This release brings embedding quantization: a way to heavily speed up retrieval & other tasks, and a new powerful loss function: GISTEmbedLoss.

Install this version with

pip install sentence-transformers==2.6.0

Embedding Quantization

Embeddings may be challenging to scale up, which leads to expensive solutions and high latencies. However, there is a new approach to counter this problem; it entails reducing the size of each of the individual values in the embedding: Quantization. Experiments on quantization have shown that we can maintain a large amount of performance while significantly speeding up computation and saving on memory, storage, and costs.

To be specific, using binary quantization may result in retaining 96% of the retrieval performance, while speeding up retrieval by 25x and saving on memory & disk space with 32x. Do not underestimate this approach! Read more about Embedding Quantization in our extensive blogpost.

Binary and Scalar Quantization

Two forms of quantization exist at this time: binary and scalar (int8). These quantize embedding values from float32 into binary and int8, respectively. For Binary quantization, you can use the following snippet:

from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer
from sentence_transformers.quantization import quantize_embeddings

# 1. Load an embedding model
model = SentenceTransformer("mixedbread-ai/mxbai-embed-large-v1")

# 2a. Encode some text using "binary" quantization
binary_embeddings = model.encode(
    ["I am driving to the lake.", "It is a beautiful day."],
    precision="binary",
)

# 2b. or, encode some text without quantization & apply quantization afterwards
embeddings = model.encode(["I am driving to the lake.", "It is a beautiful day."])
binary_embeddings = quantize_embeddings(embeddings, precision="binary")

References:

• SentenceTransformer.encode
• quantize_embeddings

GISTEmbedLoss

GISTEmbedLoss, as introduced in Solatorio (2024), is a guided variant of the more standard in-batch negatives (MultipleNegativesRankingLoss) loss. Both loss functions are provided with a list of (anchor, positive) pairs, but while MultipleNegativesRankingLoss uses anchor_i and positive_i as positive pair and all positive_j with i != j as negative pairs, GISTEmbedLoss uses a second model to guide the in-batch negative sample selection.

This can be very useful, because it is plausible that anchor_i and positive_j are actually quite semantically similar. In this case, GISTEmbedLoss would not consider them a negative pair, while MultipleNegativesRankingLoss would. When finetuning MPNet-base on the AllNLI dataset, these are the Spearman correlation based on cosine similarity using the STS Benchmark dev set (higher is better):

The blue line is MultipleNegativesRankingLoss, whereas the grey line is GISTEmbedLoss with the small all-MiniLM-L6-v2 as the guide model. Note that all-MiniLM-L6-v2 by itself does not reach 88 Spearman correlation on this dataset, so this is really the effect of two models (mpnet-base and all-MiniLM-L6-v2) reaching a performance that they could not reach separately.

All changes

• Add GISTEmbedLoss by @avsolatorio in https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/pull/2535
• [feat] Add 'get_config_dict' method to GISTEmbedLoss for better model cards by @tomaarsen in https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/pull/2543
• Enable saving modules as pytorch_model.bin by @CKeibel in https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/pull/2542
• [deprecation] Deprecate save_to_hub in favor of push_to_hub; add safe_serialization support to push_to_hub by @tomaarsen in https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/pull/2544
• Fix SentenceTransformer encode documentation return type default (numpy vectors) by @CKeibel in https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/pull/2546
• [docs] Update return docstring of encode_multi_process by @tomaarsen in https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/pull/2548
• [feat] Add binary & scalar embedding quantization support to Sentence Transformers by @tomaarsen in https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/pull/2549

New Contributors

• @avsolatorio made their first contribution in https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/pull/2535
• @CKeibel made their first contribution in https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/pull/2542

Full Changelog: https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/compare/v2.5.1...v2.6.0