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andito 
posted an update 8 days ago
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3850
🧠👁️ Can AI visualize solutions?

Humans often solve visual problems by sketching ideas in our minds. What if Vision-Language Models (VLMs) could do something similar, not by generating full images, but by using internal “mental sketches”?

That’s the idea behind Mirage, a new framework that empowers VLMs to reason using latent visual tokens. Instead of just thinking in words, Mirage mixes in abstract visual representations that help the model solve complex tasks.

These aren't photorealistic images. They're compact, internal representations optimized purely to support reasoning.

🔧 Mirage is trained in two phases:

1) Grounding: It learns to produce latent tokens anchored in real images.
2) Refinement: The model drops the images and learns to generate visual tokens on its own.

📈 And yes, it works!
On challenging benchmarks like Visual Spatial Planning, Jigsaw puzzles, and Spatial Attention Tasks, Mirage clearly outperforms GPT-4o and other strong baselines.
Smart sketches > empty words.

By mimicking the way humans visualize solutions, Mirage gives AI a new kind of imagination, one that’s faster, more efficient, and more human-like.
Kudos to the teams at UMass Amherst and MIT behind this exciting work.
Check the paper: Machine Mental Imagery: Empower Multimodal Reasoning with Latent Visual Tokens (2506.17218)
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tomaarsen 
posted an update 10 days ago
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‼️Sentence Transformers v5.0 is out! The biggest update yet introduces Sparse Embedding models, encode methods improvements, Router module for asymmetric models & much more. Sparse + Dense = 🔥 hybrid search performance! Details:

1️⃣ Sparse Encoder Models
Brand new support for sparse embedding models that generate high-dimensional embeddings (30,000+ dims) where <1% are non-zero:

- Full SPLADE, Inference-free SPLADE, and CSR architecture support
- 4 new modules, 12 new losses, 9 new evaluators
- Integration with @elastic-co , @opensearch-project , @NAVER LABS Europe, @qdrant , @IBM , etc.
- Decode interpretable embeddings to understand token importance
- Hybrid search integration to get the best of both worlds

2️⃣ Enhanced Encode Methods & Multi-Processing
- Introduce encode_query & encode_document automatically use predefined prompts
- No more manual pool management - just pass device list directly to encode()
- Much cleaner and easier to use than the old multi-process approach

3️⃣ Router Module & Advanced Training
- Router module with different processing paths for queries vs documents
- Custom learning rates for different parameter groups
- Composite loss logging - see individual loss components
- Perfect for two-tower architectures

4️⃣ Comprehensive Documentation & Training
- New Training Overview, Loss Overview, API Reference docs
- 6 new training example documentation pages
- Full integration examples with major search engines
- Extensive blogpost on training sparse models

Read the comprehensive blogpost about training sparse embedding models: https://huggingface.co/blog/train-sparse-encoder

See the full release notes here: https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/releases/v5.0.0

What's next? We would love to hear from the community! What sparse encoder models would you like to see? And what new capabilities should Sentence Transformers handle - multimodal embeddings, late interaction models, or something else? Your feedback shapes our roadmap!
tomaarsen 
posted an update 3 months ago
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4074
I just released Sentence Transformers v4.1; featuring ONNX and OpenVINO backends for rerankers offering 2-3x speedups and improved hard negatives mining which helps prepare stronger training datasets. Details:

🏎️ ONNX, OpenVINO, Optimization, Quantization
- I've added ONNX and OpenVINO support with just one extra argument: "backend" when loading the CrossEncoder reranker, e.g.: CrossEncoder("cross-encoder/ms-marco-MiniLM-L6-v2", backend="onnx")
- The export_optimized_onnx_model, export_dynamic_quantized_onnx_model, and export_static_quantized_openvino_model functions now work with CrossEncoder rerankers, allowing you to optimize (e.g. fusions, gelu approximations, etc.) or quantize (int8 weights) rerankers.
- I've uploaded ~340 ONNX & OpenVINO models for all existing models under the cross-encoder Hugging Face organization. You can use these without having to export when loading.

⛏ Improved Hard Negatives Mining
- Added 'absolute_margin' and 'relative_margin' arguments to mine_hard_negatives.
- absolute_margin ensures that sim(query, negative) < sim(query, positive) - absolute_margin, i.e. an absolute margin between the negative & positive similarities.
- relative_margin ensures that sim(query, negative) < sim(query, positive) * (1 - relative_margin), i.e. a relative margin between the negative & positive similarities.
- Inspired by the excellent NV-Retriever paper from NVIDIA.

And several other small improvements. Check out the full release notes here: https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/releases/tag/v4.1.0

With this release, I introduce near-feature parity between the SentenceTransformer embedding & CrossEncoder reranker models, which I've wanted to do for quite some time! With rerankers very strongly supported now, it's time to look forward to other useful architectures!

tomaarsen 
posted an update 4 months ago
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2674
‼️Sentence Transformers v4.0 is out! You can now train and finetune reranker models with multi-GPU training, bf16 support, loss logging, callbacks & much more. I also prove that finetuning on your domain helps much more than you might think.

1️⃣ Reranker Training Refactor
Reranker models can now be trained using an extensive trainer with a lot of powerful features:
- MultiGPU Training (Data Parallelism (DP) and Distributed Data Parallelism (DDP))
- bf16 training support; loss logging
- Evaluation datasets + evaluation loss
- Improved callback support + an excellent Weights & Biases integration
- Gradient checkpointing, gradient accumulation
- Model card generation
- Resuming from a training checkpoint without performance loss
- Hyperparameter Optimization
and much more!

