Model reference · open weights
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.
Summary of the sentence-transformers/msmarco-distilbert-base-tas-b model card, 2026-10-01
What it is
| Released by | sentence-transformers |
|---|---|
| Released | 2022-03-02 |
| Parameters | 66M |
| VRAM | 133 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
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.
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)
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)
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})
)
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.