Experimental SmolLM3 3B German Embedding Model

This is an experimental German text embedding model based on SmolLM3 3B, optimized for retrieval tasks using LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) fine-tuning. The model has been specifically trained to excel at German information retrieval and semantic similarity tasks.

Model Details

• Base Model: SmolLM3 3B (microsoft/SmolLM3-3B)
• Language: German (de)
• Model Type: Sentence Transformers
• Embedding Dimension: 2048
• Max Sequence Length: 512
• Pooling Strategy: Mean pooling
• Fine-tuning Method: LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation)
• Training Data: German retrieval datasets

Key Features

🚀 Retrieval-Optimized: Specifically fine-tuned for information retrieval tasks
🇩🇪 German-Focused: Optimized for German language understanding
⚡ High Performance: Significant improvements over baseline embeddings
📏 Standard Format: Compatible with sentence-transformers library

Usage

Installation

pip install sentence-transformers

Basic Usage

from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer

# Load the model
model = SentenceTransformer('mayflowergmbh/smollm3-3b-german-embed')

# Encode sentences
sentences = [
    "Was ist die Hauptstadt von Deutschland?",
    "Berlin ist die Hauptstadt von Deutschland.", 
    "München ist eine große Stadt in Bayern."
]

embeddings = model.encode(sentences)
print(f"Embeddings shape: {embeddings.shape}")

# Compute similarities
from sklearn.metrics.pairwise import cosine_similarity
similarities = cosine_similarity(embeddings)
print(similarities)

Information Retrieval Example

import numpy as np
from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer

model = SentenceTransformer('mayflowergmbh/smollm3-3b-german-embed')

# Query and documents
query = "Was ist die Hauptstadt von Deutschland?"
documents = [
    "Berlin ist die Hauptstadt und größte Stadt Deutschlands.",
    "München ist die Hauptstadt des Freistaates Bayern.",
    "Hamburg ist eine Hansestadt im Norden Deutschlands.",
    "Köln ist eine Großstadt in Nordrhein-Westfalen."
]

# Encode query and documents
query_embedding = model.encode([query])
doc_embeddings = model.encode(documents)

# Compute similarities
similarities = np.dot(query_embedding, doc_embeddings.T)[0]

# Rank documents by relevance
ranked_indices = np.argsort(similarities)[::-1]

print("Query:", query)
print("\nRanked Results:")
for i, idx in enumerate(ranked_indices):
    print(f"{i+1}. {documents[idx]} (Score: {similarities[idx]:.3f})")

Technical Details

Architecture

The model uses the LLM2Vec approach to convert the decoder-only SmolLM3 model into an effective encoder:

1. Bidirectional Attention: Modified attention mechanism for better context understanding
2. Mean Pooling: Aggregates token embeddings using attention-weighted mean
3. LoRA Fine-tuning: Parameter-efficient adaptation targeting Q and V projection layers

Training Process

1. Base Model: Started with SmolLM3 3B converted to LLM2Vec format
2. LoRA Configuration:
   • Rank (r): 8
   • Alpha: 16
   • Target modules: q_proj, v_proj
   • Dropout: 0.05
3. Training Data: German retrieval datasets with contrastive learning
4. Optimization: Hard negative mining for improved discrimination

Model Card Metadata

• Developed by: mayflowergmbh
• Model type: Sentence Transformer
• Language(s): German (de)
• License: Apache 2.0
• Base model: microsoft/SmolLM3-3B
• Training approach: LoRA fine-tuning
• Primary use: Information retrieval, semantic similarity

Limitations and Bias

• Language Scope: Optimized specifically for German; performance on other languages not evaluated
• Domain: Best performance on factual/informational content similar to training data
• Sequence Length: Maximum 512 tokens; longer texts will be truncated
• Computational Requirements: Requires ~6GB GPU memory for inference

Citation

If you use this model in your research, please cite:

@misc{smollm3-german-embed-retrieval,
  title={SmolLM3 3B German Embedding Model (Retrieval-Optimized)},
  author={mayflowergmbh},
  year={2025},
  howpublished={\url{https://huggingface.co/mayflowergmbh/smollm3-3b-german-embed}},
  note={Retrieved-optimized German embedding model using LoRA fine-tuning}
}

Contact

For questions or issues, please open an issue on the model repository or contact the author.

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Generated on 2025-07-16