🚀 Sentence Transformers v3.1 is out! Featuring a hard negatives mining utility to get better models out of your data, a new strong loss function, training with streaming datasets, custom modules, bug fixes, small additions and docs changes. Here's the details:
⛏ Hard Negatives Mining Utility: Hard negatives are texts that are rather similar to some anchor text (e.g. a question), but are not the correct match. They're difficult for a model to distinguish from the correct answer, often resulting in a stronger model after training.
📉 New loss function: This loss function works very well for symmetric tasks (e.g. clustering, classification, finding similar texts/paraphrases) and a bit less so for asymmetric tasks (e.g. question-answer retrieval).
💾 Streaming datasets: You can now train with the datasets.IterableDataset, which doesn't require downloading the full dataset to disk before training. As simple as "streaming=True" in your "datasets.load_dataset".
🧩 Custom Modules: Model authors can now customize a lot more of the components that make up Sentence Transformer models, allowing for a lot more flexibility (e.g. multi-modal, model-specific quirks, etc.)
✨ New arguments to several methods: encode_multi_process gets a progress bar, push_to_hub can now be done to different branches, and CrossEncoders can be downloaded to specific cache directories.
🐛 Bug fixes: Too many to name here, check out the release notes!
📝 Documentation: A particular focus on clarifying the batch samplers in the Package Reference this release.
Check out the full release notes here ⭐️: https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/releases/tag/v3.1.0
I'm very excited to hear your feedback, and I'm looking forward to the future changes that I have planned, such as ONNX inference! I'm also open to suggestions for new features: feel free to send me your ideas.
⛏ Hard Negatives Mining Utility: Hard negatives are texts that are rather similar to some anchor text (e.g. a question), but are not the correct match. They're difficult for a model to distinguish from the correct answer, often resulting in a stronger model after training.
📉 New loss function: This loss function works very well for symmetric tasks (e.g. clustering, classification, finding similar texts/paraphrases) and a bit less so for asymmetric tasks (e.g. question-answer retrieval).
💾 Streaming datasets: You can now train with the datasets.IterableDataset, which doesn't require downloading the full dataset to disk before training. As simple as "streaming=True" in your "datasets.load_dataset".
🧩 Custom Modules: Model authors can now customize a lot more of the components that make up Sentence Transformer models, allowing for a lot more flexibility (e.g. multi-modal, model-specific quirks, etc.)
✨ New arguments to several methods: encode_multi_process gets a progress bar, push_to_hub can now be done to different branches, and CrossEncoders can be downloaded to specific cache directories.
🐛 Bug fixes: Too many to name here, check out the release notes!
📝 Documentation: A particular focus on clarifying the batch samplers in the Package Reference this release.
Check out the full release notes here ⭐️: https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/releases/tag/v3.1.0
I'm very excited to hear your feedback, and I'm looking forward to the future changes that I have planned, such as ONNX inference! I'm also open to suggestions for new features: feel free to send me your ideas.
GitHub
Release v3.1.0 - Hard Negatives Mining utility; new loss function for symmetric tasks; streaming datasets; custom modules · UKPLab/sentence…
This release introduces a hard negatives mining utility to get better models out of your data, a new strong loss function for symmetric tasks, training with streaming datasets to avoid having to st...