๐ค Sentence Transformers is joining Hugging Face! ๐ค This formalizes the existing maintenance structure, as I've personally led the project for the past two years on behalf of Hugging Face! Details:
Today, the Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing (UKP) Lab is transferring the project to Hugging Face. Sentence Transformers will remain a community-driven, open-source project, with the same open-source license (Apache 2.0) as before. Contributions from researchers, developers, and enthusiasts are welcome and encouraged. The project will continue to prioritize transparency, collaboration, and broad accessibility.
We see an increasing wish from companies to move from large LLM APIs to local models for better control and privacy, reflected in the library's growth: in just the last 30 days, Sentence Transformer models have been downloaded >270 million times, second only to transformers.
I would like to thank the UKP Lab, and especially Nils Reimers and Iryna Gurevych, both for their dedication to the project and for their trust in myself, both now and two years ago. Back then, neither of you knew me well, yet you trusted me to take the project to new heights. That choice ended up being very valuable for the embedding & Information Retrieval community, and I think this choice of granting Hugging Face stewardship will be similarly successful.
I'm very excited about the future of the project, and for the world of embeddings and retrieval at large!
Takara takes 3rd place in the {tech:munich} AI hackathon with Fudeno!
A little over 2 weeks ago @aldigobbler and I set out to create the largest MultiModal SVG dataset ever created, we succeeded in this and when I was in Munich, Germany I took it one step further and made an entire app with it!
We fine-tuned Mistral Small, made a Next.JS application and blew some minds, taking 3rd place out of over 100 hackers. So cool!
๐ Multimodal > Mistral AI released a 24B vision LM, both base and instruction FT versions, sota ๐ฅ (OS) > with IBM we released SmolDocling, a sota 256M document parser with Apache 2.0 license (OS) > SpatialLM is a new vision LM that outputs 3D bounding boxes, comes with 0.5B (QwenVL based) and 1B (Llama based) variants > SkyWork released SkyWork-R1V-38B, new vision reasoning model (OS)
๐ฌ LLMs > NVIDIA released new Nemotron models in 49B and 8B with their post-training dataset > LG released EXAONE, new reasoning models in 2.4B, 7.8B and 32B > Dataset: Glaive AI released a new reasoning dataset of 22M+ examples > Dataset: NVIDIA released new helpfulness dataset HelpSteer3 > Dataset: OpenManusRL is a new agent dataset based on ReAct framework (OS) > Open-R1 team released OlympicCoder, new competitive coder model in 7B and 32B > Dataset: GeneralThought-430K is a new reasoning dataset (OS)
๐ผ๏ธ Image Generation/Computer Vision > Roboflow released RF-DETR, new real-time sota object detector (OS) ๐ฅ > YOLOE is a new real-time zero-shot object detector with text and visual prompts ๐ฅน > Stability AI released Stable Virtual Camera, a new novel view synthesis model > Tencent released Hunyuan3D-2mini, new small and fast 3D asset generation model > ByteDance released InfiniteYou, new realistic photo generation model > StarVector is a new 8B model that generates svg from images > FlexWorld is a new model that expands 3D views (OS)
๐ค Audio > Sesame released CSM-1B new speech generation model (OS)
๐ค Robotics > NVIDIA released GR00T, new robotics model for generalized reasoning and skills, along with the dataset
At Rapidata, we compared DeepL with LLMs like DeepSeek-R1, Llama, and Mixtral for translation quality using feedback from over 51,000 native speakers. Despite the costs, the performance makes it a valuable investment, especially in critical applications where translation quality is paramount. Now we can say that Europe is more than imposing regulations.
Our dataset, based on these comparisons, is now available on Hugging Face. This might be useful for anyone working on AI translation or language model evaluation.
An assembly of 18 European companies, labs, and universities have banded together to launch ๐ช๐บ EuroBERT! It's a state-of-the-art multilingual encoder for 15 European languages, designed to be finetuned for retrieval, classification, etc.
๐ช๐บ 15 Languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Italian, Russian, Polish, Portuguese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Dutch, Arabic, Turkish, Hindi 3๏ธโฃ 3 model sizes: 210M, 610M, and 2.1B parameters - very very useful sizes in my opinion โก๏ธ Sequence length of 8192 tokens! Nice to see these higher sequence lengths for encoders becoming more common. โ๏ธ Architecture based on Llama, but with bi-directional (non-causal) attention to turn it into an encoder. Flash Attention 2 is supported. ๐ฅ A new Pareto frontier (stronger *and* smaller) for multilingual encoder models ๐ Evaluated against mDeBERTa, mGTE, XLM-RoBERTa for Retrieval, Classification, and Regression (after finetuning for each task separately): EuroBERT punches way above its weight. ๐ Detailed paper with all details, incl. data: FineWeb for English and CulturaX for multilingual data, The Stack v2 and Proof-Pile-2 for code.
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!