ["Around 9 Million people live in London", "London is known for its financial district"]

#Load the model
model = SentenceTransformer('sentence-transformers/msmarco-bert-base-dot-v5')

#Encode query and documents
query_emb = model.encode(query)
doc_emb = model.encode(docs)

#Compute dot score between query and all document embeddings
scores = util.dot_score(query_emb, doc_emb)[0].cpu().tolist()

#Combine docs & scores
doc_score_pairs = list(zip(docs, scores))

#Sort by decreasing score
doc_score_pairs = sorted(doc_score_pairs, key=lambda x: x[1], reverse=True)

#Output passages & scores
print("Query:", query)
for doc, score in doc_score_pairs:
    print(score, doc)

Usage (HuggingFace Transformers)

Without sentence-transformers, you can use the model like this: First, you pass your input through the transformer model, then you have to apply the correct pooling-operation on-top of the contextualized word embeddings.

from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModel
import torch

#Mean Pooling - Take attention mask into account for correct averaging
def mean_pooling(model_output, attention_mask):
    token_embeddings = model_output.last_hidden_state
    input_mask_expanded = attention_mask.unsqueeze(-1).expand(token_embeddings.size()).float()
    return torch.sum(token_embeddings * input_mask_expanded, 1) / torch.clamp(input_mask_expanded.sum(1), min=1e-9)

#Encode text
def encode(texts):
    # Tokenize sentences
    encoded_input = tokenizer(texts, padding=True, truncation=True, return_tensors='pt')

    # Compute token embeddings
    with torch.no_grad():
        model_output = model(**encoded_input, return_dict=True)

    # Perform pooling
    embeddings = mean_pooling(model_output, encoded_input['attention_mask'])

    return embeddings

# Sentences we want sentence embeddings for
query = "How many people live in London?"
docs = ["Around 9 Million people live in London", "London is known for its financial district"]

# Load model from HuggingFace Hub
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("sentence-transformers/msmarco-bert-base-dot-v5")
model = AutoModel.from_pretrained("sentence-transformers/msmarco-bert-base-dot-v5")

#Encode query and docs
query_emb = encode(query)
doc_emb = encode(docs)

#Compute dot score between query and all document embeddings
scores = torch.mm(query_emb, doc_emb.transpose(0, 1))[0].cpu().tolist()

#Combine docs & scores
doc_score_pairs = list(zip(docs, scores))

#Sort by decreasing score
doc_score_pairs = sorted(doc_score_pairs, key=lambda x: x[1], reverse=True)

#Output passages & scores
print("Query:", query)
for doc, score in doc_score_pairs:
    print(score, doc)

Technical Details

In the following some technical details how this model must be used:

SettingValue
Dimensions768
Max Sequence Length512
Produces normalized embeddingsNo
Pooling-MethodMean pooling
Suitable score functionsdot-product (e.g. util.dot_score)

Training

See train_script.py in this repository for the used training script.

The model was trained with the parameters:

DataLoader:

torch.utils.data.dataloader.DataLoader of length 7858 with parameters:

{'batch_size': 64, 'sampler': 'torch.utils.data.sampler.RandomSampler', 'batch_sampler': 'torch.utils.data.sampler.BatchSampler'}

Loss:

sentence_transformers.losses.MarginMSELoss.MarginMSELoss

Parameters of the fit()-Method:

{
    "callback": null,
    "epochs": 30,
    "evaluation_steps": 0,
    "evaluator": "NoneType",
    "max_grad_norm": 1,
    "optimizer_class": "",
    "optimizer_params": {
        "lr": 1e-05
    },
    "scheduler": "WarmupLinear",
    "steps_per_epoch": null,
    "warmup_steps": 10000,
    "weight_decay": 0.01
}

Full Model Architecture

SentenceTransformer(
  (0): Transformer({'max_seq_length': 512, 'do_lower_case': False}) with Transformer model: bert-base-uncased
  (1): Pooling({'word_embedding_dimension': 768, 'pooling_mode_cls_token': False, 'pooling_mode_mean_tokens': True, 'pooling_mode_max_tokens': False, 'pooling_mode_mean_sqrt_len_tokens': False})
)

Citing & Authors

This model was trained by sentence-transformers.

If you find this model helpful, feel free to cite our publication Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks:

@inproceedings{reimers-2019-sentence-bert,
    title = "Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks",
    author = "Reimers, Nils and Gurevych, Iryna",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = "11",
    year = "2019",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "http://arxiv.org/abs/1908.10084",
}

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

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