Model reference · open weights

serafim-portuguese-pt-sentence-encoder

Embeddings PORTULAN Embeddings 2 builds Open weights 4k dl/mo

serafim-portuguese-pt-sentence-encoder is an open-weight embedding model from PORTULAN. serafim-335m-portuguese-pt-sentence-encoder (FP32) weighs 669 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.

  • serafim-portuguese-pt-sentence-encoder is a sentence-transformers model developed by PORTULAN for the sentence-similarity task.
  • It maps Portuguese sentences and paragraphs to a 768-dimensional dense vector space, supporting applications such as clustering and semantic search.
  • The model contains 109M parameters, has a context length of 512 tokens, and is released under the MIT licence.

Summary of the PORTULAN/serafim-100m-portuguese-pt-sentence-encoder model card, 2026-10-01. The estimate below is for another build of the family.

What it is

Released byPORTULAN
Released2024-07-04
Parameters109M
VRAM669 MB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for serafim-335m-portuguese-pt-sentence-encoder (FP32)

669 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

Builds

Sizes, precisions & builds

BuildParamsPrecisionWeightsSmallest setup
serafim-100m-portuguese-pt-sentence-encoder ↗ 109MFP32 218 MBRTX 3060 12 GB
serafim-335m-portuguese-pt-sentence-encoder (above) ↗ 334MFP32 669 MBRTX 3060 12 GB

From the model card

What PORTULAN says about serafim-portuguese-pt-sentence-encoder

Read the model card

This is a sentence-transformers model: It maps sentences & paragraphs to a 768 dimensional dense vector space and can be used for tasks like clustering or semantic search.

Usage (Sentence-Transformers)

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 = ["This is an example sentence", "Each sentence is converted"]

model = SentenceTransformer('PORTULAN/serafim-100m-portuguese-pt-sentence-encoder')
embeddings = model.encode(sentences)
print(embeddings)

Usage (HuggingFace Transformers)

Without sentence-transformers, you can use the model like this: First, you pass your input through the transformer model, then you have to apply the right pooling-operation on-top of the contextualized word embeddings.

from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModel
import torch

#Mean Pooling - Take attention mask into account for correct averaging
def mean_pooling(model_output, attention_mask):
    token_embeddings = model_output[0] #First element of model_output contains all token embeddings
    input_mask_expanded = attention_mask.unsqueeze(-1).expand(token_embeddings.size()).float()
    return torch.sum(token_embeddings * input_mask_expanded, 1) / torch.clamp(input_mask_expanded.sum(1), min=1e-9)

# Sentences we want sentence embeddings for
sentences = ['This is an example sentence', 'Each sentence is converted']

# Load model from HuggingFace Hub
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained('PORTULAN/serafim-100m-portuguese-pt-sentence-encoder')
model = AutoModel.from_pretrained('PORTULAN/serafim-100m-portuguese-pt-sentence-encoder')

# Tokenize sentences
encoded_input = tokenizer(sentences, padding=True, truncation=True, return_tensors='pt')

# Compute token embeddings
with torch.no_grad():
    model_output = model(**encoded_input)

# Perform pooling. In this case, mean pooling.
sentence_embeddings = mean_pooling(model_output, encoded_input['attention_mask'])

print("Sentence embeddings:")
print(sentence_embeddings)

Evaluation Results

For an automated evaluation of this model, see the Sentence Embeddings Benchmark: https://seb.sbert.net

Training

The model was trained with the parameters:

DataLoader:

torch.utils.data.dataloader.DataLoader of length 296 with parameters:

{'batch_size': 64, 'sampler': 'torch.utils.data.sampler.RandomSampler', 'batch_sampler': 'torch.utils.data.sampler.BatchSampler'}

Loss:

sentence_transformers.losses.CoSENTLoss.CoSENTLoss with parameters:

{'scale': 20.0, 'similarity_fct': 'pairwise_cos_sim'}

Parameters of the fit()-Method:

{
    "epochs": 20,
    "evaluation_steps": 30,
    "evaluator": "sentence_transformers.evaluation.EmbeddingSimilarityEvaluator.EmbeddingSimilarityEvaluator",
    "max_grad_norm": 1,
    "optimizer_class": "",
    "optimizer_params": {
        "lr": 1e-05
    },
    "scheduler": "WarmupLinear",
    "steps_per_epoch": 296,
    "warmup_steps": 592,
    "weight_decay": 0.01
}

Full Model Architecture

SentenceTransformer(
  (0): Transformer({'max_seq_length': 128, 'do_lower_case': False}) with Transformer model: BertModel
  (1): Pooling({'word_embedding_dimension': 768, '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})
)

Citing & Authors

The article has been presented at EPIA 2024 conference and published by Springer:

@InProceedings{epia2024serafim,
    title={Open Sentence Embeddings for Portuguese with the Serafim PT* encoders family},
    author={Luís Gomes and António Branco and João Silva and João Rodrigues and Rodrigo Santos},
    editor={Manuel Filipe Santos and José Machado and Paulo Novais and Paulo Cortez and Pedro Miguel Moreira},
    booktitle={Progress in Artificial Intelligence},
    doi={doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-73503-5_22},
    year={2024},
    publisher={Springer Nature Switzerland},
    address={Cham},
    pages={267--279},
    isbn={978-3-031-73503-5}
}

Before publication by Springer, the pre-print was available at arXiv:

@misc{gomes2024opensentenceembeddingsportuguese,
    title={Open Sentence Embeddings for Portuguese with the Serafim PT* encoders family},
    author={Luís Gomes and António Branco and João Silva and João Rodrigues and Rodrigo Santos},
    year={2024},
    eprint={2407.19527},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    primaryClass={cs.CL},
    url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.19527},
}

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

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