Model reference · open weights

Tarka-Embedding

Available as managed deployment Embeddings Tarka-AIR Embeddings 1 variants 513 dl/mo

Tarka-Embedding is an open-weight embedding model from Tarka-AIR. 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 byTarka-AIR
TypeEmbedding models
TaskEmbeddings
Parameters (lead)151M
Context2k tokens
Runs withsentence-transformers
Released2025-11-04
Popularity513 downloads / month
LicenceOpen, with conditions

About

What Tarka-Embedding is

Introduction

Tarka-Embedding-150M-V1 is a 150M parameter embedding model designed to produce 768-dimensional dense text representations. It is optimized for a wide range of downstream applications such as semantic similarity, search, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The model focuses on capturing deep contextual semantics to support general-purpose text understanding across diverse domains.

The model is trained using Data-Free Knowledge Distillation (DFKD). To prepare the training data, standard open-source datasets were used only as a source of raw textual content — all labels, annotations, and structural elements were stripped to create a plain, unlabeled text corpus. The resulting dataset contained approximately 2 billion tokens, all of which were used during model training.

Read the full model card

Find more information about Tarka-Embedding-150M-V1 in our blog post.

[!NOTE] 🚀 Try our demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/Tarka-AIR/Tarka-Embedding

Model Details

Tarka-Embedding-150M-V1 has the following features:

  • Model Type: Text Embedding
  • Supported Languages: English, Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish.
  • Number of Paramaters: 150M
  • Context Length: 2048
  • Embedding Dimension: 768

Currently, only the MTEB (English) benchmark has been evaluated. Additional multilingual benchmark results will be released in future updates.

Training Details

  • Initialization: Based on google/embeddinggemma-300m and LiquidAI/LFM2-350M
  • Architecture Modifications: The tokenizer and embedding weights from the EmbeddingGemma model were replaced with the LFM2-350M tokenizer. The embedding layer and several hidden layers were reinitialized to align with the modified architecture, resulting in a dimensional change from [262,144, 768] → [64,400, 768], effectively reducing the total parameter count by approximately 50%.
  • Training Data: 2 billion tokens curated from multiple open source datasets.
  • Teacher Model: google/embeddinggemma-300m
  • Compute Resources: 40 GPU hours on NVIDIA A100

Citation

@misc{tarka_ai_research_2025,
	author       = { Tarka AI Research },
	title        = { Tarka-Embedding-150M-V1 (Revision c5f4f43) },
	year         = 2025,
	url          = { https://huggingface.co/Tarka-AIR/Tarka-Embedding-150M-V1 },
	doi          = { 10.57967/hf/6875 },
	publisher    = { Hugging Face }
}

MTEB (Eng v2)

MTEB English / ModelsParam.Mean(Task)Mean(Type)Class.Clust.Pair Class.Rerank.Retri.STSSumm.
GIST-large-Embedding-v0335M66.2561.9678.9148.8486.748.7654.5284.4431.52
mxbai-embed-large-v1335M66.2662.0479.147.4887.248.0555.484.4232.63
UAE-Large-V1335M66.461.8579.0847.8687.2548.3555.9184.3730.13
GIST-Embedding-v0109M65.561.478.1648.586.3347.5253.5983.3532.32
bge-large-en-v1.5335M65.8961.8778.3448.0187.1348.2655.4482.7933.13
multilingual-e5-large-instruct560M65.5361.2175.5449.8986.2448.7453.4784.7229.89
gte-large335M64.7760.8675.4748.285.0847.8453.2983.2732.9
bge-base-en-v1.5109M65.1460.7777.6947.4286.5646.6654.7582.1230.19
mini-gte66M65.0660.6579.9547.8984.7846.8653.2381.5530.31
bilingual-embedding-large559M63.7760.277.1746.5385.6246.2546.868632.95
gte-base109M63.959.9475.0447.7484.6847.1751.982.1730.9
mmlw-roberta-large434M61.859.4579.6647.8985.247.5639.6981.234.97
e5-large335M63.1359.6875.6145.8885.9445.4349.648233.26
mmlw-e5-base278M61.4358.6177.8847.1184.8846.440.2181.9231.87
e5-large-v2335M62.7959.476.4445.2386.0645.7249.3180.6732.34
Tarka-Embedding-150M-V1150M66.4061.3586.2851.9481.6545.6651.6281.4830.86

Sentence Transformers Usage

# Requires transformers>=4.51.0
# Requires sentence-transformers>=2.7.0

from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer

# Load the model
model = SentenceTransformer("Tarka-AIR/Tarka-Embedding-150M-V1")

# The queries and documents to embed
queries = [
    "What is the capital of China?",
    "Explain gravity",
]
documents = [
    "The capital of China is Beijing.",
    "Gravity is a force that attracts two bodies towards each other. It gives weight to physical objects and is responsible for the movement of planets around the sun.",
]

query_embeddings = model.encode_query(queries)
document_embeddings = model.encode_document(documents)
print(query_embeddings.shape, document_embeddings.shape)
# (2, 768) (2, 768)

# Compute similarities to determine a ranking
similarities = model.similarity(query_embeddings, document_embeddings)
print(similarities)
# tensor([[0.7830, 0.2929],[0.3390, 0.6536]])

Prompt Instructions

EmbeddingGemma can generate optimized embeddings for various use cases—such as document retrieval, question answering, and fact verification—or for specific input types—either a query or a document—using prompts that are prepended to the input strings. Query prompts follow the form task: {task description} | query: where the task description varies by the use case, with the default task description being search result. Document-style prompts follow the form title: {title | "none"} | text: where the title is either none (the default) or the actual t

From the published model card. Full card on the HuggingFace links in the sidebar.

Using it via the API

Call it like any OpenAI endpoint

Once AxForge deploys tarka-embedding for you, it answers on the OpenAI-compatible API — the same base URL and keys as every other model. (tarka-embedding 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":"tarka-embedding","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.

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