LFM2.5-Embedding-350M — A dense bi-encoder, one vector per document. Smallest, fastest index.
LFM2.5-ColBERT-350M — A late-interaction model. One vector per token, matched via MaxSim. Higher accuracy and better generalization at the cost of index size.

Both models are 350M params and the first bidirectional members of the LFM family, built on LFM2.5-350M-Base. They can be used as a drop-in replacement for your current RAG pipeline and target fast, cheap, and reliable multilingual / cross-lingual search across 11 languages.

Find more details about the bidirectional architecture and training recipe in our blog post.

📄 Model details

Property	LFM2.5-Embedding-350M	LFM2.5-ColBERT-350M
Type	Dense bi-encoder (single vector)	Late interaction (per-token vectors)
Total parameters	~354M	~353M
Backbone	LFM2.5-350M-Base + bi-directional patches	LFM2.5-350M-Base + bi-directional patches
Layers	17 (10 conv + 6 attn + 1 pool)	17 (10 conv + 6 attn + 1 dense)
Vocabulary size	65,536	64,402
Output	1024-dim CLS vector	128-dim per token
Similarity	Cosine	MaxSim
Training precision	BF16	BF16
License	LFM Open License v1.0	LFM Open License v1.0

Document length: 512 tokens

Supported languages: English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, Swedish, Norwegian, Japanese, Korean.

Architecture:

text

SentenceTransformer(
  (0): Transformer({'max_seq_length': 512, 'do_lower_case': False}) with Transformer model: Lfm2BidirectionalModel
  (1): Pooling({'word_embedding_dimension': 1024, 'pooling_mode_cls_token': True, 'pooling_mode_mean_tokens': False})
)

Asymmetric prompts: query: for queries, document: for passages. They are stored in the model config and applied automatically via prompt_name.

We recommend LFM2.5-Embedding-350M and LFM2.5-ColBERT-350M for short-context retrieval use cases, such as:

E-commerce: find products across many languages with semantic search at scale.
FAQ and support knowledge bases: retrieve the right answer reliably across customer-facing surfaces.
On-device semantic search: search files, emails, and notes locally on consumer hardware.
Enterprise knowledge assistants: retrieve internal legal, financial, and technical documents across languages.

🏃 How to run

First, install sentence-transformers:

pip install -U sentence-transformers

Encoding queries and documents

Load LFM2.5-Embedding-350M and encode your queries and documents separately, using the matching prompt name on each side. Cosine similarity (or a normalized dot product) ranks documents against queries:

python

from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer

# Load the model (trust_remote_code applies the bidirectional patches)
model = SentenceTransformer(
    "LiquidAI/LFM2.5-Embedding-350M",
    trust_remote_code=True,
)

queries = [
    "What is the capital of France?",
    "Which city is Japan's capital?",
]
documents = [
    "Paris is the capital and largest city of France. Located on the Seine River in northern France, it serves as the country's political, economic, and cultural center.",
    "Tokyo, officially the Tokyo Metropolis, is the capital of Japan. It is the most populous metropolitan area in the world and serves as Japan's administrative, financial, and commercial hub.",
    "Berlin is the capital and largest city of Germany. Reunified in 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it now serves as a major cultural and political center in Europe.",
]

# Encode with the matching prompt name; normalize so the dot product == cosine similarity
q_emb = model.encode(queries,   prompt_name="query",    normalize_embeddings=True)
d_emb = model.encode(documents, prompt_name="document", normalize_embeddings=True)

scores = q_emb @ d_emb.T  # shape: (n_queries, n_documents)

Always pass prompt_name="query" for queries and prompt_name="document" for passages — the model was trained with these prefixes, and omitting them silently degrades retrieval quality.

Flash Attention 2 (optional)

LFM2.5-Embedding-350M can run with FlashAttention-2 (requires flash-attn installed):

python

import torch
from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer

model = SentenceTransformer(
    "LiquidAI/LFM2.5-Embedding-350M",
    trust_remote_code=True,
    model_kwargs={"attn_implementation": "flash_attention_2", "dtype": torch.bfloat16},
)

Verified equivalent to the default within bf16 noise (multilingual NanoBEIR ndcg@10 within 0.002 across 11 languages). At the model's 512-token max length the speed gain is small (~5%); FA2 mainly helps memory and throughput if you fine-tune or run the backbone at longer contexts.

Fine-tuning

Standard sentence-transformers training works directly. Example with MultipleNegativesRankingLoss:

python

from datasets import Dataset
from sentence_transformers import (
    SentenceTransformer,
    SentenceTransformerTrainer,
    SentenceTransformerTrainingArguments,
)
from sentence_transformers.losses import MultipleNegativesRankingLoss

model = SentenceTransformer("LiquidAI/LFM2.5-Embedding-350M", trust_remote_code=True)
loss = MultipleNegativesRankingLoss(model)

train_ds = Dataset.from_dict({
    "query":    [...],
    "positive": [...],
    # optional: "negative": [...],
})

args = SentenceTransformerTrainingArguments(
    output_dir="out",
    num_train_epochs=1,
    per_device_train_batch_size=64,
    learning_rate=2e-5,
    warmup_ratio=0.1,
    bf16=True,
    prompts={"query": "query: ", "positive": "document: "},
)

trainer = SentenceTransformerTrainer(model=model, args=args, train_dataset=train_ds, loss=loss)
trainer.train()

Notes:

Always pass the asymmetric prompts during training (the model was trained with them).
For larger effective batches without OOM, swap MultipleNegativesRankingLoss for CachedMultipleNegativesRankingLoss.
Save with model.save_pretrained(...); the modeling file and auto_map are preserved so the patched behavior survives reloads.

📈 Performance

We highlight (= bold) the best bi-encoder and best late retriever for each language.

