Fast_Sentence_Embeddings VS marqo

This is a great guide.

Also - despite the fact that language model embedding [1] are currently the hot rage, good old embedding models are more than good enough for most tasks.

With just a bit of tuning, they're generally as good at many sentence embedding tasks [2], and with good libraries [3] you're getting something like 400k sentence/sec on laptop CPU versus ~4k-15k sentences/sec on a v100 for LM embeddings.

When you should use language model embeddings:

- Multilingual tasks. While some embedding models are multilingual aligned (eg. MUSE [4]), you still need to route the sentence to the correct embedding model file (you need something like langdetect). It's also cumbersome, with one 400mb file per language.

For LM embedding models, many are multilingual aligned right away.

- Tasks that are very context specific or require fine-tuning. For instance, if you're making a RAG system for medical documents, the embedding space is best when it creates larger deviations for the difference between seemingly-related medical words.

This means models with more embedding dimensions, and heavily favors LM models over classic embedding models.

1. sbert.net

2. https://collaborate.princeton.edu/en/publications/a-simple-b...

3. https://github.com/oborchers/Fast_Sentence_Embeddings

4. https://github.com/facebookresearch/MUSE

You can find some comparisons and evaluation datasets/tasks here: https://www.sbert.net/docs/pretrained_models.html

Generally MiniLM is a good baseline. For faster models you want this library:

https://github.com/oborchers/Fast_Sentence_Embeddings

For higher quality ones, just take the bigger/slower models in the SentenceTransformers library

Links: fse: https://github.com/oborchers/Fast_Sentence_Embeddings Sentence-transformers: https://github.com/oborchers/sentence-transformers

We (Marqo) are doing a lot on 1 and 2. There is a huge amount to be done on the ML side of vector search and we are investing heavily in it. I think it has not quite sunk in that vector search systems are ML systems and everything that comes with that. I would love to chat about 1 and 2 so feel free to email me (email is in my profile). What we have done so far is here -> https://github.com/marqo-ai/marqo

Marqo.ai (https://github.com/marqo-ai/marqo) is doing some interesting stuff and is oss. We handle embedding generation as well as retrieval (full disclosure, I work for Marqo.ai)

Take a look here https://github.com/marqo-ai/local-image-search-demo. It is based on https://github.com/marqo-ai/marqo. We do a lot of image search applications. Feel free to reach out if you have other questions (email in profile).

That sounds much longer than it should. I am not sure on your exact use-case but I would encourage you to check out Marqo (https://github.com/marqo-ai/marqo - disclaimer, I am a co-founder). All inference and orchestration is included (no api calls) and many open-source or fine-tuned models can be used.

Try this https://github.com/marqo-ai/marqo which handles all the chunking for you (and is configurable). Also handles chunking of images in an analogous way. This enables highlighting in longer docs and also for images in a single retrieval step.

As others have correctly pointed out, to make a vector search or recommendation application requires a lot more than similarity alone. We have seen the HNSW become commoditised and the real value lies elsewhere. Just because a database has vector functionality doesn’t mean it will actually service anything beyond “hello world” type semantic search applications. IMHO these have questionable value, much like the simple Q and A RAG applications that have proliferated. The elephant in the room with these systems is that if you are relying on machine learning models to produce the vectors you are going to need to invest heavily in the ML components of the system. Domain specific models are a must if you want to be a serious contender to an existing search system and all the usual considerations still apply regarding frequent retraining and monitoring of the models. Currently this is left as an exercise to the reader - and a very large one at that. We (https://github.com/marqo-ai/marqo, I am a co-founder) are investing heavily into making the ML production worthy and continuous learning from feedback of the models as part of the system. Lots of other things to think about in how you represent documents with multiple vectors, multimodality, late interactions, the interplay between embedding quality and HNSW graph quality (i.e. recall) and much more.

Marqo provides automatic, configurable chunking (for example with overlap) and can allow you to bring your own model or choose from a wide range of opensource models. I think e5-large would be a good one to try. https://github.com/marqo-ai/marqo

Marqo has a similar API to Meilisearch's standard API but uses vector search in the background: https://github.com/marqo-ai/marqo

Have you tried Marqo? check the repo : https://github.com/marqo-ai/marqo