Model reference · open weights

snowflake-arctic-embed-l

Embeddings Snowflake Embeddings 2 builds Open weights 715k dl/mo

snowflake-arctic-embed-l is an open-weight embedding model from Snowflake. snowflake-arctic-embed-l (FP32) weighs 668 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

What it is

Released bySnowflake
Released2024-11-08
Parameters568M
VRAM668 MB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for snowflake-arctic-embed-l (FP32)

668 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

Builds

Sizes, precisions & builds

BuildParamsPrecisionWeightsSmallest setup
snowflake-arctic-embed-l-v2.0 ↗ 568MFP32 1.1 GBRTX 3060 12 GB
snowflake-arctic-embed-l (above) ↗ 334MFP32 668 MBRTX 3060 12 GB

From the model card

What Snowflake says about snowflake-arctic-embed-l

News

Models

Snowflake arctic-embed-l-v2.0 is the newest addition to the suite of embedding models Snowflake has released optimizing for retrieval performance and inference efficiency. Arctic Embed 2.0 introduces a new standard for multilingual embedding models, combining high-quality multilingual text retrieval without sacrificing performance in English. Released under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, Arctic Embed 2.0 is ideal for applications that demand reliable, enterprise-grade multilingual search and retrieval at scale.

Key Features:

Read the full model card
  1. Multilingual without compromise: Excels in English and non-English retrieval, outperforming leading open-source and proprietary models on benchmarks like MTEB Retrieval, CLEF, and MIRACL.

  2. Inference efficiency: Its 303m non-embedding parameters inference is fast and efficient for any scale.

  3. Compression-friendly: Achieves high-quality retrieval with embeddings as small as 128 bytes/vector using Matryoshka Representation Learning (MRL) and quantization-aware embedding training. Please note that like our v1.5 model, the MRL for this model is 256 dimensions, and high-quality 128-byte compression is achieved via 4-bit quantization (e.g. using a pq256x4fs fast-scan FAISS index or using the example code published alongside our 1.5 model).

  4. Drop-In Replacement: arctic-embed-l-v2.0 builds on BAAI/bge-m3-retromae which allows direct drop-in inference replacement with any form of new libraries, kernels, inference engines etc.

  5. Long Context Support: arctic-embed-l-v2.0 builds on BAAI/bge-m3-retromae which can support a context window of up to 8192 via the use of RoPE.

Quality Benchmarks

Unlike most other open-source models, Arctic-embed-l-v2.0 excels across English (via MTEB Retrieval) and multilingual (via MIRACL and CLEF). You no longer need to support models to empower high-quality English and multilingual retrieval. All numbers mentioned below are the average NDCG@10 across the dataset being discussed.

Model Name# params# non-emb params# dimensionsBEIR (15)MIRACL (4)CLEF (Focused)CLEF (Full)
snowflake-arctic-l-v2.0568M303M102455.655.852.954.3
snowflake-arctic-m109M86M76854.924.934.429.1
snowflake-arctic-l335M303M102456.034.838.233.7
me5 base560M303M102451.454.043.034.6
bge-m3 (BAAI)568M303M102448.856.840.841.3
gte (Alibaba)305M113M76851.152.347.753.1

Aside from high-quality retrieval arctic delivers embeddings that are easily compressible. Leverage vector truncation via MRL to decrease vector size by 4x with less than 3% degredation in quality. Combine MRLed vectors with vector compression (Int4) to power retrieval in 128 bytes per doc.

ModelBEIR (15)Relative PerformanceMIRACL (4)Relative PerformanceCLEF (5)Relative PerformanceCLEF (Full)Relative Performance
snowflake-arctic-l-v2.0102455.6N/A55.8N/A52.9N/A54.3N/A
snowflake-arctic-l-v2.025654.3-0.18%54.3-2.70%51.9-1.81%53.4-1.53%

Usage

Using Sentence Transformers

from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer

# Load the model
model_name = 'Snowflake/snowflake-arctic-embed-l-v2.0'
model = SentenceTransformer(model_name)

# Define the queries and documents
queries = ['what is snowflake?', 'Where can I get the best tacos?']
documents = ['The Data Cloud!', 'Mexico City of Course!']

