Post
3417
I just released Sentence Transformers v4.1; featuring ONNX and OpenVINO backends for rerankers offering 2-3x speedups and improved hard negatives mining which helps prepare stronger training datasets. Details:
ποΈ ONNX, OpenVINO, Optimization, Quantization
- I've added ONNX and OpenVINO support with just one extra argument: "backend" when loading the CrossEncoder reranker, e.g.:
- The
- I've uploaded ~340 ONNX & OpenVINO models for all existing models under the cross-encoder Hugging Face organization. You can use these without having to export when loading.
β Improved Hard Negatives Mining
- Added 'absolute_margin' and 'relative_margin' arguments to
-
-
- Inspired by the excellent NV-Retriever paper from NVIDIA.
And several other small improvements. Check out the full release notes here: https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/releases/tag/v4.1.0
With this release, I introduce near-feature parity between the SentenceTransformer embedding & CrossEncoder reranker models, which I've wanted to do for quite some time! With rerankers very strongly supported now, it's time to look forward to other useful architectures!
ποΈ ONNX, OpenVINO, Optimization, Quantization
- I've added ONNX and OpenVINO support with just one extra argument: "backend" when loading the CrossEncoder reranker, e.g.:
CrossEncoder("cross-encoder/ms-marco-MiniLM-L6-v2", backend="onnx")- The
export_optimized_onnx_model, export_dynamic_quantized_onnx_model, and export_static_quantized_openvino_model functions now work with CrossEncoder rerankers, allowing you to optimize (e.g. fusions, gelu approximations, etc.) or quantize (int8 weights) rerankers.- I've uploaded ~340 ONNX & OpenVINO models for all existing models under the cross-encoder Hugging Face organization. You can use these without having to export when loading.
β Improved Hard Negatives Mining
- Added 'absolute_margin' and 'relative_margin' arguments to
mine_hard_negatives. -
absolute_margin ensures that sim(query, negative) < sim(query, positive) - absolute_margin, i.e. an absolute margin between the negative & positive similarities.-
relative_margin ensures that sim(query, negative) < sim(query, positive) * (1 - relative_margin), i.e. a relative margin between the negative & positive similarities.- Inspired by the excellent NV-Retriever paper from NVIDIA.
And several other small improvements. Check out the full release notes here: https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/releases/tag/v4.1.0
With this release, I introduce near-feature parity between the SentenceTransformer embedding & CrossEncoder reranker models, which I've wanted to do for quite some time! With rerankers very strongly supported now, it's time to look forward to other useful architectures!
