Model reference · open weights

multi-qa-distilbert-dot

multi-qa-distilbert-dot is an open-weight embedding model from sentence-transformers, listed in the AxForge catalogue. AxForge can bring it up on EU-owned hardware for you on request — with the licence handled where one is required.

Licence fee required Embeddings sentence-transformers 1 variants 63k downloads/mo
Request a licence + hosting quote All served models Not on the shared API today — deployed on request.

About

What multi-qa-distilbert-dot is

multi-qa-distilbert-dot-v1 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 215M (question, answer) pairs from diverse sources. 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: Then you can use the model like this: 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. Technical Details In the following some technical details how this model must be used: Background The project aims to train sentence embedding models on very large sentence level datasets using a self-supervised contrastive learning objective. We use a contrastive learning objective: given a sentence from the pair, the model should predict which out of a set of randomly sampled other sentences, was actually paired with it in our dataset. We developped this model during the Community week using JAX/Flax for NLP & CV, organized by Hugging Face. We developped this model as part of the project: Train the Best Sentence Embedding Model Ever with 1B Training Pairs. We benefited from efficient hardware infrastructure to run the project: 7 TPUs v3-8, as well as intervention from Googles Flax, JAX, and Cloud team member about efficient deep learning frameworks. Intended uses Our model is intented to be used for semantic search: It encodes queries / questions and text paragraphs in a dense vector space. It finds relevant documents for the given passages. Note that there is a limit of 512 word pieces: Text longer than that will be truncated. Further note that the model was just trained on input text up to 250 word pieces. It might not work well for longer text. Training procedure The full training script is accessible in this current repository: trainscript.py. Pre-training We use the pretrained distilbert-base-uncased model. Please refer to the model car

Summarised from the published model card. Read the full card on the HuggingFace links below.

Specifications

What it is

Makersentence-transformers
TypeEmbedding models
Parameters (lead)66M
Context512 tokens
Variants1
Runs withsentence-transformers
Released2022-03-02
Popularity63k downloads / month
Likes1
LicenceCommercial licence needed

How it works

How embedding models work

Your textsentence / documentEncodermaps meaningVectorlist of numbersAn embedding model turns text into a vector, so similar meanings sit close together — the basis of search and RAG.

Variants

Sizes & precisions

Open weights ship in several sizes and precisions. One page, all the variants — pick the one that fits your GPU. VRAM figures are estimates from model size.

VariantParamsPrecisionVRAMFits 16 GBWeights
multi-qa-distilbert-dot-v166MBF16~0.2 GBWeights ↗

Using it via the API

Call it like any OpenAI endpoint

Once AxForge deploys multi-qa-distilbert-dot for you, it answers on the OpenAI-compatible API — the same base URL and keys as every other model. (multi-qa-distilbert-dot below is illustrative; you get the exact model name on deployment.)

$ curl -sS https://api.axforge.ai/v1/embeddings \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $AXFORGE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model":"multi-qa-distilbert-dot","input":"text to embed"}'

Details

Languages, data & research

Languages

en

Tags

sentence-transformers pytorch onnx safetensors openvino distilbert fill-mask feature-extraction sentence-similarity transformers en text-embeddings-inference endpoints_compatible deploy:azure

Licence

Commercial licence needed

The weights are open but its licence needs a commercial agreement for business use. AxForge can arrange that licence and host the model for you — you pay AxForge, we settle with the model’s maker. Ask us for a quote. Read the licence ↗

Sources

Weights & code

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