# Compute embeddings: use `prompt_name="query"` to encode queries!
query_embeddings = model.encode(queries, prompt_name="query")
document_embeddings = model.encode(documents)

# Compute cosine similarity scores
scores = model.similarity(query_embeddings, document_embeddings)

# Output the results
for query, query_scores in zip(queries, scores):
    doc_score_pairs = list(zip(documents, query_scores))
    doc_score_pairs = sorted(doc_score_pairs, key=lambda x: x[1], reverse=True)
    print("Query:", query)
    for document, score in doc_score_pairs:
        print(score, document)

Using Huggingface Transformers

You can use the transformers package to use Snowflake's arctic-embed model, as shown below. For optimal retrieval quality, use the CLS token to embed each text portion and use the query prefix below (just on the query).

import torch
from transformers import AutoModel, AutoTokenizer

model_name = 'Snowflake/snowflake-arctic-embed-l-v2.0'
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name)
model = AutoModel.from_pretrained(model_name, add_pooling_layer=False)
model.eval()

query_prefix = 'query: '
queries  = ['what is snowflake?', 'Where can I get the best tacos?']
queries_with_prefix = ["{}{}".format(query_prefix, i) for i in queries]
query_tokens = tokenizer(queries_with_prefix, padding=True, truncation=True, return_tensors='pt', max_length=8192)

documents = ['The Data Cloud!', 'Mexico City of Course!']
document_tokens =  tokenizer(documents, padding=True, truncation=True, return_tensors='pt', max_length=8192)

# Compute token embeddings
with torch.no_grad():
    query_embeddings = model(**query_tokens)[

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

Benchmarks

Reported results

As published on the model card: the maker's own numbers, not measured by AxForge.

TaskDatasetMetricScore
ClassificationMTEB AmazonCounterfactualClassification (en-ext)accuracy67.039
ClassificationMTEB AmazonCounterfactualClassification (en-ext)f155.181
ClassificationMTEB AmazonCounterfactualClassification (en-ext)f1_weighted73.411
ClassificationMTEB AmazonCounterfactualClassification (en-ext)ap17.991
ClassificationMTEB AmazonCounterfactualClassification (en-ext)ap_weighted17.991
ClassificationMTEB AmazonCounterfactualClassification (en-ext)main_score67.039
ClassificationMTEB AmazonCounterfactualClassification (en)accuracy65.597
ClassificationMTEB AmazonCounterfactualClassification (en)f160.244
ClassificationMTEB AmazonCounterfactualClassification (en)f1_weighted68.998
ClassificationMTEB AmazonCounterfactualClassification (en)ap29.762
ClassificationMTEB AmazonCounterfactualClassification (en)ap_weighted29.762
ClassificationMTEB AmazonCounterfactualClassification (en)main_score65.597
ClassificationMTEB AmazonPolarityClassification (default)accuracy74.257
ClassificationMTEB AmazonPolarityClassification (default)f174.029
ClassificationMTEB AmazonPolarityClassification (default)f1_weighted74.029
ClassificationMTEB AmazonPolarityClassification (default)ap68.760
ClassificationMTEB AmazonPolarityClassification (default)ap_weighted68.760
ClassificationMTEB AmazonPolarityClassification (default)main_score74.257
ClassificationMTEB AmazonReviewsClassification (en)accuracy34.946
ClassificationMTEB AmazonReviewsClassification (en)f134.285
ClassificationMTEB AmazonReviewsClassification (en)f1_weighted34.285
ClassificationMTEB AmazonReviewsClassification (en)main_score34.946
RetrievalMTEB ArguAna (default)ndcg_at_133.286
RetrievalMTEB ArguAna (default)ndcg_at_349.051
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