Model reference · open weights

dpr-question_encoder-multiset

Embeddings facebook Embeddings 1 build Non-commercial 1k dl/mo

dpr-question_encoder-multiset is an open-weight embedding model from Meta. dpr-question_encoder-multiset-base (BF16) weighs 438 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.

  • dpr-question_encoder-multiset-base is a BERT-based feature extraction model developed by Meta for open-domain question answering.
  • It encodes questions into vectors to retrieve relevant passages and supports a context length of 512 tokens in English.
  • The model is released under the cc-by-nc-4.0 license.

Summary of the facebook/dpr-question_encoder-multiset-base model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released byMeta
Released2022-03-02
VRAM438 MB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for dpr-question_encoder-multiset-base (BF16)

438 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 Meta says about dpr-question_encoder-multiset

Read the model card

Table of Contents

Model Details

Model Description: Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) is a set of tools and models for state-of-the-art open-domain Q&A research. dpr-question_encoder-multiset-base is the question encoder trained using the Natural Questions (NQ) dataset, TriviaQA, WebQuestions (WQ), and CuratedTREC (TREC).

How to Get Started with the Model

Use the code below to get started with the model.

from transformers import DPRQuestionEncoder, DPRQuestionEncoderTokenizer

tokenizer = DPRQuestionEncoderTokenizer.from_pretrained("facebook/dpr-question_encoder-multiset-base")
model = DPRQuestionEncoder.from_pretrained("facebook/dpr-question_encoder-multiset-base")
input_ids = tokenizer("Hello, is my dog cute ?", return_tensors="pt")["input_ids"]
embeddings = model(input_ids).pooler_output

Uses

Direct Use

dpr-question_encoder-multiset-base, dpr-ctx_encoder-multiset-base, and dpr-reader-multiset-base can be used for the task of open-domain question answering.

Misuse and Out-of-scope Use

The model should not be used to intentionally create hostile or alienating environments for people. In addition, the set of DPR models was not trained to be factual or true representations of people or events, and therefore using the models to generate such content is out-of-scope for the abilities of this model.

Risks, Limitations and Biases

CONTENT WARNING: Readers should be aware this section may contain content that is disturbing, offensive, and can propogate historical and current stereotypes.

Significant research has explored bias and fairness issues with language models (see, e.g., Sheng et al., 2021 and Bender et al., 2021). Predictions generated by the model can include disturbing and harmful stereotypes across protected classes; identity characteristics; and sensitive, social, and occupational groups.

Training

Training Data

This model was trained using the following datasets:

Training Procedure

The training procedure is described in the associated paper:

Given a collection of M text passages, the goal of our dense passage retriever (DPR) is to index all the passages in a low-dimensional and continuous space, such that it can retrieve efficiently the top k passages relevant to the input question for the reader at run-time.

Our dense passage retriever (DPR) uses a dense encoder EP(·) which maps any text passage to a d- dimensional real-valued vectors and builds an index for all the M passages that we will use for retrieval. At run-time, DPR applies a different encoder EQ(·) that maps the input question to a d-dimensional vector, and retrieves k passages of which vectors are the closest to the question vector.

The authors report that for encoders, they used two independent BERT (Devlin et al., 2019) networks (base, un-cased) and use FAISS (Johnson et al., 2017) during inference time to encode and index passages. See the paper for further details on training, including encoders, inference, positive and negative passages, and in-batch negatives.

Evaluation

The following evaluation information is extracted from the

Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.

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