Model reference · open weights

bilingual-embedding-small

Embeddings Lajavaness Embeddings 1 build Open weights 5k dl/mo

bilingual-embedding-small is an open-weight embedding model from Lajavaness. bilingual-embedding-small (FP32) weighs 235 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

For self-hosting, compare this build's requirements below with the GPU you plan to rent.

  • bilingual-embedding-small is a sentence-similarity model developed by Lajavaness that encodes English and French text into 384-dimensional vectors.
  • The model contains 118M parameters and supports a context length of 512 tokens.
  • It is distributed under the apache-2.0 license.

Summary of the Lajavaness/bilingual-embedding-small model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released byLajavaness
Released2024-07-17
Parameters118M
VRAM235 MB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for bilingual-embedding-small (FP32)

235 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

From the model card

What Lajavaness says about bilingual-embedding-small

Read the model card

Bilingual-embedding is the Embedding Model for bilingual language: french and english. This model is a specialized sentence-embedding trained specifically for the bilingual language, leveraging the robust capabilities of Multilingual-MiniLM-L12-H384, a pre-trained language model is built upon multilingual-e5 architecture. The model utilizes MiniLM to encode english-french sentences into a 384-dimensional vector space, facilitating a wide range of applications from semantic search to text clustering. The embeddings capture the nuanced meanings of english-french sentences, reflecting both the lexical and contextual layers of the language.

Full Model Architecture

SentenceTransformer(
  (0): Transformer({'max_seq_length': 512, 'do_lower_case': False}) with Transformer model: BilingualModel
  (1): Pooling({'word_embedding_dimension': 384, 'pooling_mode_cls_token': False, 'pooling_mode_mean_tokens': True, 'pooling_mode_max_tokens': False, 'pooling_mode_mean_sqrt_len_tokens': False, 'pooling_mode_weightedmean_tokens': False, 'pooling_mode_lasttoken': False, 'include_prompt': True})
  (2): Normalize()
)

Training and Fine-tuning process

Stage 1: NLI Training
  • Dataset: [(SNLI+XNLI) for english+french]
  • Method: Training using Multi-Negative Ranking Loss. This stage focused on improving the model's ability to discern and rank nuanced differences in sentence semantics.

Stage 3: Continued Fine-tuning for Semantic Textual Similarity on STS Benchmark

  • Dataset: [STSB-fr and en]
  • Method: Fine-tuning specifically for the semantic textual similarity benchmark using Siamese BERT-Networks configured with the 'sentence-transformers' library.

Stage 4: Advanced Augmentation Fine-tuning

  • Dataset: STSB with generate silver sample from gold sample
  • Method: Employed an advanced strategy using Augmented SBERT with Pair Sampling Strategies, integrating both Cross-Encoder and Bi-Encoder models. This stage further refined the embeddings by enriching the training data dynamically, enhancing the model's robustness and accuracy.

Usage:

Using this model becomes easy when you have sentence-transformers installed:

pip install -U sentence-transformers

Then you can use the model like this:

from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer

sentences = ["Paris est une capitale de la France", "Paris is a capital of France"]

model = SentenceTransformer('Lajavaness/bilingual-embedding-small', trust_remote_code=True)

embeddings = model.encode(sentences)

print(embeddings)

Evaluation

TODO

Citation

@article{conneau2019unsupervised,
  title={Unsupervised cross-lingual representation learning at scale},
  author={Conneau, Alexis and Khandelwal, Kartikay and Goyal, Naman and Chaudhary, Vishrav and Wenzek, Guillaume and Guzm{\'a}n, Francisco and Grave, Edouard and Ott, Myle and Zettlemoyer, Luke and Stoyanov, Veselin},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.02116},
  year={2019}
}

@article{reimers2019sentence,
   title={Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks},
   author={Nils Reimers, Iryna Gurevych},
   journal={https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.10084},
   year={2019}
}

@article{thakur2020augmented,
  title={Augmented SBERT: Data Augmentation Method for Improving Bi-Encoders for Pairwise Sentence Scoring Tasks},
  author={Thakur, Nandan and Reimers, Nils and Daxenberger, Johannes and Gurevych, Iryna},
  journal={arXiv e-prints},
  pages={arXiv--2010},
  year={2020}

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
ClusteringMTEB AlloProfClusteringP2Pv_measure63.190
ClusteringMTEB AlloProfClusteringP2Pv_measures
ClusteringMTEB AlloProfClusteringS2Sv_measure41.328
ClusteringMTEB AlloProfClusteringS2Sv_measures
RerankingMTEB AlloprofRerankingmap68.439
RerankingMTEB AlloprofRerankingmrr69.591
RerankingMTEB AlloprofRerankingnAUC_map_diff147.928
RerankingMTEB AlloprofRerankingnAUC_map_max10.207
RerankingMTEB AlloprofRerankingnAUC_mrr_diff147.824
RerankingMTEB AlloprofRerankingnAUC_mrr_max10.266
RetrievalMTEB AlloprofRetrievalmap_at_123.230
RetrievalMTEB AlloprofRetrievalmap_at_1033.514
RetrievalMTEB AlloprofRetrievalmap_at_10034.554
RetrievalMTEB AlloprofRetrievalmap_at_100034.621
RetrievalMTEB AlloprofRetrievalmap_at_2034.129
RetrievalMTEB AlloprofRetrievalmap_at_330.527
RetrievalMTEB AlloprofRetrievalmap_at_532.107
RetrievalMTEB AlloprofRetrievalmrr_at_123.230
RetrievalMTEB AlloprofRetrievalmrr_at_1033.514
RetrievalMTEB AlloprofRetrievalmrr_at_10034.554
RetrievalMTEB AlloprofRetrievalmrr_at_100034.621
RetrievalMTEB AlloprofRetrievalmrr_at_2034.129
RetrievalMTEB AlloprofRetrievalmrr_at_330.527
RetrievalMTEB AlloprofRetrievalmrr_at_532.107
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