The Qwen3 Embedding model series is the latest proprietary model of the Qwen family, specifically designed for text embedding and ranking tasks. Building upon the dense foundational models of the Qwen3 series, it provides a comprehensive range of text embeddings and reranking models in various sizes (0.6B, 4B, and 8B). This series inherits the exceptional multilingual capabilities, long-text understanding, and reasoning skills of its foundational model. The Qwen3 Embedding series represents significant advancements in multiple text embedding and ranking tasks, including text retrieval, code retrieval, text classification, text clustering, and bitext mining.
Exceptional Versatility: The embedding model has achieved state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of downstream application evaluations. The 8B size embedding model ranks No.1 in the MTEB multilingual leaderboard (as of June 5, 2025, score 70.58), while the reranking model excels in various text retrieval scenarios.
Comprehensive Flexibility: The Qwen3 Embedding series offers a full spectrum of sizes (from 0.6B to 8B) for both embedding and reranking models, catering to diverse use cases that prioritize efficiency and effectiveness. Developers can seamlessly combine these two modules. Additionally, the embedding model allows for flexible vector definitions across all dimensions, and both embedding and reranking models support user-defined instructions to enhance performance for specific tasks, languages, or scenarios.
Multilingual Capability: The Qwen3 Embedding series offer support for over 100 languages, thanks to the multilingual capabilites of Qwen3 models. This includes various programming languages, and provides robust multilingual, cross-lingual, and code retrieval capabilities.
Model Overview
Qwen3-Embedding-4B has the following features:
Model Type: Text Embedding
Supported Languages: 100+ Languages
Number of Paramaters: 4B
Context Length: 32k
Embedding Dimension: Up to 2560, supports user-defined output dimensions ranging from 32 to 2560
For more details, including benchmark evaluation, hardware requirements, and inference performance, please refer to our blog, GitHub.
MRL Support indicates whether the embedding model supports custom dimensions for the final embedding.
Instruction Aware notes whether the embedding or reranking model supports customizing the input instruction according to different tasks.
Our evaluation indicates that, for most downstream tasks, using instructions (instruct) typically yields an improvement of 1% to 5% compared to not using them. Therefore, we recommend that developers create tailored instructions specific to their tasks and scenarios. In multilingual contexts, we also advise users to write their instructions in English, as most instructions utilized during the model training process were originally written in English.
Usage
With Transformers versions earlier than 4.51.0, you may encounter the following error:
KeyError: 'qwen3'
Transformers Usage
python
1# Requires transformers>=4.51.02import torch
3import torch.nn.functional as F
45from torch import Tensor
6from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModel
789deflast_token_pool(last_hidden_states: Tensor,10 attention_mask: Tensor)-> Tensor:11 left_padding =(attention_mask[:,-1].sum()== attention_mask.shape[0])12if left_padding:13return last_hidden_states[:,-1]14else:15 sequence_lengths = attention_mask.sum(dim=1)-116 batch_size = last_hidden_states.shape[0]17return last_hidden_states[torch.arange(batch_size, device=last_hidden_states.device), sequence_lengths]181920defget_detailed_instruct(task_description:str, query:str)->str:21returnf'Instruct: {task_description}\nQuery:{query}'2223deftokenize(tokenizer, input_texts, eod_id, max_length):24 batch_dict = tokenizer(input_texts, padding=False, truncation=True, max_length=max_length-2)25for seq, att inzip(batch_dict["input_ids"], batch_dict["attention_mask"]):26 seq.append(eod_id)27 att.append(1)28 batch_dict = tokenizer.pad(batch_dict, padding=True, return_tensors="pt")29return batch_dict
3031# Each query must come with a one-sentence instruction that describes the task32task ='Given a web search query, retrieve relevant passages that answer the query'3334queries =[35 get_detailed_instruct(task,'What is the capital of China?'),36 get_detailed_instruct(task,'Explain gravity')37]38# No need to add instruction for retrieval documents39documents =[40"The capital of China is Beijing.",41"Gravity is a force that attracts two bodies towards each other. It gives weight to physical objects and is responsible for the movement of planets around the sun."42]43input_texts = queries + documents
4445tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained('Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-4B', padding_side='left')46model = AutoModel.from_pretrained('Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-4B')4748# We recommend enabling flash_attention_2 for better acceleration and memory saving.49# model = AutoModel.from_pretrained('Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-4B', attn_implementation="flash_attention_2", torch_dtype=torch.float16).cuda()5051eod_id = tokenizer.convert_tokens_to_ids("<|endoftext|>")52max_length =81925354# Tokenize the input texts55batch_dict = tokenize(tokenizer, input_texts, eod_id, max_length)56batch_dict.to(model.device)57outputs = model(**batch_dict)58embeddings = last_token_pool(outputs.last_hidden_state, batch_dict['attention_mask'])5960# normalize embeddings61embeddings = F.normalize(embeddings, p=2, dim=1)62scores =(embeddings[:2] @ embeddings[2:].T)63print(scores.tolist())
📌 Tip: We recommend that developers customize the instruct according to their specific scenarios, tasks, and languages. Our tests have shown that in most retrieval scenarios, not using an instruct on the query side can lead to a drop in retrieval performance by approximately 1% to 5%.
