Use this model with PyLate to index and retrieve documents. The index uses FastPLAID for efficient similarity search.
Indexing documents
Load the ColBERT model and initialize the PLAID index, then encode and index your documents:
python
1from pylate import indexes, models, retrieve
23# Step 1: Load the ColBERT model4model = models.ColBERT(5 model_name_or_path="aditeyabaral/langcache-colbert-v2",6)78# Step 2: Initialize the PLAID index9index = indexes.PLAID(10 index_folder="pylate-index",11 index_name="index",12 override=True,# This overwrites the existing index if any13)1415# Step 3: Encode the documents16documents_ids =["1","2","3"]17documents =["document 1 text","document 2 text","document 3 text"]1819documents_embeddings = model.encode(20 documents,21 batch_size=32,22 is_query=False,# Ensure that it is set to False to indicate that these are documents, not queries23 show_progress_bar=True,24)2526# Step 4: Add document embeddings to the index by providing embeddings and corresponding ids27index.add_documents(28 documents_ids=documents_ids,29 documents_embeddings=documents_embeddings,30)
Note that you do not have to recreate the index and encode the documents every time. Once you have created an index and added the documents, you can re-use the index later by loading it:
python
1# To load an index, simply instantiate it with the correct folder/name and without overriding it2index = indexes.PLAID(3 index_folder="pylate-index",4 index_name="index",5)
Retrieving top-k documents for queries
Once the documents are indexed, you can retrieve the top-k most relevant documents for a given set of queries.
To do so, initialize the ColBERT retriever with the index you want to search in, encode the queries and then retrieve the top-k documents to get the top matches ids and relevance scores:
python
1# Step 1: Initialize the ColBERT retriever2retriever = retrieve.ColBERT(index=index)34# Step 2: Encode the queries5queries_embeddings = model.encode(6["query for document 3","query for document 1"],7 batch_size=32,8 is_query=True,# # Ensure that it is set to False to indicate that these are queries9 show_progress_bar=True,10)1112# Step 3: Retrieve top-k documents13scores = retriever.retrieve(14 queries_embeddings=queries_embeddings,15 k=10,# Retrieve the top 10 matches for each query16)
Reranking
If you only want to use the ColBERT model to perform reranking on top of your first-stage retrieval pipeline without building an index, you can simply use rank function and pass the queries and documents to rerank:
Approximate statistics based on the first 1000 samples:
anchor
positive
negative_1
type
string
string
string
details
min: 4 tokens
mean: 17.0 tokens
max: 128 tokens
min: 4 tokens
mean: 17.14 tokens
max: 128 tokens
min: 5 tokens
mean: 19.96 tokens
max: 107 tokens
Samples:
anchor
positive
negative_1
[object Object]"There aren't many places in Gold Coast where you can find a wide variety of wedding dresses."
[object Object]"There aren't many places in Gold Coast where you can find a wide variety of wedding dresses."
Where can I get a wide variety of wedding dresses in Gold Coast?
[object Object]It's easy to say it's good having siblings, but people often suggest it as a universal truth without considering that not everyone enjoys sibling relationships. Having siblings can lead to conflicts, competition, and stress, which might overshadow any potential benefits like companionship or support. Additionally, individual experiences with siblings can vary greatly depending on personality, family dynamics, and cultural background.
[object Object]It's easy to say it's good having siblings, but people often suggest it as a universal truth without considering that not everyone enjoys sibling relationships. Having siblings can lead to conflicts, competition, and stress, which might overshadow any potential benefits like companionship or support. Additionally, individual experiences with siblings can vary greatly depending on personality, family dynamics, and cultural background.
What's it like having siblings?
[object Object]To reconcile the idea that 'Education is the Key to Success' with the presence of underemployed graduates and successful criminals, it's important to emphasize that education is one among many factors that contribute to success. Education equips individuals with knowledge, critical thinking skills, and problem-solving abilities, which are essential tools for navigating life's challenges and seizing opportunities. However, success is also influenced by other elements such as personal drive, social connections, opportunities presented, and sometimes sheer luck. Education does not guarantee success on its own; rather, it provides a foundation upon which individuals can build their careers and personal lives. Additionally, the definition of success can be subjective and varies across different cultures and individuals. It's crucial to address practical considerations like ensuring that educational curricula are relevant to the current job market and fostering environments where both hard ...
[object Object]To reconcile the idea that 'Education is the Key to Success' with the presence of underemployed graduates and successful criminals, it's important to emphasize that education is one among many factors that contribute to success. Education equips individuals with knowledge, critical thinking skills, and problem-solving abilities, which are essential tools for navigating life's challenges and seizing opportunities. However, success is also influenced by other elements such as personal drive, social connections, opportunities presented, and sometimes sheer luck. Education does not guarantee success on its own; rather, it provides a foundation upon which individuals can build their careers and personal lives. Additionally, the definition of success can be subjective and varies across different cultures and individuals. It's crucial to address practical considerations like ensuring that educational curricula are relevant to the current job market and fostering environments where both hard ...
How do you convince the upcoming generation that "Education is The Key of Success " when we are surrounded by poor graduates and rich criminals?
Approximate statistics based on the first 1000 samples:
anchor
positive
negative_1
type
string
string
string
details
min: 5 tokens
mean: 28.17 tokens
max: 121 tokens
min: 5 tokens
mean: 27.61 tokens
max: 121 tokens
min: 6 tokens
mean: 20.27 tokens
max: 64 tokens
Samples:
anchor
positive
negative_1
What high potential jobs are there other than computer science?
What high potential jobs are there other than computer science?
Why IT or Computer Science jobs are being over rated than other Engineering jobs?
Would India ever be able to develop a missile system like S300 or S400 missile?
Would India ever be able to develop a missile system like S300 or S400 missile?
Should India buy the Russian S400 air defence missile system?
water from the faucet is being drunk by a yellow dog
A yellow dog is drinking water from the faucet
Childlessness is low in Eastern European countries.
Loss: pylate.losses.contrastive.Contrastive
Framework Versions
Python: 3.12.12
Sentence Transformers: 5.3.0
PyLate: 1.5.0
Transformers: 5.3.0
PyTorch: 2.9.0+cu130
Accelerate: 1.13.0
Datasets: 4.8.5
Tokenizers: 0.22.2
Citation
BibTeX
Sentence Transformers
bibtex
1@inproceedings{reimers-2019-sentence-bert,
2 title = "Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks",
3 author = "Reimers, Nils and Gurevych, Iryna",
4 booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
5 month = "11",
6 year = "2019",
7 publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
8 url = "https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.10084"
9}
PyLate
bibtex
1@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/cikm/ChaffinS25,
2 author = {Antoine Chaffin and
3 Rapha{"{e}}l Sourty},
4 editor = {Meeyoung Cha and
5 Chanyoung Park and
6 Noseong Park and
7 Carl Yang and
8 Senjuti Basu Roy and
9 Jessie Li and
10 Jaap Kamps and
11 Kijung Shin and
12 Bryan Hooi and
13 Lifang He},
14 title = {PyLate: Flexible Training and Retrieval for Late Interaction Models},
15 booktitle = {Proceedings of the 34th {ACM} International Conference on Information
16 and Knowledge Management, {CIKM} 2025, Seoul, Republic of Korea, November
17 10-14, 2025},
18 pages = {6334--6339},
19 publisher = {{ACM}},
20 year = {2025},
21 url = {https://github.com/lightonai/pylate},
22 doi = {10.1145/3746252.3761608},
23}