MSMARCO Models
MS MARCO is a large scale information retrieval corpus that was created based on real user search queries using Bing search engine. The provided models can be used for semantic search, i.e., given keywords / a search phrase / a question, the model will find passages that are relevant for the search query.
The training data consists of over 500k examples, while the complete corpus consist of over 8.8 Million passages.
Usage
from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer, util
model = SentenceTransformer("msmarco-distilbert-base-v3")
query_embedding = model.encode("How big is London")
passage_embedding = model.encode("London has 9,787,426 inhabitants at the 2011 census")
print("Similarity:", util.cos_sim(query_embedding, passage_embedding))
For more details on the usage, see Applications - Information Retrieval
Performance
Performance is evaluated on TREC-DL 2019, which is a query-passage retrieval task where multiple queries have been annotated as with their relevance with respect to the given query. Further, we evaluate on the MS Marco Passage Retrieval dataset.
As baseline we show the results for lexical search with BM25 using Elasticsearch.
| Approach | NDCG@10 (TREC DL 19 Reranking) | MRR@10 (MS Marco Dev) | Queries (GPU / CPU) | Docs (GPU / CPU) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Models tuned for cosine-similarity | ||||
| msmarco-MiniLM-L-6-v3 | 67.46 | 32.27 | 18,000 / 750 | 2,800 / 180 |
| msmarco-MiniLM-L-12-v3 | 65.14 | 32.75 | 11,000 / 400 | 1,500 / 90 |
| msmarco-distilbert-base-v3 | 69.02 | 33.13 | 7,000 / 350 | 1,100 / 70 |
| msmarco-distilbert-base-v4 | 70.24 | 33.79 | 7,000 / 350 | 1,100 / 70 |
| msmarco-roberta-base-v3 | 69.08 | 33.01 | 4,000 / 170 | 540 / 30 |
| Models tuned for dot-product | ||||
| msmarco-distilbert-base-dot-prod-v3 | 68.42 | 33.04 | 7,000 / 350 | 1100 / 70 |
| msmarco-roberta-base-ance-firstp | 67.84 | 33.01 | 4,000 / 170 | 540 / 30 |
| msmarco-distilbert-base-tas-b | 71.04 | 34.43 | 7,000 / 350 | 1100 / 70 |
| Previous approaches | ||||
| BM25 (Elasticsearch) | 45.46 | 17.29 | ||
| msmarco-distilroberta-base-v2 | 65.65 | 28.55 | ||
| msmarco-roberta-base-v2 | 67.18 | 29.17 | ||
| msmarco-distilbert-base-v2 | 68.35 | 30.77 |
Notes:
We provide two type of models, one tuned for cosine-similarity, the other for dot-product. Make sure to use the right method to compute the similarity between query and passages.
Models tuned for cosine-similarity will prefer the retrieval of shorter passages, while models for dot-product will prefer the retrieval of longer passages. Depending on your task, you might prefer the one or the other type of model.
msmarco-roberta-base-ance-firstp is the MSMARCO Dev Passage Retrieval ANCE(FirstP) 600K model from ANCE. This model should be used with dot-product instead of cosine similarity.
msmarco-distilbert-base-tas-b uses the model from sebastian-hofstaetter/distilbert-dot-tas_b-b256-msmarco. See the linked documentation / paper for more details.
Encoding speeds are per second and were measured on a V100 GPU and an 8 core Intel(R) Xeon(R) Platinum 8168 CPU @ 2.70GHz
Changes in v3
The models from v2 have been used for find for all training queries similar passages. An MS MARCO Cross-Encoder based on the electra-base-model has been then used to classify if these retrieved passages answer the question.
If they received a low score by the cross-encoder, we saved them as hard negatives: They got a high score from the bi-encoder, but a low-score from the (better) cross-encoder.
We then trained the v2 models with these new hard negatives.