Sentence Transformers

Milvus integrates with Sentence Transformer pre-trained models via the SentenceTransformerEmbeddingFunction class. This class provides methods for encoding documents and queries using the pretrained Sentence Transformer models and returning the embeddings as dense vectors compatible with Milvus indexing.

To use this feature, install the necessary dependencies:

pip install --upgrade pymilvus
pip install "pymilvus[model]"

Then, instantiate the SentenceTransformerEmbeddingFunction:

from pymilvus import model

sentence_transformer_ef = model.dense.SentenceTransformerEmbeddingFunction(
    model_name='all-MiniLM-L6-v2', # Specify the model name
    device='cpu' # Specify the device to use, e.g., 'cpu' or 'cuda:0'
)

Parameters:

• model_name (string)

  The name of the Sentence Transformer model to use for encoding. The value defaults to all-MiniLM-L6-v2. You can use any of Sentence Transformers’ pre-trained models. For a list of available models, refer to Pretrained models.

• device (string)

  The device to use, with cpu for the CPU and cuda:n for the nth GPU device.

To create embeddings for documents, use the encode_documents() method:

docs = [
    "Artificial intelligence was founded as an academic discipline in 1956.",
    "Alan Turing was the first person to conduct substantial research in AI.",
    "Born in Maida Vale, London, Turing was raised in southern England.",
]

docs_embeddings = sentence_transformer_ef.encode_documents(docs)

# Print embeddings
print("Embeddings:", docs_embeddings)
# Print dimension and shape of embeddings
print("Dim:", sentence_transformer_ef.dim, docs_embeddings[0].shape)

The expected output is similar to the following:

Embeddings: [array([-3.09392996e-02, -1.80662833e-02,  1.34775648e-02,  2.77156215e-02,
       -4.86349640e-03, -3.12581174e-02, -3.55921760e-02,  5.76934684e-03,
        2.80773244e-03,  1.35783911e-01,  3.59678417e-02,  6.17732145e-02,
...
       -4.61330153e-02, -4.85207550e-02,  3.13997865e-02,  7.82178566e-02,
       -4.75336798e-02,  5.21207601e-02,  9.04406682e-02, -5.36676683e-02],
      dtype=float32)]
Dim: 384 (384,)

To create embeddings for queries, use the encode_queries() method:

queries = ["When was artificial intelligence founded", 
           "Where was Alan Turing born?"]

query_embeddings = sentence_transformer_ef.encode_queries(queries)

# Print embeddings
print("Embeddings:", query_embeddings)
# Print dimension and shape of embeddings
print("Dim:", sentence_transformer_ef.dim, query_embeddings[0].shape)

The expected output is similar to the following:

Embeddings: [array([-2.52114702e-02, -5.29330298e-02,  1.14570223e-02,  1.95571519e-02,
       -2.46500354e-02, -2.66519729e-02, -8.48201662e-03,  2.82961670e-02,
       -3.65092754e-02,  7.50745758e-02,  4.28900979e-02,  7.18822703e-02,
...
       -6.76431581e-02, -6.45996556e-02, -4.67132553e-02,  4.78532910e-02,
       -2.31596199e-03,  4.13446948e-02,  1.06935494e-01, -1.08258888e-01],
      dtype=float32)]
Dim: 384 (384,)