multilingual-e5-small — OpenVINO IR (static [1, 512])

Pre-exported intfloat/multilingual-e5-small in OpenVINO IR format with static input shape [1, 512].

A single .xml / .bin pair, measured to compile and run on every OpenVINO device a Core Ultra laptop exposes — CPU, integrated GPU (Arc), secondary GPU, and NPU (3720). The static reshape unlocks the NPU path, but the same IR drops into CPU and GPU pipelines unchanged.

TL;DR — full local agent on a single laptop

This embedder is one piece of a working all-local LLM-agent stack on a single consumer laptop (Intel Core Ultra 9 + RTX 5070 Ti, 64 GB RAM):

The headline isn't any single number — it's that a 31-billion-parameter LLM, an always-on multilingual embedder, persistent vector memory, and the user's normal desktop work all run simultaneously on one laptop, none of them blocking each other, all entirely offline.

Multi-device benchmark on a real laptop

Same openvino_model.xml, same input, mean of 50 runs after one warm-up. Hardware: Intel® Core™ Ultra 9 (NPU 3720 + Intel® Arc™ iGPU), Windows 11, OpenVINO 2026.1.0:

You don't need an NPU to use this model. A regular CPU-only PC runs the same file at ~20 embeds/s — fast enough for most retrieval workloads. NPU is the right pick when you want the embedder to stay always-on without contending with the GPU or CPU (which, in the agent setup above, are busy serving a 31 B LLM).

Why this exists

The Intel NPU compiler (NPU 3720 and newer) rejects dynamic input dims (-1 in the shape). The default optimum-intel export keeps shapes dynamic, which works fine on CPU and GPU but fails on NPU with Got negative shape dim bound: '-1'. This repository is the same model already reshaped to [batch=1, seq_len=512], so a single IR is loadable on NPU, GPU, and CPU.

Files

• openvino_model.xml / openvino_model.bin — IR with static shape
• tokenizer.json, tokenizer_config.json, special_tokens_map.json — tokenizer
• config.json — model config

Usage

The same code runs unchanged on NPU / GPU / CPU. The snippet auto-picks the best device the laptop exposes:

import numpy as np
import openvino as ov
from huggingface_hub import snapshot_download
from transformers import AutoTokenizer

REPO = "seminse/multilingual-e5-small-openvino-npu-static"
local_dir = snapshot_download(REPO)

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(local_dir)
core = ov.Core()
available = core.available_devices
device = "NPU" if "NPU" in available else ("GPU" if "GPU" in available else "CPU")
print(f"Using device: {device}")

ov_config = {"PERFORMANCE_HINT": "LATENCY"}
if device == "NPU":
    ov_config["NPU_TURBO"] = "YES"

model = core.read_model(f"{local_dir}/openvino_model.xml")
compiled = core.compile_model(model, device, ov_config)

def embed(text: str, prefix: str = "passage: ") -> np.ndarray:
    batch = tokenizer(prefix + text, padding="max_length", truncation=True,
                      max_length=512, return_tensors="np")
    feed = {k: v.astype(np.int64) for k, v in batch.items()
            if k in {"input_ids", "attention_mask", "token_type_ids"}}
    out = compiled(feed)
    last_hidden = next(iter(out.values()))
    mask = batch["attention_mask"][..., None].astype(np.float32)
    pooled = (last_hidden * mask).sum(1) / mask.sum(1).clip(1e-9)
    pooled /= np.linalg.norm(pooled, axis=-1, keepdims=True).clip(1e-9)
    return pooled[0].astype(np.float32)

vec = embed("Edge AI runs on the NPU.")
print(vec.shape)  # (384,)

Why the NPU number matters even though the iGPU is faster

On a consumer laptop the silicon is not idle:

• dGPU is busy serving the LLM (31 B Q8 at 2.29 tok/s — that workload saturates VRAM and most of the GPU's compute).
• iGPU is doing rendering, video decode, Studio Effects, sometimes Stable-Diffusion-class workloads.
• CPU is running the orchestrator, FAISS, the IDE, the browser.

The NPU is the only piece of silicon that is otherwise idle. Putting the embedder on it at ~1 W means the memory layer does not contend with the LLM or the user's work. The price for that is +10 ms / embed vs the iGPU — a fair trade when the alternative is the embedder fighting the LLM for GPU time.

Properties preserved from base model

• 117 M parameters
• 384-dim output
• 100+ languages (Korean, Japanese, Chinese, German, French, ...)
• L2-normalized embeddings (after mean pooling)
• Use passage: prefix for documents and query: for queries

Where this is useful

• Always-on agent memory (the original motivation): NPU runs the embedder at ~1 W while the dGPU runs a local 31 B LLM, with measured zero contention between them.
• Plain on-device search on a regular PC: no NPU required. CPU → 20 embeds/s, Intel iGPU → 50+ embeds/s. Same file, same code.
• Foundation for local retrieval-augmented LLM agents running entirely on-device with no cloud round-trip.

Companion notebook

A full walkthrough — export, static reshape, compile across CPU / GPU / NPU, latency benchmark, multilingual FAISS demo — is being submitted to the official OpenVINO Notebooks repo: openvinotoolkit/openvino_notebooks#3425.

License

MIT (inherited from the base model).