Model reference · open weights
LaBSE is an open-weight embedding model from setu4993. AxForge deploys and operates it for you on dedicated EU-owned hardware — with the licence handled where one is required.
Available as managed deployment — configured and operated for you on dedicated EU hardware, quoted per deployment.
What it is
| Released by | setu4993 |
|---|---|
| Type | Embedding models |
| Task | Embeddings |
| Parameters (lead) | 471M |
| Context | 512 tokens |
| Runs with | transformers |
| Released | 2022-03-02 |
| Popularity | 250k downloads / month |
| Licence | Open weights |
About
Language-agnostic BERT Sentence Encoder (LaBSE) is a BERT-based model trained for sentence embedding for 109 languages. The pre-training process combines masked language modeling with translation language modeling. The model is useful for getting multilingual sentence embeddings and for bi-text retrieval.
This is migrated from the v2 model on the TF Hub, which uses dict-based input. The embeddings produced by both the versions of the model are equivalent.
Using the model:
import torch
from transformers import BertModel, BertTokenizerFast
tokenizer = BertTokenizerFast.from_pretrained("setu4993/LaBSE")
model = BertModel.from_pretrained("setu4993/LaBSE")
model = model.eval()
english_sentences = [
"dog",
"Puppies are nice.",
"I enjoy taking long walks along the beach with my dog.",
]
english_inputs = tokenizer(english_sentences, return_tensors="pt", padding=True)
with torch.no_grad():
english_outputs = model(**english_inputs)
To get the sentence embeddings, use the pooler output:
english_embeddings = english_outputs.pooler_output
Output for other languages:
italian_sentences = [
"cane",
"I cuccioli sono carini.",
"Mi piace fare lunghe passeggiate lungo la spiaggia con il mio cane.",
]
japanese_sentences = ["犬", "子犬はいいです", "私は犬と一緒にビーチを散歩するのが好きです"]
italian_inputs = tokenizer(italian_sentences, return_tensors="pt", padding=True)
japanese_inputs = tokenizer(japanese_sentences, return_tensors="pt", padding=True)
with torch.no_grad():
italian_outputs = model(**italian_inputs)
japanese_outputs = model(**japanese_inputs)
italian_embeddings = italian_outputs.pooler_output
japanese_embeddings = japanese_outputs.pooler_output
For similarity between sentences, an L2-norm is recommended before calculating the similarity:
import torch.nn.functional as F
def similarity(embeddings_1, embeddings_2):
normalized_embeddings_1 = F.normalize(embeddings_1, p=2)
normalized_embeddings_2 = F.normalize(embeddings_2, p=2)
return torch.matmul(
normalized_embeddings_1, normalized_embeddings_2.transpose(0, 1)
)
print(similarity(english_embeddings, italian_embeddings))
print(similarity(english_embeddings, japanese_embeddings))
print(similarity(italian_embeddings, japanese_embeddings))
Details about data, training, evaluation and performance metrics are available in the original paper.
@misc{feng2020languageagnostic,
title={Language-agnostic BERT Sentence Embedding},
author={Fangxiaoyu Feng and Yinfei Yang and Daniel Cer and Naveen Arivazhagan and Wei Wang},
year={2020},
eprint={2007.01852},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CL}
}
From the published model card. Full card on the HuggingFace links in the sidebar.
Using it via the API
Once AxForge deploys setu4993-labse for you, it answers on the OpenAI-compatible API — the same base URL and keys as every other model. (setu4993-labse below is illustrative; you get the exact model name on deployment.)
$ curl -sS https://api.axforge.ai/v1/embeddings \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $AXFORGE_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"model":"setu4993-labse","input":"text to embed"}'
Create an account — your API key is available in the console. 3M free tokens every 30 days with every new account.