Model reference · open weights
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.
Summary of the nasa-impact/nasa-smd-ibm-st-v2 model card, 2026-10-01
What it is
| Released by | nasa-impact |
|---|---|
| Released | 2024-02-20 |
| VRAM | 249 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
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
Figure: Open dataset sources for sentence transformers (269M in total)
Additionally, 2.6M abstract + title pairs collected from NASA SMD documents.
Following models are evaluated:
Figure: BEIR and NASA-IR Evaluation Metrics
For NASA SMD related, scientific usecases.
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))
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
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 }
}
IBM Research
NASA SMD
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.