Model reference · open weights

msmarco-distilbert-tas-b

Embeddings sentence-transformers Embeddings 1 build Open weights 198k dl/mo

msmarco-distilbert-tas-b is an open-weight embedding model from sentence-transformers. msmarco-distilbert-base-tas-b (FP32) weighs 133 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

  • msmarco-distilbert-tas-b is a sentence-similarity model developed by sentence-transformers that maps sentences and paragraphs to a 768-dimensional dense vector space.
  • It is optimized for semantic search tasks and supports English with a context length of 512 tokens.
  • The model contains 66M parameters and is distributed under the apache-2.0 licence.

Summary of the sentence-transformers/msmarco-distilbert-base-tas-b model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released bysentence-transformers
Released2022-03-02
Parameters66M
VRAM133 MB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for msmarco-distilbert-base-tas-b (FP32)

133 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-distilbert-tas-b

Read the model card

This is a port of the DistilBert TAS-B Model to sentence-transformers model: It maps sentences & paragraphs to a 768 dimensional dense vector space and is optimized for the task of 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-distilbert-base-tas-b')

#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
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 right pooling-operation on-top of the contextualized word embeddings.

from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModel
import torch

#CLS Pooling - Take output from first token
def cls_pooling(model_output):
    return model_output.last_hidden_state[:,0]

#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 = cls_pooling(model_output)

    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-distilbert-base-tas-b")
model = AutoModel.from_pretrained("sentence-transformers/msmarco-distilbert-base-tas-b")

#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
for doc, score in doc_score_pairs:
    print(score, doc)

Full Model Architecture

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

Citing & Authors

Have a look at: DistilBert TAS-B Model

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

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