Model reference · open weights
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.
Summary of the facebook/dpr-question_encoder-multiset-base model card, 2026-10-01
What it is
| Released by | Meta |
|---|---|
| Released | 2022-03-02 |
| VRAM | 438 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
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
This model was trained using the following datasets:
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.
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.