Show HN: Model2vec-Rs – Fast Static Text Embeddings in Rust(github.com)
59 pointsby Tananon5 days ago5 comments
  • gthompson5125 days ago
    How does it handle documents longer than the context length of the model? Sorry there are a ton of these regularly and they don't usually think about this.

    Edit: it seems like it just splits in to sentences which is a weird thing to do given in English only 95%ish percent agreement is even possible on what a sentence is. ``` // Process in batches for batch in sentences.chunks(batch_size) { // Truncate each sentence to max_length * median_token_length chars let truncated: Vec<&str> = batch .iter() .map(|text| { if let Some(max_tok) = max_length { Self::truncate_str(text, max_tok, self.median_token_length) } else { text.as_str() } }) .collect(); ```

    • gthompson5125 days ago
      Sorry, looking more, it doesn't seem like you are doing what you are saying. This is just poorly breaking text into bad chunks with no regard for semantics and is like ~200 lines of actual code. What is this for? Most models can handle fairly large contexts.

      Edit: That wasn't intended to be mean, although it may come off that way, but what is this supposed to be for? Myself I have text >8k tokens that need to be embedded and test things regularly.

  • noahbp5 days ago
    What is your preferred static text embedding model?

    For someone looking to build a large embedding search, fast static embeddings seem like a good deal, but almost too good to be true. What quality tradeoff are you seeing with these models versus embedding models with attention mechanisms?

    • Tananon5 days ago
      It depends a bit on the task and language, but my go-to is usually minishlab/potion-base-8M for every task except retrieval (classification, clustering, etc). For retrieval minishlab/potion-retrieval-32M works best. If performance is critical minishlab/potion-base-32M is best, although it's a bit bigger (~100mb).

      There's definitely a quality trade-off. We have extensive benchmarks here: https://github.com/MinishLab/model2vec/blob/main/results/REA.... potion-base-32M reaches ~92% of the performance of MiniLM while being much faster (about 70x faster on CPU). It depends a bit on your constraints: if you have limited hardware and very high throughput, these models will allow you to still make decent quality embeddings, but ofcourse an attention based model will be better, but more expensive.

      • refulgentis5 days ago
        Thanks man this is incredible work, really appreciate the details you went into.

        I've been chewing on if there was a miracle that could make embeddings 10x faster for my search app that uses minilmv3, sounds like there is :) I never would have dreamed. I'll definitely be trying potion-base in my library for Flutter x ONNX.

        EDIT: I was thanking you for thorough benchmarking, then it dawned on me you were on the team that built the model - fantastic work, I can't wait to try this. And you already have ONNX!

        EDIT2: Craziest demo I've seen in a while. I'm seeing 23x faster, after 10 minutes of work.

        • Tananon5 days ago
          Thanks so much for the kind words, that's awesome to hear! If you have any ideas or requests, don't hesitate to reach out!
  • echelon5 days ago
    I love that you're doing this, Tananon.

    We've been using Candle and Cudarc and having a fairly good time of it. We've built a real time drawing app on a custom LCM stack, and Rust makes it feel rock solid. Python is way too flimsy for something like this.

    The more the Rust ML ecosystem grows, the better. It's a little bit fledgling right now, so every little bit counts.

    If llama.cpp had instead been llama.rs, I feel like we would have had a runaway success.

    We'll be checking this out! Kudos, and keep it up!

    • Tananon5 days ago
      Awesome to hear! It's great to see the Rust ML ecosystem growing, and we hope we can be a small part of it. Don't hesitate to reach out with any ideas or requests!
  • Havoc5 days ago
    Surprised it is so much faster. I would have thought the python one is C under the hood
    • Tananon5 days ago
      Indeed, I also didn't expect it to be so much faster! I think it's because most of the time is actually spent on tokenization (which also happens in Rust in the Python package), but there is some transfer overhead there between Rust and Python. The other operations should be the same speed I think.
  • badmonster5 days ago
    How do I load a custom model instead of the ones on Hugging Face?
    • Tananon5 days ago
      We support loading from both local as well as Hugging Face paths with from_pretrained! So let model = StaticModel::from_pretrained("my_custom_model", None, None, None)?; will work.