Model reference · open weights
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 by | Tarka-AIR |
|---|---|
| Type | Embedding models |
| Task | Embeddings |
| Parameters (lead) | 151M |
| Context | 2k tokens |
| Runs with | sentence-transformers |
| Released | 2025-11-04 |
| Popularity | 513 downloads / month |
| Licence | Open, with conditions |
About
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.
Find more information about Tarka-Embedding-150M-V1 in our blog post.
[!NOTE] 🚀 Try our demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/Tarka-AIR/Tarka-Embedding
Tarka-Embedding-150M-V1 has the following features:
Currently, only the MTEB (English) benchmark has been evaluated. Additional multilingual benchmark results will be released in future updates.
google/embeddinggemma-300m and LiquidAI/LFM2-350M@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 English / Models | Param. | Mean(Task) | Mean(Type) | Class. | Clust. | Pair Class. | Rerank. | Retri. | STS | Summ. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GIST-large-Embedding-v0 | 335M | 66.25 | 61.96 | 78.91 | 48.84 | 86.7 | 48.76 | 54.52 | 84.44 | 31.52 |
| mxbai-embed-large-v1 | 335M | 66.26 | 62.04 | 79.1 | 47.48 | 87.2 | 48.05 | 55.4 | 84.42 | 32.63 |
| UAE-Large-V1 | 335M | 66.4 | 61.85 | 79.08 | 47.86 | 87.25 | 48.35 | 55.91 | 84.37 | 30.13 |
| GIST-Embedding-v0 | 109M | 65.5 | 61.4 | 78.16 | 48.5 | 86.33 | 47.52 | 53.59 | 83.35 | 32.32 |
| bge-large-en-v1.5 | 335M | 65.89 | 61.87 | 78.34 | 48.01 | 87.13 | 48.26 | 55.44 | 82.79 | 33.13 |
| multilingual-e5-large-instruct | 560M | 65.53 | 61.21 | 75.54 | 49.89 | 86.24 | 48.74 | 53.47 | 84.72 | 29.89 |
| gte-large | 335M | 64.77 | 60.86 | 75.47 | 48.2 | 85.08 | 47.84 | 53.29 | 83.27 | 32.9 |
| bge-base-en-v1.5 | 109M | 65.14 | 60.77 | 77.69 | 47.42 | 86.56 | 46.66 | 54.75 | 82.12 | 30.19 |
| mini-gte | 66M | 65.06 | 60.65 | 79.95 | 47.89 | 84.78 | 46.86 | 53.23 | 81.55 | 30.31 |
| bilingual-embedding-large | 559M | 63.77 | 60.2 | 77.17 | 46.53 | 85.62 | 46.25 | 46.86 | 86 | 32.95 |
| gte-base | 109M | 63.9 | 59.94 | 75.04 | 47.74 | 84.68 | 47.17 | 51.9 | 82.17 | 30.9 |
| mmlw-roberta-large | 434M | 61.8 | 59.45 | 79.66 | 47.89 | 85.2 | 47.56 | 39.69 | 81.2 | 34.97 |
| e5-large | 335M | 63.13 | 59.68 | 75.61 | 45.88 | 85.94 | 45.43 | 49.64 | 82 | 33.26 |
| mmlw-e5-base | 278M | 61.43 | 58.61 | 77.88 | 47.11 | 84.88 | 46.4 | 40.21 | 81.92 | 31.87 |
| e5-large-v2 | 335M | 62.79 | 59.4 | 76.44 | 45.23 | 86.06 | 45.72 | 49.31 | 80.67 | 32.34 |
| Tarka-Embedding-150M-V1 | 150M | 66.40 | 61.35 | 86.28 | 51.94 | 81.65 | 45.66 | 51.62 | 81.48 | 30.86 |
# 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]])
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
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.