Model reference · open weights

bge-small-en

Embeddings unsloth Embeddings 2 builds Open weights 349k dl/mo

bge-small-en is an open-weight embedding model from unsloth. bge-small-en-v1.5-GGUF (GGUF) weighs 68 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

bge-small-en-v1.5 is a 33M parameter feature-extraction model developed by unsloth for English text retrieval. It supports a context length of 512 tokens and is released under the MIT licence.

Summary of the unsloth/bge-small-en-v1.5 model card, 2026-10-01. The estimate below is for another build of the family.

What it is

Released byunsloth
Released2026-06-01
Parameters33M
VRAM68 MB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for bge-small-en-v1.5-GGUF (GGUF)

68 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
bge-small-en-v1.5 ↗ 33MFP32 67 MBRTX 3060 12 GB
bge-small-en-v1.5-GGUF (above) ↗ —GGUF 68 MBRTX 3060 12 GB

From the model card

What unsloth says about bge-small-en

Read the model card

More details please refer to our Github: FlagEmbedding.

If you are looking for a model that supports more languages, longer texts, and other retrieval methods, you can try using bge-m3.

English | 中文

FlagEmbedding focuses on retrieval-augmented LLMs, consisting of the following projects currently:

News

  • 1/30/2024: Release BGE-M3, a new member to BGE model series! M3 stands for Multi-linguality (100+ languages), Multi-granularities (input length up to 8192), Multi-Functionality (unification of dense, lexical, multi-vec/colbert retrieval). It is the first embedding model which supports all three retrieval methods, achieving new SOTA on multi-lingual (MIRACL) and cross-lingual (MKQA) benchmarks. Technical Report and Code. :fire:

  • 1/9/2024: Release Activation-Beacon, an effective, efficient, compatible, and low-cost (training) method to extend the context length of LLM. Technical Report :fire:

  • 12/24/2023: Release LLaRA, a LLaMA-7B based dense retriever, leading to state-of-the-art performances on MS MARCO and BEIR. Model and code will be open-sourced. Please stay tuned. Technical Report :fire:

  • 11/23/2023: Release LM-Cocktail, a method to maintain general capabilities during fine-tuning by merging multiple language models. Technical Report :fire:

  • 10/12/2023: Release LLM-Embedder, a unified embedding model to support diverse retrieval augmentation needs for LLMs. Technical Report

  • 09/15/2023: The technical report of BGE has been released

  • 09/15/2023: The massive training data of BGE has been released

  • 09/12/2023: New models:

    • New reranker model: release cross-encoder models BAAI/bge-reranker-base and BAAI/bge-reranker-large, which are more powerful than embedding model. We recommend to use/fine-tune them to re-rank top-k documents returned by embedding models.
    • update embedding model: release bge-*-v1.5 embedding model to alleviate the issue of the similarity distribution, and enhance its retrieval ability without instruction.
  • 09/07/2023: Update fine-tune code: Add script to mine hard negatives and support adding instruction during fine-tuning.

  • 08/09/2023: BGE Models are integrated into Langchain, you can use it like this; C-MTEB leaderboard is available.

  • 08/05/2023: Release base-scale and small-scale models, best performance among the models of the same size 🤗

  • 08/02/2023: Release bge-large-*(short for BAAI General Embedding) Models, rank 1st on MTEB and C-MTEB benchmark! :tada: :tada:

  • 08/01/2023: We release the Chinese Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (C-MTEB), consisting of 31 test dataset.

Model List

bge is short for BAAI general embedding.

ModelLanguageDescriptionquery instruction for retrieval [1]
BAAI/bge-m3MultilingualInference Fine-tuneMulti-Functionality(dense retrieval, sparse retrieval, multi-vector(colbert)), Multi-Linguality, and Multi-Granularity(8192 tokens)
BAAI/llm-embedderEnglishInference Fine-tunea unified embedding model to support diverse retrieval augmentation needs for LLMsSee README
BAAI/bge-reranker-largeChinese and EnglishInference Fine-tunea cross-encoder model which is more accurate but less efficient [2]
BAAI/bge-reranker-baseChinese and EnglishInference Fine-tunea cross-encoder model which is more accurate but less efficient [2]

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)accuracy73.791
ClassificationMTEB AmazonCounterfactualClassification (en)ap37.219
ClassificationMTEB AmazonCounterfactualClassification (en)f168.091
ClassificationMTEB AmazonPolarityClassificationaccuracy92.754
ClassificationMTEB AmazonPolarityClassificationap89.468
ClassificationMTEB AmazonPolarityClassificationf192.739
ClassificationMTEB AmazonReviewsClassification (en)accuracy46.986
ClassificationMTEB AmazonReviewsClassification (en)f146.559
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamap_at_135.846
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamap_at_1051.388
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamap_at_10052.133
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamap_at_100052.141
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamap_at_347.037
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamap_at_549.579
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamrr_at_136.558
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamrr_at_1051.658
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamrr_at_10052.402
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamrr_at_100052.410
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamrr_at_347.345
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnamrr_at_549.798
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnandcg_at_135.846
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnandcg_at_1059.550
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnandcg_at_10062.596
RetrievalMTEB ArguAnandcg_at_100062.759
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