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😎 I just published Sentence Transformers v5.1.0, and it's a big one. 2x-3x speedups of SparseEncoder models via ONNX and/or OpenVINO backends, easier distillation data preparation with hard negatives mining, and more:
1️⃣ Faster ONNX and OpenVINO backends for SparseEncoder models
Usage is as simple as
2️⃣ New
This new output format is immediately compatible with the MarginMSELoss and SparseMarginMSELoss for training SentenceTransformer, CrossEncoder, and SparseEncoder losses.
3️⃣ Gathering across devices
When doing multi-GPU training using a loss that has in-batch negatives (e.g. MultipleNegativesRankingLoss), you can now use
4️⃣ Trackio support
If you also upgrade
5️⃣ MTEB Documentation
We've added some documentation on evaluating SentenceTransformer models properly with MTEB. It's rudimentary as the documentation on the MTEB side is already great, but it should get you started.
Plus many more smaller features & fixes (crash fixes, compatibility with datasets v4, FIPS compatibility, etc.).
See the full release notes here: https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/releases/tag/v5.1.0
Big thanks to all of the contributors for helping with the release, many of the features from this release were proposed by others. I have a big list of future potential features that I'd love to add, but I'm
1️⃣ Faster ONNX and OpenVINO backends for SparseEncoder models
Usage is as simple as
backend="onnx" or backend="openvino" when initializing a SparseEncoder to get started, but I also included utility functions for optimization, dynamic quantization, and static quantization, plus benchmarks.2️⃣ New
n-tuple-scores output format from mine_hard_negativesThis new output format is immediately compatible with the MarginMSELoss and SparseMarginMSELoss for training SentenceTransformer, CrossEncoder, and SparseEncoder losses.
3️⃣ Gathering across devices
When doing multi-GPU training using a loss that has in-batch negatives (e.g. MultipleNegativesRankingLoss), you can now use
gather_across_devices=True to load in-batch negatives from the other devices too! Essentially a free lunch, pretty big impact potential in my evals.4️⃣ Trackio support
If you also upgrade
transformers, and you install trackio with pip install trackio, then your experiments will also automatically be tracked locally with trackio. Just open up localhost and have a look at your losses/evals, no logins, no metric uploading.5️⃣ MTEB Documentation
We've added some documentation on evaluating SentenceTransformer models properly with MTEB. It's rudimentary as the documentation on the MTEB side is already great, but it should get you started.
Plus many more smaller features & fixes (crash fixes, compatibility with datasets v4, FIPS compatibility, etc.).
See the full release notes here: https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/releases/tag/v5.1.0
Big thanks to all of the contributors for helping with the release, many of the features from this release were proposed by others. I have a big list of future potential features that I'd love to add, but I'm
