Model reference · open weights
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.
Summary of the sentence-transformers/multi-qa-MiniLM-L6-cos-v1 model card, 2026-10-01
What it is
| Released by | sentence-transformers |
|---|---|
| Released | 2022-03-02 |
| Parameters | 23M |
| VRAM | 45 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 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
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)
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)
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)
In the following some technical details how this model must be used:
| Setting | Value |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 384 |
| 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 mo
Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.