onnx VS sentence-transformers

Once your model has been trained and validated using Anomalib, the next step is to prepare it for real-time implementation. This is where ONNX (Open Neural Network Exchange) or OpenVINO (Open Visual Inference and Neural network Optimization) comes into play.

ONNX is an open format from the Linux Foundation to represent machine learning models. It is becoming extensively adopted by the Machine Learning community and is compatible with most of the machine learning frameworks like PyTorch, TensorFlow, etc. Converting a model between any of those formats and ONNX is really simple and can be done in most cases with a single command.

ONNX[0], model-as-protosbufs, continuing to gain adoption will hopefully solve this issue.

[0] https://github.com/onnx/onnx

Running inference for large models on CPU is not a new problem and fortunately there has been great development in many different optimization frameworks for speeding up matrix and tensor computations on CPU. We explored multiple optimization frameworks and methods to improve latency, namely TorchScript, BetterTransformer and ONNX.

ONNX is a format for representing machine learning models in a portable way. Additionally, ONNX models can be easily optimized and thus become smaller and faster.

I would say onnx.ai [0] provides more information about ONNX for those who aren’t working with ML/DL.

[0] https://onnx.ai

It's not clear why you thing this sub is appropriate for some third party system with a Python interface. Why don't you try their discussion group: https://github.com/onnx/onnx/discussions

This kind of indirection through standardisation is pretty common to make compatibility between different kinds of software components easier. Some other good examples are the LSP project from Microsoft and ONNX to represent machine learning models. The first provides a standard so that IDEs don't have to re-invent the weel for every programming language. The latter decouples training frameworks from inference frameworks. Going back to WSGI, you can find a pretty extensive rationale for the WSGI standard here if interested.

txtai is an open-source first system. Given it's own open-source roots, like-minded projects such as sentence-transformers are prioritized during development. But that doesn't mean txtai can't work with Embeddings API services.

Ok great. My use case is not very specific, but rather general. I am looking for a model that can perform asymmetric semantic search for the languages I mentioned earlier (Urdu, Persian, Arabic etc.). I have also looked into the sentence-transformer training documentation. Do you think it would be a good idea to use the XNLI dataset for fine-tuning? Or maybe you can suggest much better dataset. Furthermore, I am not sure if fine-tuning is suitable for my task. Because my use case is general so I can use already trained model.

The task you are looking for is semantic textual similarity. There are a few models and datasets out there that can do this. I'd probably start with the SemEval2017 Task 1 task description and competition entries here and then work outward from there (using something like SemanticScholar or Papers With Code to find newer state of the art works that cite these models if needed). For what it's worth you might find that Sentence Bert (SBERT) gives good vectors for cosine similarity comparison out of the box for this task.

Check out the sentence-transformers implementation. If I don't miss anything they don't exclude CLS when the pooling strategy is set to 'mean'

Break up transcript into shorter segments and convert segments to a 768 vector array. Use a process known as embedding using our second ML model, UKP Labs BERT’s sentence transformer model.

Not sure what kind of texts you have, but these models have a max sequence limit of 512 (approx 350 words or so). If you're texts are longer than that, consider splitting them up into chunks or creating a summary and taking an embedding of that. Some clustering algorithm may be the way to go here. Here's a bunch of examples. I use agglomerative for my use case.

https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/tree/master/examples/training/data_augmentation (Augmented Encoding)

For vector representation you can take the mean and then pca to get the size that you want, but if you have time then use sentence transformers to train a vector representation instead.