Liquid AI Releases LFM2-ColBERT-350M: A New Small Model that brings Late Interaction Retrieval to Multilingual and Cross-Lingual RAG
Can a compact late interplay retriever index as soon as and ship correct cross lingual search with quick inference? Liquid AI launched LFM2-ColBERT-350M, a compact late interplay retriever for multilingual and cross-lingual search. Documents could be listed in a single language, queries could be written in lots of languages, and the system retrieves with excessive accuracy. The Liquid AI crew stories inference velocity on par with fashions that are 2.3 instances smaller, which is attributed to the LFM2 spine. The mannequin is on the market with a Hugging Face demo and an in depth mannequin card for integration in retrieval augmented technology methods.
What late interplay means and why it issues?
Most manufacturing methods use bi-encoders for velocity or cross encoders for accuracy. Late interplay goals to mix each benefits. Queries and paperwork are encoded individually on the token degree. The system compares token vectors at question time utilizing operations similar to MaxSim. This preserves high-quality grained token interactions with out the complete price of joint cross consideration. It permits pre-computation for paperwork and improves precision at rating time. It can function a primary stage retriever and additionally as a ranker in a single move.
Model specification
LFM2-ColBERT-350M has 350 million whole parameters. There are 25 layers, with 18 convolution blocks, 6 consideration blocks, and 1 dense layer. The context size is 32k tokens. The vocabulary dimension is 65,536. The similarity operate is MaxSim. The output dimensionality is 128. Training precision is BF16. The license is LFM Open License v1.0.
Languages, supported and evaluated
The mannequin helps 8 languages. These are English, Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. The analysis provides Italian and Portuguese, which brings the matrix to 9 languages for cross comparisons of doc and question languages. This distinction is related when planning deployments that should cowl particular buyer markets.
Evaluation setup and key outcomes
Liquid AI extends the NanoBEIR benchmark with Japanese and Korean and publishes the extension for reproducibility. On this setup, LFM2-ColBERT-350M reveals stronger multilingual functionality than the baseline late interplay mannequin on this class, which is GTE-ModernColBERT-v1 at 150M parameters. The largest beneficial properties seem in German, Arabic, Korean, and Japanese, whereas English efficiency is maintained.
Key Takeaways
- Token-level scoring with MaxSim preserves fine-grained interactions whereas protecting separate encoders, so doc embeddings could be precomputed and queried effectively.
- Documents could be listed in a single language and retrieved in lots of. The mannequin card lists 8 supported languages, whereas evaluations span 9 languages for cross-lingual pairs.
- On the NanoBEIR multilingual extension, LFM2-ColBERT-350M outperforms the prior late-interaction baseline (GTE-ModernColBERT-v1 at 150M) and maintains English efficiency.
- Inference velocity is reported on par with fashions 2.3× smaller throughout batch sizes, attributed to the LFM2 spine.
Editorial Notes
Liquid AI’s LFM2-ColBERT-350M applies late interplay ColBERT with MaxSim, it encodes queries and paperwork individually, then scores token vectors at question time, which preserves token degree interactions and permits precomputed doc embeddings for scale. It targets multilingual and cross lingual retrieval, index as soon as and question in lots of languages, with evaluations described on a NanoBEIR multilingual extension. Liquid AI crew stories inference velocity on par with fashions 2.3 instances smaller, attributed to the LFM2 spine. Overall, late interplay on the nano scale seems to be manufacturing prepared for multilingual RAG trials.
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