README.md

---

license: apache-2.0  
base_model: microsoft/MiniLM-L6-v2  
tags:  
- transformers  
- sentence-transformers  
- sentence-similarity  
- feature-extraction  
- text-embeddings-inference  
- information-retrieval  
- knowledge-distillation  
language:
- en
---


<div style="display: flex; justify-content: center;">      
    <div style="display: flex; align-items: center; gap: 10px;">      

        <img src="logo.webp" alt="MongoDB Logo" style="height: 36px; width: auto; border-radius: 4px;">      

        <span style="font-size: 32px; font-weight: bold">MongoDB/mdbr-leaf-mt-asym</span>      

    </div>      

</div>  


# Content

1. [Introduction](#introduction)
2. [Technical Report](#technical-report)
3. [Highlights](#highlights)
4. [Benchmarks](#benchmark-comparison)
5. [Quickstart](#quickstart)
6. [Citation](#citation)

# Introduction

`mdbr-leaf-mt-asym` is a high-performance text embedding model designed for classification, clustering, semantic sentence similarity and summarization tasks. 

This model is the asymmetric variant of `mdbr-leaf-mt`, which uses [`MongoDB/mdbr-leaf-mt`](https://huggingface.co/MongoDB/mdbr-leaf-mt) for queries and [`mixedbread-ai/mxbai-embed-large-v1`](https://huggingface.co/mixedbread-ai/mxbai-embed-large-v1) for documents.

The model is robust to [vector quantization](#vector-quantization) and [MRL truncation](#mrl-truncation).

If you are looking to perform semantic search / information retrieval (e.g. for RAGs), please check out our [`mdbr-leaf-ir`](https://huggingface.co/MongoDB/mdbr-leaf-ir) model, which is specifically trained for these tasks.

> [!Note]  
> **Note**: this model has been developed by the ML team of MongoDB Research. At the time of writing it is not used in any of MongoDB's commercial product or service offerings.

# Technical Report

A technical report detailing our proposed `LEAF` training procedure is [available here](https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12539).

# Highlights  

* **State-of-the-Art Performance**: `mdbr-leaf-mt-asym` achieves state-of-the-art results for compact embedding models, **ranking #1** on the public [MTEB v2 (Eng) leaderboard](https://huggingface.co/spaces/mteb/leaderboard) for models with ≤30M parameters.
* **Flexible Architecture Support**: `mdbr-leaf-mt-asym` uses an asymmetric retrieval architecture enabling even greater retrieval results.
* **MRL and Quantization Support**: embedding vectors generated by `mdbr-leaf-mt-asym` compress well when truncated (MRL) and can be stored using more efficient types like `int8` and `binary`.  [See below](#mrl-truncation) for more information.

## Benchmark Comparison

The table below shows the scores for `mdbr-leaf-mt` on the MTEB v2 (English) benchmark, compared to other retrieval models.

`mdbr-leaf-mt` ranks #1 on this benchmark for models with <30M parameters.

| Model                              | Size    | MTEB v2 (Eng) |  
|------------------------------------|---------|---------------|  
| OpenAI text-embedding-3-large      | Unknown | 66.43         |  
| OpenAI text-embedding-3-small      | Unknown | 64.56         |  
| **mdbr-leaf-mt**                   | 23M     | **63.97**     |  
| gte-small                          | 33M     | 63.22         |  
| snowflake-arctic-embed-s           | 32M     | 61.59         |  
| e5-small-v2                        | 33M     | 61.32         |  
| granite-embedding-small-english-r2 | 47M     | 61.07         |  
| all-MiniLM-L6-v2                   | 22M     | 59.03         |  

# Quickstart

## Sentence Transformers

```python  

from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer  



# Load the model  

model = SentenceTransformer("MongoDB/mdbr-leaf-mt-asym")  



# Example queries and documents

queries = [

    "What is machine learning?", 

    "How does neural network training work?",

]



documents = [

    "Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence that focuses on algorithms that can learn from data.",

    "Neural networks are trained through backpropagation, adjusting weights to minimize prediction errors.",

]



# Encode queries and documents

query_embeddings = model.encode_query(queries)

document_embeddings = model.encode_document(documents)



# Compute similarity scores

scores = model.similarity(query_embeddings, document_embeddings)



# Print results

for i, query in enumerate(queries):

    print(f"Query: {query}")

    for j, doc in enumerate(documents):

        print(f" Similarity: {scores[i, j]:.4f} | Document {j}: {doc[:80]}...")

