multi-qa-mpnet-base-dot-v1

This is a sentence-transformers model: It maps sentences & paragraphs to a 768 dimensional dense vector space and was designed for semantic search. It has been trained on 215M (question, answer) pairs from diverse sources. For an introduction to semantic search, have a look at: SBERT.net - Semantic Search

Technical Details

In the following some technical details how this model must be used:

Background

The project aims to train sentence embedding models on very large sentence level datasets using a self-supervised contrastive learning objective. We use a contrastive learning objective: given a sentence from the pair, the model should predict which out of a set of randomly sampled other sentences, was actually paired with it in our dataset.

We developped this model during the Community week using JAX/Flax for NLP & CV, organized by Hugging Face. We developped this model as part of the project: Train the Best Sentence Embedding Model Ever with 1B Training Pairs. We benefited from efficient hardware infrastructure to run the project: 7 TPUs v3-8, as well as intervention from Googles Flax, JAX, and Cloud team member about efficient deep learning frameworks.

Intended uses

Our model is intented to be used for semantic search: It encodes queries / questions and text paragraphs in a dense vector space. It finds relevant documents for the given passages.

Note that there is a limit of 512 word pieces: Text longer than that will be truncated. Further note that the model was just trained on input text up to 250 word pieces. It might not work well for longer text.

Training procedure

The full training script is accessible in this current repository: train_script.py.

Pre-training

We use the pretrained mpnet-base model. Please refer to the model card for more detailed information about the pre-training procedure.

Training

We use the concatenation from multiple datasets to fine-tune our model. In total we have about 215M (question, answer) pairs. We sampled each dataset given a weighted probability which configuration is detailed in the data_config.json file.

The model was trained with MultipleNegativesRankingLoss using CLS-pooling, dot-product as similarity function, and a scale of 1.