Model reference · open weights

multi-qa-MiniLM-L6-cos

Embeddings sentence-transformers Embeddings 1 build Licence not stated 865k dl/mo

multi-qa-MiniLM-L6-cos is an open-weight embedding model from sentence-transformers. multi-qa-MiniLM-L6-cos-v1 (FP32) weighs 45 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

  • multi-qa-MiniLM-L6-cos-v1 is a sentence-transformers model with 23M parameters designed for semantic search and sentence-similarity tasks.
  • It maps English text to 384-dimensional vectors using a 512-token context length, having been trained on 215M question-answer pairs.
  • The model produces normalized embeddings suitable for dot-product or cosine-similarity scoring.

Summary of the sentence-transformers/multi-qa-MiniLM-L6-cos-v1 model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released bysentence-transformers
Released2022-03-02
Parameters23M
VRAM45 MB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for multi-qa-MiniLM-L6-cos-v1 (FP32)

45 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 multi-qa-MiniLM-L6-cos

Read the model card

This is a sentence-transformers model: It maps sentences & paragraphs to a 384 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:

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/multi-qa-MiniLM-L6-cos-v1')

#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)

PyTorch 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
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
    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/multi-qa-MiniLM-L6-cos-v1")
model = AutoModel.from_pretrained("sentence-transformers/multi-qa-MiniLM-L6-cos-v1")

#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)

TensorFlow Usage (HuggingFace Transformers)

Similarly to the PyTorch example above, to use the model with TensorFlow 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, TFAutoModel
import tensorflow as tf

#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 = tf.cast(tf.tile(tf.expand_dims(attention_mask, -1), [1, 1, token_embeddings.shape[-1]]), tf.float32)
    return tf.math.reduce_sum(token_embeddings * input_mask_expanded, 1) / tf.math.maximum(tf.math.reduce_sum(input_mask_expanded, 1), 1e-9)

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

    # Compute token embeddings
    model_output = model(**encoded_input, return_dict=True)

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

    # Normalize embeddings
    embeddings = tf.math.l2_normalize(embeddings, axis=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/multi-qa-MiniLM-L6-cos-v1")
model = TFAutoModel.from_pretrained("sentence-transformers/multi-qa-MiniLM-L6-cos-v1")

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

#Compute dot score between query and all document embeddings
scores = (query_emb @ tf.transpose(doc_emb))[0].numpy().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)

Technical Details

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

SettingValue
Dimensions384
Produces normalized embeddingsYes
Pooling-MethodMean pooling
Suitable score functionsdot-product (util.dot_score), cosine-similarity (util.cos_sim), or euclidean distance

Note: When loaded with sentence-transformers, this mo

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

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