NanoBEIR Multilingual Extended — NDCG@10

LiquidAI/nanobeir-multilingual-extended. Multilingual retrieval capabilities.

Model	Type	AVG	ar	de	en	es	fr	it	ja	ko	no	pt	sv
LiquidAI/LFM2.5-ColBERT-350M	late	0.605	0.551	0.606	0.687	0.607	0.622	0.606	0.614	0.590	0.570	0.613	0.586
LiquidAI/LFM2.5-Embedding-350M	dense	0.577	0.529	0.581	0.644	0.581	0.592	0.583	0.575	0.563	0.557	0.581	0.566
Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B	dense	0.556	0.514	0.560	0.649	0.568	0.565	0.565	0.551	0.530	0.516	0.571	0.525
LiquidAI/LFM2-ColBERT-350M	late	0.540	0.491	0.563	0.661	0.563	0.564	0.543	0.557	0.527	0.449	0.547	0.480
Alibaba-NLP/gte-multilingual-base	dense	0.528	0.477	0.523	0.624	0.537	0.542	0.528	0.511	0.494	0.516	0.534	0.526
lightonai/GTE-ModernColBERT-v1	late	0.489	0.309	0.499	0.680	0.525	0.546	0.516	0.459	0.368	0.465	0.530	0.483
lightonai/LateOn	late	0.484	0.307	0.505	0.690	0.531	0.537	0.514	0.442	0.326	0.465	0.533	0.475
lightonai/DenseOn	dense	0.432	0.178	0.474	0.676	0.496	0.520	0.487	0.378	0.197	0.422	0.493	0.433
Alibaba-NLP/gte-modernbert-base	dense	0.383	0.112	0.449	0.666	0.448	0.475	0.408	0.275	0.180	0.376	0.431	0.391
BAAI/bge-large-en-v1.5	dense	0.359	0.059	0.419	0.642	0.445	0.475	0.431	0.198	0.132	0.358	0.434	0.353

MKQA-11 — Recall@20

MKQA. Cross-lingual capabilities (subset of the 11 languages we target).

Model	Type	AVG	ar	de	en	es	fr	it	ja	ko	no	pt	sv
LiquidAI/LFM2.5-ColBERT-350M	late	0.694	0.608	0.709	0.748	0.711	0.715	0.707	0.703	0.640	0.689	0.703	0.700
LiquidAI/LFM2.5-Embedding-350M	dense	0.691	0.610	0.709	0.738	0.708	0.715	0.703	0.685	0.630	0.691	0.710	0.708
Alibaba-NLP/gte-multilingual-base	dense	0.675	0.567	0.692	0.741	0.705	0.703	0.697	0.655	0.563	0.698	0.700	0.699
LiquidAI/LFM2-ColBERT-350M	late	0.646	0.554	0.696	0.754	0.711	0.710	0.667	0.658	0.558	0.541	0.669	0.589
Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B	dense	0.638	0.520	0.671	0.723	0.678	0.672	0.671	0.635	0.543	0.620	0.667	0.620
lightonai/GTE-ModernColBERT-v1	late	0.459	0.092	0.532	0.754	0.552	0.615	0.510	0.275	0.166	0.503	0.524	0.524
lightonai/LateOn	late	0.454	0.157	0.492	0.755	0.537	0.577	0.481	0.316	0.209	0.472	0.502	0.501
lightonai/DenseOn	dense	0.435	0.165	0.482	0.751	0.491	0.553	0.457	0.325	0.222	0.438	0.443	0.453
BAAI/bge-large-en-v1.5	dense	0.413	0.133	0.471	0.748	0.450	0.531	0.461	0.208	0.172	0.456	0.443	0.467
Alibaba-NLP/gte-modernbert-base	dense	0.295	0.060	0.333	0.736	0.273	0.417	0.291	0.100	0.052	0.332	0.326	0.330

Inference speed - llama.cpp

End-to-end latency on MacBook Pro M4 Max via llama.cpp at fp16, measured at 32-token queries and 256-token documents. Docs cached means that the document embeddings are pre-computed and looked up (from an index).

Model	Stage	Docs cached	p50	p95
LFM2.5-Embedding-350M	Query embedding	yes	7.3 ms	9.6 ms
LFM2.5-ColBERT-350M	Query embedding	yes	8.1 ms	8.5 ms
LFM2.5-ColBERT-350M	Query embedding + MaxSim	yes	8.2 ms	15.2 ms
LFM2.5-ColBERT-350M	Query embedding + Doc embedding + MaxSim	no	34.3 ms	36.3 ms

Both models LiquidAI/LFM2.5-ColBERT-350M-GGUF and LiquidAI/LFM2.5-Embedding-350M-GGUF are available on Hugging Face under different quantization schemas for llama.cpp.

Inference speed - Enterprise GPU

For large-scale production-grade enterprise deployments, we also experiment with an internal GPU stack to deliver extremely low-latency serving under high inbound load. We observe latencies as low as 1 ms.

Workload	Setup	p50	p95	p99
LFM2.5-Embedding-350M	Query embedding	1.5 ms	1.6 ms	1.7 ms
LFM2.5-ColBERT-350M	Query embedding	1.3 ms	1.4 ms	1.5 ms
LFM2.5-ColBERT-350M	Query embedding + MaxSim	2.5 ms	2.7 ms	2.8 ms
LFM2.5-ColBERT-350M	Query embedding + Doc embedding + MaxSim	22.8 ms	24.1 ms	26.4 ms

📬 Contact

Got questions or want to connect? Join our Discord community.
If you are interested in custom solutions with edge deployment, please contact our sales team.

Citation

@article{liquidai2025lfm2,
  title={LFM2 Technical Report},
  author={Liquid AI},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.23404},
  year={2025}
}