Read my detailed blogpost to learn about the components that make up this new training approach: https://huggingface.co/blog/train-reranker
Notably, the release is fully backwards compatible: all deprecations are soft, meaning that they still work but emit a warning informing you how to upgrade.

2️⃣ New Reranker Losses
- 11 new losses:
- 2 traditional losses: BinaryCrossEntropy and CrossEntropy
- 2 distillation losses: MSE and MarginMSE
- 2 in-batch negatives losses: MNRL (a.k.a. InfoNCE) and CMNRL
- 5 learning to rank losses: Lambda, p-ListMLE, ListNet, RankNet, ListMLE

3️⃣ New Reranker Documentation
- New Training Overview, Loss Overview, API Reference docs
- 5 new, 1 refactored training examples docs pages
- 13 new, 6 refactored training scripts
- Migration guides (2.x -> 3.x, 3.x -> 4.x)

4️⃣ Blogpost
Alongside the release, I've written a blogpost where I finetune ModernBERT on a generic question-answer dataset. My finetunes easily outperform all general-purpose reranker models, even models 4x as big. Finetuning on your domain is definitely worth it: https://huggingface.co/blog/train-reranker

See the full release notes here: https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/releases/v4.0.1
lewtun 
posted an update 4 months ago
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Introducing OlympicCoder: a series of open reasoning models that can solve olympiad-level programming problems 🧑‍💻

- 7B open-r1/OlympicCoder-7B
- 32B open-r1/OlympicCoder-32B

We find that OlympicCoder models outperform Claude 3.7 Sonnet, as well as others over 100x larger 💪

Together with the models, we are releasing:

📊CodeForces-CoTs: new dataset of code problems from the most popular competitive coding platform, with R1 traces in C++ and Python open-r1/codeforces-cots

🏆 IOI'2024: a new benchmark of VERY hard programming problems where even frontier models struggle to match human performance open-r1/ioi

For links to the models and datasets, check out our latest progress report from Open R1: https://huggingface.co/blog/open-r1/update-3
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tomaarsen 
posted an update 4 months ago
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An assembly of 18 European companies, labs, and universities have banded together to launch 🇪🇺 EuroBERT! It's a state-of-the-art multilingual encoder for 15 European languages, designed to be finetuned for retrieval, classification, etc.

🇪🇺 15 Languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Italian, Russian, Polish, Portuguese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Dutch, Arabic, Turkish, Hindi
3️⃣ 3 model sizes: 210M, 610M, and 2.1B parameters - very very useful sizes in my opinion
➡️ Sequence length of 8192 tokens! Nice to see these higher sequence lengths for encoders becoming more common.
⚙️ Architecture based on Llama, but with bi-directional (non-causal) attention to turn it into an encoder. Flash Attention 2 is supported.
🔥 A new Pareto frontier (stronger *and* smaller) for multilingual encoder models
📊 Evaluated against mDeBERTa, mGTE, XLM-RoBERTa for Retrieval, Classification, and Regression (after finetuning for each task separately): EuroBERT punches way above its weight.
📝 Detailed paper with all details, incl. data: FineWeb for English and CulturaX for multilingual data, The Stack v2 and Proof-Pile-2 for code.

Check out the release blogpost here: https://huggingface.co/blog/EuroBERT/release
* EuroBERT/EuroBERT-210m
* EuroBERT/EuroBERT-610m
* EuroBERT/EuroBERT-2.1B

The next step is for researchers to build upon the 3 EuroBERT base models and publish strong retrieval, zero-shot classification, etc. models for all to use. I'm very much looking forward to it!
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andito 
posted an update 4 months ago
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2974
Extremely bullish on @CohereForAI 's Aya Vision (8B & 32B) - new SOTA open-weight VLMs

- 8B wins up to 81% of the time in its class, better than Gemini Flash
- 32B beats Llama 3.2 90B!
- Covers 23 languages, excels in image captioning, VQA & more
- Integrated on transformers from Day 0!

Efficient multimodal models are here to stay!!🔥
Check out their blog! https://huggingface.co/blog/aya-vision
lewtun 
posted an update 5 months ago
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Introducing OpenR1-Math-220k!

open-r1/OpenR1-Math-220k

The community has been busy distilling DeepSeek-R1 from inference providers, but we decided to have a go at doing it ourselves from scratch 💪

What’s new compared to existing reasoning datasets?

♾ Based on AI-MO/NuminaMath-1.5: we focus on math reasoning traces and generate answers for problems in NuminaMath 1.5, an improved version of the popular NuminaMath-CoT dataset.

🐳 800k R1 reasoning traces: We generate two answers for 400k problems using DeepSeek R1. The filtered dataset contains 220k problems with correct reasoning traces.

📀 512 H100s running locally: Instead of relying on an API, we leverage vLLM and SGLang to run generations locally on our science cluster, generating 180k reasoning traces per day.

⏳ Automated filtering: We apply Math Verify to only retain problems with at least one correct answer. We also leverage Llama3.3-70B-Instruct as a judge to retrieve more correct examples (e.g for cases with malformed answers that can’t be verified with a rules-based parser)

📊 We match the performance of DeepSeek-Distill-Qwen-7B by finetuning Qwen-7B-Math-Instruct on our dataset.

🔎 Read our blog post for all the nitty gritty details: https://huggingface.co/blog/open-r1/update-2