michaelfeil / michaelfeil/infinity

Question: Support for sparse embeddings?

Open
#146 13 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

new model question
Dominant language
Python
Stars
2.9k
Forks
206
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

Hi, I was wondering whether is would make sence to support models which, in addition to dense vectors, also support sparse and colbert. For example, [BGE-M3](https://huggingface.co/BAAI/bge-m3) works well under infinity for dense vector retrieval. However, it would require some changes to the inference process to additionally obtain sparse vectors such as shown here:
https://github.com/FlagOpen/FlagEmbedding/blob/master/FlagEmbedding/BGE_M3/modeling.py#L352-L355

I wonder if for such case, it's feasible to add extra config parameters in the CLI or that would require too much changes to the core logic of the model during startup?

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with the linked BGE-M3 modeling.py lines 352-355, then trace Infinity's CLI configuration and model startup paths to determine where dense, sparse, and ColBERT outputs are handled. Done would require an agreed design for configuration and inference changes, plus validation that the additional retrieval outputs are exposed correctly.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
machine-learning
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
30/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.