Model reference · open weights
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.
Summary of the Lajavaness/bilingual-embedding-small model card, 2026-10-01
What it is
| Released by | Lajavaness |
|---|---|
| Released | 2024-07-17 |
| Parameters | 118M |
| VRAM | 235 MB for the weights |
What it runs on
| Card | Runs | Memory |
|---|---|---|
| RTX 3060 12 GB | fits | 11.6 GB |
| RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB | fits | 15.4 GB |
| RTX 3090 24 GB | fits | 23.4 GB |
| RTX 4090 24 GB | fits | 23.4 GB |
| RTX 5090 32 GB | fits | 31.0 GB |
| L40S 48 GB | fits | 44.0 GB |
| A100 80 GB | fits | 78.2 GB |
| H100 80 GB | fits | 78.1 GB |
| RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB | fits | 93.8 GB |
| DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified | fits | 107 GB |
| H200 141 GB | fits | 138 GB |
| B200 180 GB | fits | 176 GB |
From 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.
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()
)
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)
TODO
@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
As published on the model card: the maker's own numbers, not measured by AxForge.
| Task | Dataset | Metric | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clustering | MTEB AlloProfClusteringP2P | v_measure | 63.190 |
| Clustering | MTEB AlloProfClusteringP2P | v_measures | |
| Clustering | MTEB AlloProfClusteringS2S | v_measure | 41.328 |
| Clustering | MTEB AlloProfClusteringS2S | v_measures | |
| Reranking | MTEB AlloprofReranking | map | 68.439 |
| Reranking | MTEB AlloprofReranking | mrr | 69.591 |
| Reranking | MTEB AlloprofReranking | nAUC_map_diff1 | 47.928 |
| Reranking | MTEB AlloprofReranking | nAUC_map_max | 10.207 |
| Reranking | MTEB AlloprofReranking | nAUC_mrr_diff1 | 47.824 |
| Reranking | MTEB AlloprofReranking | nAUC_mrr_max | 10.266 |
| Retrieval | MTEB AlloprofRetrieval | map_at_1 | 23.230 |
| Retrieval | MTEB AlloprofRetrieval | map_at_10 | 33.514 |
| Retrieval | MTEB AlloprofRetrieval | map_at_100 | 34.554 |
| Retrieval | MTEB AlloprofRetrieval | map_at_1000 | 34.621 |
| Retrieval | MTEB AlloprofRetrieval | map_at_20 | 34.129 |
| Retrieval | MTEB AlloprofRetrieval | map_at_3 | 30.527 |
| Retrieval | MTEB AlloprofRetrieval | map_at_5 | 32.107 |
| Retrieval | MTEB AlloprofRetrieval | mrr_at_1 | 23.230 |
| Retrieval | MTEB AlloprofRetrieval | mrr_at_10 | 33.514 |
| Retrieval | MTEB AlloprofRetrieval | mrr_at_100 | 34.554 |
| Retrieval | MTEB AlloprofRetrieval | mrr_at_1000 | 34.621 |
| Retrieval | MTEB AlloprofRetrieval | mrr_at_20 | 34.129 |
| Retrieval | MTEB AlloprofRetrieval | mrr_at_3 | 30.527 |
| Retrieval | MTEB AlloprofRetrieval | mrr_at_5 | 32.107 |