Model reference · open weights
msmarco-MiniLM-L12-cos is an open-weight embedding model from sentence-transformers. msmarco-MiniLM-L12-cos-v5 (FP32) weighs 67 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.
Summary of the sentence-transformers/msmarco-MiniLM-L12-cos-v5 model card, 2026-10-01
What it is
| Released by | sentence-transformers |
|---|---|
| Released | 2022-03-02 |
| 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
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 Passages dataset. For an introduction to semantic search, have a look at: SBERT.net - 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-MiniLM-L12-cos-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
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 correct pooling-operation on-top of the contextualized word embeddings.
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModel
import torch
import torch.nn.functional as F
#Mean Pooling - Take average of all tokens
def mean_pooling(model_output, attention_mask):
token_embeddings = model_output.last_hidden_state #First element of model_output contains all token embeddings
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'])
# Normalize embeddings
embeddings = F.normalize(embeddings, p=2, dim=1)
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-MiniLM-L12-cos-v5")
model = AutoModel.from_pretrained("sentence-transformers/msmarco-MiniLM-L12-cos-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
for doc, score in doc_score_pairs:
print(score, doc)
In the following some technical details how this model must be used:
| Setting | Value |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 768 |
| Produces normalized embeddings | Yes |
| Pooling-Method | Mean pooling |
| Suitable score functions | dot-product (util.dot_score), cosine-similarity (util.cos_sim), or euclidean distance |
Note: When loaded with sentence-transformers, this model produces normalized embeddings with length 1. In that case, dot-product and cosine-similarity are equivalent. dot-product is preferred as it is faster. Euclidean distance is proportional to dot-product and can also be used.
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.