```
<details>
<summary>See example output</summary>

```

Query: What is machine learning?

 Similarity: 0.8483 | Document 0: Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence that focuses on algorith...

 Similarity: 0.6805 | Document 1: Neural networks are trained through backpropagation, adjusting weights to minimi...



Query: How does neural network training work?

 Similarity: 0.6050 | Document 0: Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence that focuses on algorith...

 Similarity: 0.7689 | Document 1: Neural networks are trained through backpropagation, adjusting weights to minimi...

```

</details>

## Transformers Usage  

See [here](https://huggingface.co/MongoDB/mdbr-leaf-mt/blob/main/transformers_example_mt.ipynb).
  
## Asymmetric Retrieval Setup
  
`mdbr-leaf-mt` is *aligned* to [`mxbai-embed-large-v1`](https://huggingface.co/mixedbread-ai/mxbai-embed-large-v1), the model it has been distilled from. 
This enables flexible architectures in which, for example, documents are encoded using the larger model, 
while queries can be encoded faster and more efficiently with the compact `leaf` model. 
This usually outperforms the symmetric setup in which both queries and documents are encoded with `leaf`.

To use exclusively the leaf model, use [`mdbr-leaf-mt`](https://huggingface.co/MongoDB/mdbr-leaf-mt).

## MRL Truncation

Embeddings have been trained via [MRL](https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.13147) and can be truncated for more efficient storage:
```python

query_embeds = model.encode_query(queries, truncate_dim=256)

doc_embeds = model.encode_document(documents, truncate_dim=256)



similarities = model.similarity(query_embeds, doc_embeds)



print('After MRL:')

print(f"* Embeddings dimension: {query_embeds.shape[1]}")

print(f"* Similarities:\n{similarities}")

```
<details>
<summary>See example output</summary>

```

After MRL:

* Embeddings dimension: 256

* Similarities:

  tensor([[0.8584, 0.6921],

          [0.5973, 0.7893]])

```

</details>


## Vector Quantization
Vector quantization, for example to `int8` or `binary`, can be performed as follows:

**Note**: For vector quantization to types other than binary, we suggest performing a calibration to determine the optimal ranges, [see here](https://sbert.net/examples/sentence_transformer/applications/embedding-quantization/README.html#scalar-int8-quantization). 
Good initial values are -1.0 and +1.0.
```python

from sentence_transformers.quantization import quantize_embeddings

import torch



query_embeds = model.encode_query(queries)

doc_embeds = model.encode_document(documents)



# Quantize embeddings to int8 using -1.0 and +1.0

ranges = torch.tensor([[-1.0], [+1.0]]).expand(2, query_embeds.shape[1]).cpu().numpy()

query_embeds = quantize_embeddings(query_embeds, "int8", ranges=ranges)

doc_embeds = quantize_embeddings(doc_embeds, "int8", ranges=ranges)



# Calculate similarities; cast to int64 to avoid under/overflow

similarities = query_embeds.astype(int) @ doc_embeds.astype(int).T



print('After quantization:')

print(f"* Embeddings type: {query_embeds.dtype}")

print(f"* Similarities:\n{similarities}")

```
<details>
<summary>See example output</summary>

```

After quantization:

* Embeddings type: int8

* Similarities:

  [[11392 9204]

   [8256 10470]]

```

</details>


## Evaluation

Please [see here](https://huggingface.co/MongoDB/mdbr-leaf-mt/blob/main/evaluate_models.ipynb).

# Citation
  
If you use this model in your work, please cite:  
  
```bibtex  

@misc{mdbr_leaf,

      title={LEAF: Knowledge Distillation of Text Embedding Models with Teacher-Aligned Representations}, 

      author={Robin Vujanic and Thomas Rueckstiess},

      year={2025},

      eprint={2509.12539},

      archivePrefix={arXiv},

      primaryClass={cs.IR},

      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12539}, 

}

```  
  
# License  
  
This model is released under Apache 2.0 License.  
  
# Contact  
  
For questions or issues, please open an issue or pull request. You can also contact the MongoDB ML research team at robin.vujanic@mongodb.com.  

# Acknowledgments

This model version was created by @tomaarsen - we thank him for his contribution to this project.