Model reference · open weights

paraphrase-MiniLM-L12

Embeddings sentence-transformers Embeddings 1 build Open weights 443k dl/mo

paraphrase-MiniLM-L12 is an open-weight embedding model from sentence-transformers. paraphrase-MiniLM-L12-v2 (FP32) weighs 67 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

  • paraphrase-MiniLM-L12-v2 is a sentence-transformers model with 33M parameters designed for sentence-similarity tasks.
  • It maps sentences and paragraphs to a 384-dimensional dense vector space for use in clustering or semantic search.
  • The model supports a context length of 512 tokens and is released under the apache-2.0 licence.

Summary of the sentence-transformers/paraphrase-MiniLM-L12-v2 model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released bysentence-transformers
Released2022-03-02
Parameters33M
VRAM67 MB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for paraphrase-MiniLM-L12-v2 (FP32)

67 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 paraphrase-MiniLM-L12

Read the model card

This is a sentence-transformers model: It maps sentences & paragraphs to a 384 dimensional dense vector space and can be used for tasks like clustering or 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
sentences = ["This is an example sentence", "Each sentence is converted"]

model = SentenceTransformer('sentence-transformers/paraphrase-MiniLM-L12-v2')
embeddings = model.encode(sentences)
print(embeddings)

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 right pooling-operation on-top of the contextualized word embeddings.

from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModel
import torch

#Mean Pooling - Take attention mask into account for correct averaging
def mean_pooling(model_output, attention_mask):
    token_embeddings = model_output[0] #First element of model_output contains all token embeddings
    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)

# Sentences we want sentence embeddings for
sentences = ['This is an example sentence', 'Each sentence is converted']

# Load model from HuggingFace Hub
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained('sentence-transformers/paraphrase-MiniLM-L12-v2')
model = AutoModel.from_pretrained('sentence-transformers/paraphrase-MiniLM-L12-v2')

# Tokenize sentences
encoded_input = tokenizer(sentences, padding=True, truncation=True, return_tensors='pt')

# Compute token embeddings
with torch.no_grad():
    model_output = model(**encoded_input)

# Perform pooling. In this case, max pooling.
sentence_embeddings = mean_pooling(model_output, encoded_input['attention_mask'])

print("Sentence embeddings:")
print(sentence_embeddings)

Full Model Architecture

SentenceTransformer(
  (0): Transformer({'max_seq_length': 128, 'do_lower_case': False}) with Transformer model: BertModel
  (1): Pooling({'word_embedding_dimension': 384, 'pooling_mode_cls_token': False, 'pooling_mode_mean_tokens': True, 'pooling_mode_max_tokens': False, 'pooling_mode_mean_sqrt_len_tokens': False})
)

Citing & Authors

This model was trained by sentence-transformers.

If you find this model helpful, feel free to cite our publication Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks:

@inproceedings{reimers-2019-sentence-bert,
    title = "Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks",
    author = "Reimers, Nils and Gurevych, Iryna",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = "11",
    year = "2019",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "http://arxiv.org/abs/1908.10084",
}

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

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