Granite Embedding Models

Parul Awasthy; Aashka Trivedi; Yulong Li; Mihaela Bornea; David Cox; Abraham Daniels; Martin Franz; Gabe Goodhart; Bhavani Iyer; Vishwajeet Kumar; Luis Lastras; Scott McCarley; Rudra Murthy; Vignesh P; Sara Rosenthal; Salim Roukos; Jaydeep Sen; Sukriti Sharma; Avirup Sil; Kate Soule; Arafat Sultan; Radu Florian

arXiv · 2502.20204

Granite Embedding Models

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Abstract

We introduce the Granite Embedding models, a family of encoder-based embedding models designed for retrieval tasks, spanning dense-retrieval and sparse retrieval architectures, with both English and Multilingual capabilities. This report provides the technical details of training these highly effective 12 layer embedding models, along with their efficient 6 layer distilled counterparts. Extensive evaluations show that the models, developed with techniques like retrieval oriented pretraining, contrastive finetuning, knowledge distillation, and model merging significantly outperform publicly available models of similar sizes on both internal IBM retrieval and search tasks, and have equivalent performance on widely used information retrieval benchmarks, while being trained on high-quality data suitable for enterprise use. We publicly release all our Granite Embedding models under the Apache 2.0 license, allowing both research and commercial use at https://huggingface.co/collections/ibm-granite.

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Parul Awasthy, Aashka Trivedi, Yulong Li, Mihaela Bornea, David Cox, Abraham Daniels, Martin Franz, Gabe Goodhart, Bhavani Iyer, Vishwajeet Kumar, Luis Lastras, Scott McCarley, Rudra Murthy, Vignesh P, Sara Rosenthal, Salim Roukos, Jaydeep Sen, Sukriti Sharma, Avirup Sil, Kate Soule, Arafat Sultan, Radu Florian. 2025-02-27. Granite Embedding Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20204

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