Evaluation
MTEB (Multilingual)
Model
Size
Mean (Task)
Mean (Type)
Bitxt Mining
Class.
Clust.
Inst. Retri.
Multi. Class.
Pair. Class.
Rerank
Retri.
STS
NV-Embed-v2
7B
56.29
49.58
57.84
57.29
40.80
1.04
18.63
78.94
63.82
56.72
71.10
GritLM-7B
7B
60.92
53.74
70.53
61.83
49.75
3.45
22.77
79.94
63.78
58.31
73.33
BGE-M3
0.6B
59.56
52.18
79.11
60.35
40.88
-3.11
20.1
80.76
62.79
54.60
74.12
multilingual-e5-large-instruct
0.6B
63.22
55.08
80.13
64.94
50.75
-0.40
22.91
80.86
62.61
57.12
76.81
gte-Qwen2-1.5B-instruct
1.5B
59.45
52.69
62.51
58.32
52.05
0.74
24.02
81.58
62.58
60.78
71.61
gte-Qwen2-7b-Instruct
7B
62.51
55.93
73.92
61.55
52.77
4.94
25.48
85.13
65.55
60.08
73.98
text-embedding-3-large
-
58.93
51.41
62.17
60.27
46.89
-2.68
22.03
79.17
63.89
59.27
71.68
Cohere-embed-multilingual-v3.0
-
61.12
53.23
70.50
62.95
46.89
-1.89
22.74
79.88
64.07
59.16
74.80
gemini-embedding-exp-03-07
-
68.37
59.59
79.28
71.82
54.59
5.18
29.16
83.63
65.58
67.71
79.40
Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B
0.6B
64.33
56.00
72.22
66.83
52.33
5.09
24.59
80.83
61.41
64.64
76.17
Qwen3-Embedding-4B
4B
69.45
60.86
79.36
72.33
57.15
11.56
26.77
85.05
65.08
69.60
80.86
Qwen3-Embedding-8B
8B
70.58
61.69
80.89
74.00
57.65
10.06
28.66
86.40
65.63
70.88
81.08
Note: For compared models, the scores are retrieved from MTEB online leaderboard on May 24th, 2025.
MTEB (Eng v2)
MTEB English / Models
Param.
Mean(Task)
Mean(Type)
Class.
Clust.
Pair Class.
Rerank.
Retri.
STS
Summ.
multilingual-e5-large-instruct
0.6B
65.53
61.21
75.54
49.89
86.24
48.74
53.47
84.72
29.89
NV-Embed-v2
7.8B
69.81
65.00
87.19
47.66
88.69
49.61
62.84
83.82
35.21
GritLM-7B
7.2B
67.07
63.22
81.25
50.82
87.29
49.59
54.95
83.03
35.65
gte-Qwen2-1.5B-instruct
1.5B
67.20
63.26
85.84
53.54
87.52
49.25
50.25
82.51
33.94
stella_en_1.5B_v5
1.5B
69.43
65.32
89.38
57.06
88.02
50.19
52.42
83.27
36.91
gte-Qwen2-7B-instruct
7.6B
70.72
65.77
88.52
58.97
85.9
50.47
58.09
82.69
35.74
gemini-embedding-exp-03-07
-
73.3
67.67
90.05
59.39
87.7
48.59
64.35
85.29
38.28
Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B
0.6B
70.70
64.88
85.76
54.05
84.37
48.18
61.83
86.57
33.43
Qwen3-Embedding-4B
4B
74.60
68.10
89.84
57.51
87.01
50.76
68.46
88.72
34.39
Qwen3-Embedding-8B
8B
75.22
68.71
90.43
58.57
87.52
51.56
69.44
88.58
34.83
C-MTEB (MTEB Chinese)
C-MTEB
Param.
Mean(Task)
Mean(Type)
Class.
Clust.
Pair Class.
Rerank.
Retr.
STS
multilingual-e5-large-instruct
0.6B
58.08
58.24
69.80
48.23
64.52
57.45
63.65
45.81
bge-multilingual-gemma2
9B
67.64
68.52
75.31
59.30
86.67
68.28
73.73
55.19
gte-Qwen2-1.5B-instruct
1.5B
67.12
67.79
72.53
54.61
79.5
68.21
71.86
60.05
gte-Qwen2-7B-instruct
7.6B
71.62
72.19
75.77
66.06
81.16
69.24
75.70
65.20
ritrieve_zh_v1
0.3B
72.71
73.85
76.88
66.5
85.98
72.86
76.97
63.92
Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B
0.6B
66.33
67.45
71.40
68.74
76.42
62.58
71.03
54.52
Qwen3-Embedding-4B
4B
72.27
73.51
75.46
77.89
83.34
66.05
77.03
61.26
Qwen3-Embedding-8B
8B
73.84
75.00
76.97
80.08
84.23
66.99
78.21
63.53
Citation
If you find our work helpful, feel free to give us a cite.
@misc{qwen3-embedding,
title = {Qwen3-Embedding},
url = {https://qwenlm.github.io/blog/qwen3/},
author = {Qwen Team},
month = {May},
year = {2025}
}