snowflake-arctic-embed-xs

News

12/04/2024: Release of snowflake-arctic-embed-l-v2.0 and snowflake-arctic-embed-m-v2.0 our newest models with multilingual workloads in mind. These models outperform prior versions of Arctic Embed and we suggest these replace prior versions!

07/26/2024: Release preprint [2407.18887] Embedding And Clustering Your Data Can Improve Contrastive Pretraining on arXiv.

07/18/2024: Release of snowflake-arctic-embed-m-v1.5, capable of producing highly compressible embedding vectors that preserve quality even when squished as small as 128 bytes per vector. Details about the development of this model are available in the launch post on the Snowflake engineering blog.

05/10/2024: Release the technical report on Arctic Embed

04/16/2024: Release the ** snowflake-arctic-embed ** family of text embedding models. The releases are state-of-the-art for Retrieval quality at each of their representative size profiles. Technical Report is coming shortly. For more details, please refer to our Github: Arctic-Text-Embed.

Models

snowflake-arctic-embed is a suite of text embedding models that focuses on creating high-quality retrieval models optimized for performance.

The snowflake-arctic-embedding models achieve state-of-the-art performance on the MTEB/BEIR leaderboard for each of their size variants. Evaluation is performed using these scripts. As shown below, each class of model size achieves SOTA retrieval accuracy compared to other top models.

The models are trained by leveraging existing open-source text representation models, such as bert-base-uncased, and are trained in a multi-stage pipeline to optimize their retrieval performance. First, the models are trained with large batches of query-document pairs where negatives are derived in-batch—pretraining leverages about 400m samples of a mix of public datasets and proprietary web search data. Following pretraining models are further optimized with long training on a smaller dataset (about 1m samples) of triplets of query, positive document, and negative document derived from hard harmful mining. Mining of the negatives and data curation is crucial to retrieval accuracy. A detailed technical report can be found here.

Aside from being great open-source models, the largest model, snowflake-arctic-embed-l, can serve as a natural replacement for closed-source embedding, as shown below.

snowflake-arctic-embed-xs

This tiny model packs quite the punch. Based on the all-MiniLM-L6-v2 model with only 22m parameters and 384 dimensions, this model should meet even the strictest latency/TCO budgets. Despite its size, its retrieval accuracy is closer to that of models with 100m paramers.