Model reference · open weights
simlm-msmarco-finetuned is an open-weight embedding model from intfloat. simlm-base-msmarco-finetuned (BF16) weighs 438 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.
Summary of the intfloat/simlm-base-msmarco-finetuned model card, 2026-10-01
What it is
| Released by | intfloat |
|---|---|
| Released | 2022-08-04 |
| VRAM | 438 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
paper available at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.02578
code available at https://github.com/microsoft/unilm/tree/master/simlm
In this paper, we propose SimLM (Similarity matching with Language Model pre-training), a simple yet effective pre-training method for dense passage retrieval. It employs a simple bottleneck architecture that learns to compress the passage information into a dense vector through self-supervised pre-training. We use a replaced language modeling objective, which is inspired by ELECTRA, to improve the sample efficiency and reduce the mismatch of the input distribution between pre-training and fine-tuning. SimLM only requires access to unlabeled corpus, and is more broadly applicable when there are no labeled data or queries. We conduct experiments on several large-scale passage retrieval datasets, and show substantial improvements over strong baselines under various settings. Remarkably, SimLM even outperforms multi-vector approaches such as ColBERTv2 which incurs significantly more storage cost.
| Model | dev MRR@10 | dev R@50 | dev R@1k | TREC DL 2019 nDCG@10 | TREC DL 2020 nDCG@10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RocketQAv2 | 38.8 | 86.2 | 98.1 | - | - |
| coCondenser | 38.2 | 86.5 | 98.4 | 71.7 | 68.4 |
| ColBERTv2 | 39.7 | 86.8 | 98.4 | - | - |
| SimLM (this model) | 41.1 | 87.8 | 98.7 | 71.4 | 69.7 |
Get embeddings from our fine-tuned model:
import torch
from transformers import AutoModel, AutoTokenizer, BatchEncoding, PreTrainedTokenizerFast
from transformers.modeling_outputs import BaseModelOutput
def l2_normalize(x: torch.Tensor):
return torch.nn.functional.normalize(x, p=2, dim=-1)
def encode_query(tokenizer: PreTrainedTokenizerFast, query: str) -> BatchEncoding:
return tokenizer(query,
max_length=32,
padding=True,
truncation=True,
return_tensors='pt')
def encode_passage(tokenizer: PreTrainedTokenizerFast, passage: str, title: str = '-') -> BatchEncoding:
return tokenizer(title,
text_pair=passage,
max_length=144,
padding=True,
truncation=True,
return_tensors='pt')
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained('intfloat/simlm-base-msmarco-finetuned')
model = AutoModel.from_pretrained('intfloat/simlm-base-msmarco-finetuned')
model.eval()
with torch.no_grad():
query_batch_dict = encode_query(tokenizer, 'what is qa')
outputs: BaseModelOutput = model(**query_batch_dict, return_dict=True)
query_embedding = l2_normalize(outputs.last_hidden_state[0, 0, :])
psg1 = 'Quality assurance (QA) is a process-centered approach to ensuring that a company or organization is providing the best possible products or services. It is related to quality control, which focuses on the end result, such as testing a sample of items from a batch after production.'
psg1_batch_dict = encode_passage(tokenizer, psg1)
outputs: BaseModelOutput = model(**psg1_batch_dict, return_dict=True)
psg1_embedding = l2_normalize(outputs.last_hidden_state[0, 0, :])
psg2 = 'The Super Bowl is typically four hours long. The game itself takes about three and a half hours, with a 30 minute halftime show built in.'
psg2_batch_dict = encode_passage(tokenizer, psg2)
outputs: BaseModelOutput = model(**psg2_batch_dict, return_dict=True)
psg2_embedding = l2_normalize(outputs.last_hidden_state[0, 0, :])
# Higher cosine similarity means they are more relevant
print(query_embedding.dot(psg1_embedding), query_embedding.dot(psg2_embedding))
@article{Wang2022SimLMPW,
title={SimLM: Pre-training with Representation Bottleneck for Dense Passage Retrieval},
author={Liang Wang and Nan Yang and Xiaolong Huang and Binxing Jiao and Linjun Yang and Daxin Jiang and Rangan Majumder and Furu Wei},
journal={ArXiv},
year={2022},
volume={abs/2207.02578}
}
Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.