Model reference · open weights

nasa-smd-ibm-st

Embeddings nasa-impact Embeddings 1 build Open weights 1k dl/mo

nasa-smd-ibm-st is an open-weight embedding model from nasa-impact. nasa-smd-ibm-st-v2 (BF16) weighs 249 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

  • nasa-smd-ibm-st-v2 is a bi-encoder sentence transformer model developed by nasa-impact for sentence similarity and information retrieval tasks.
  • It features 125 million parameters, supports a context length of 514 tokens, and operates in English.
  • The model is trained on 271 million general examples and 2.6 million domain-specific examples from NASA Science Mission Directorate documents, and it is released under the apache-2.0 license.

Summary of the nasa-impact/nasa-smd-ibm-st-v2 model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released bynasa-impact
Released2024-02-20
VRAM249 MB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for nasa-smd-ibm-st-v2 (BF16)

249 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 nasa-impact says about nasa-smd-ibm-st

Read the model card

Indus-Retriever (nasa-smd-ibm-st-v2) is a Bi-encoder sentence transformer model, that is fine-tuned from nasa-smd-ibm-v0.1 encoder model. it is an updated version of nasa-smd-ibm-st with better performance (shown below). It's trained with 271 million examples along with a domain-specific dataset of 2.6 million examples from documents curated by NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD). With this model, we aim to enhance natural language technologies like information retrieval and intelligent search as it applies to SMD NLP applications.

you can also use distilled version of the model here: https://huggingface.co/nasa-impact/nasa-ibm-st.38m

Model Details

  • Base Encoder Model: INDUS
  • Tokenizer: Custom
  • Parameters: 125M
  • Training Strategy: Sentence Pairs, and score indicating relevancy. The model encodes the two sentence pairs independently and cosine similarity is calculated. the similarity is optimized using the relevance score.

Training Data

Figure: Open dataset sources for sentence transformers (269M in total)

Additionally, 2.6M abstract + title pairs collected from NASA SMD documents.

Training Procedure

  • Framework: PyTorch 1.9.1
  • sentence-transformers version: 4.30.2
  • Strategy: Sentence Pairs

Evaluation

Following models are evaluated:

  1. All-MiniLM-l6-v2 [sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2]
  2. BGE-base [BAAI/bge-base-en-v1.5]
  3. RoBERTa-base [roberta-base]
  4. nasa-smd-ibm-rtvr_v0.1 [nasa-impact/nasa-smd-ibm-st]

Figure: BEIR and NASA-IR Evaluation Metrics

Uses

  • Information Retreival
  • Sentence Similarity Search

For NASA SMD related, scientific usecases.

Usage


from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer, Util

model = SentenceTransformer("nasa-impact/nasa-smd-ibm-st-v2")

input_queries = [
'query: how much protein should a female eat', 'query: summit define']
input_passages = [
"As a general guideline, the CDC's average requirement of protein for women ages 19 to 70 is 46 grams per day.
But, as you can see from this chart, you'll need to increase that if you're expecting or training for a marathon. Check out the chart below to see how much protein you should be eating each day.",
"Definition of summit for English Language Learners. : 1 the highest point of a mountain : the top of a mountain. : 2 the highest level. : 3 a meeting or series of meetings between the leaders of two or more governments."]
query_embeddings = model.encode(input_queries)
passage_embeddings = model.encode(input_passages)
print(util.cos_sim(query_embeddings, passage_embeddings))

Note

This Sentence Transformer Model is released in support of the training and evaluation of the encoder language model "Indus".

Accompanying paper can be found here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.10725

Citation

If you find this work useful, please cite using the following bibtex citation:

@misc {nasa-impact_2024,
	author       = { {NASA-IMPACT} },
	title        = { nasa-smd-ibm-st-v2 (Revision d249d84) },
	year         = 2024,
	url          = { https://huggingface.co/nasa-impact/nasa-smd-ibm-st-v2 },
	doi          = { 10.57967/hf/1800 },
	publisher    = { Hugging Face }
}

Attribution

IBM Research

  • Aashka Trivedi
  • Masayasu Muraoka
  • Bishwaranjan Bhattacharjee

NASA SMD

  • Muthukumaran Ramasubramanian
  • Iksha Gurung
  • Rahul Ramachandran
  • Manil Maskey
  • Kaylin Bugbee
  • Mike Little
  • Elizabeth Fancher
  • Lauren Sanders
  • Sylvain Costes
  • Sergi Blanco-Cuaresma
  • Kelly Lockhart
  • Thomas Allen
  • Felix Grazes
  • Megan Ansdell
  • Alberto Accomazzi
  • Sanaz Vahidinia
  • Ryan McGranaghan
  • Armin Mehrabian
  • Tsendgar Lee

Disclaimer

This sentence-transformer model is currently in an experimental phase. We are working to improve the model's capabilities and performance, and as we progress, we invite the community to engage with this model, provide feedback, and contribute to its evolution.

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

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