Status: Training completed successfully but MTEB evaluation shows critical quality loss. This serves as a baseline for comparison with the improved v2 model (2048 tokens, better architecture) currently in development.

Model Description

This model is a distilled and quantized version of google/embeddinggemma-300m trained using the LEAF (Layer-wise Early-exit Alignment Framework) methodology. It generates 768-dimensional embeddings optimized for fast CPU inference with INT8 quantization.

What is LEAF?

LEAF is a knowledge distillation framework that:

Compresses larger embedding models into smaller, faster versions
Preserves semantic quality through multi-objective training (distillation + alignment + contrastive losses)
Optimizes for CPU deployment with INT8 post-training quantization

Architecture

Property	This Model (LEAF)	Base Model (EmbeddingGemma-300m)
Dimensions	768D	768D (also 512D, 256D, 128D via Matryoshka)
Parameters	~75M (6 layers, compressed)	300M (full architecture)
Max Tokens	512	2048
Quantization	INT8 (441MB)	FP32 (~600MB)
Inference Speed	695 texts/s (CPU)	~50-100 texts/s (CPU)

Trade-offs:

✅ 6-10x faster inference on CPU
✅ Smaller model size (441MB vs ~600MB)
✅ Lower memory footprint
⚠️ Reduced context length (512 vs 2048 tokens)
⚠️ Possible quality loss from distillation (not yet benchmarked)

Performance

Inference Speed (CPU)

Throughput: 695 texts/second
Latency: ~1.4ms per text
Memory: ~500MB RAM
Hardware: Standard CPU, no GPU required

❌ ACTUAL QUALITY (MTEB Evaluation - FAILED)

Evaluation Date: 2025-10-12 Status: ❌ CRITICAL FAILURE - Model does not capture semantic relationships

Dataset	Metric	This Model (v1)	Base Model	Quality Loss
STSBenchmark	Spearman	0.223	0.81	-72% ❌
STS22 English	Spearman	0.373	0.75	-50% ❌
STS22 Average	Spearman	~0.21	0.65	-68% ❌
Cross-lingual	Spearman	-0.14 to 0.12	0.55	Complete loss ❌

Detailed STS22 Results by Language:

Language	Spearman	Status
🇨🇳 Chinese	0.499	🟡 Moderate (best)
🇸🇦 Arabic	0.469	🟡 Moderate
🇮🇹 Italian	0.435	🟡 Moderate
🇪🇸 Spanish	0.403	🟠 Poor
🇬🇧 English	0.373	🟠 Poor
🇫🇷 French	0.300	🔴 Very poor
🇷🇺 Russian	0.268	🔴 Very poor
🇹🇷 Turkish	0.247	🔴 Very poor
🇩🇪 German	0.163	❌ Critical
🇵🇱 Polish	0.132	❌ Critical

Cross-lingual pairs (translation tasks): All FAILED (scores 0.002 to -0.143)

Conclusion: This model cannot be used for semantic search, similarity tasks, or any production use. The embeddings do not preserve semantic meaning from the base model.

Training Quality Analysis

Training Metrics (from WandB logs):

Metric	Final Value	Status
Distillation Loss	0.976	✅ Good - Model learned from teacher
Alignment Loss	2.18	⚠️ Moderate - Semantic space alignment could improve
Training Steps	12,500 (3 epochs)	✅ Complete
Training Time	2h10min	✅ Efficient
Eval Loss	NaN	❌ Bug in evaluation aggregation

Observations:

✅ Training converged smoothly without crashes
✅ Distillation loss stable and low (0.976) - good knowledge transfer
⚠️ Alignment loss moderate (2.18) - room for improvement
❌ Evaluation metrics not computed (NaN) - needs separate MTEB evaluation
📊 17 checkpoints saved - can select best performing model

Quality Verdict: ❌ FAILED - Despite low distillation loss, the model failed to learn semantic representations.

🔍 Failure Analysis

What went wrong:

Architecture Too Aggressive ❌
- 6 layers too small for semantic preservation (should be 12+)
- 4x compression (300M→75M) lost critical information
- Hidden size ratio 0.5x insufficient
Insufficient Training Data ❌
- Only 50k samples for 100+ languages
- Mostly English data (NLI, STS, MS MARCO)
- No multilingual balance
Misleading Distillation Loss ⚠️
- Low distillation loss (0.976) doesn't guarantee semantic quality
- High alignment loss (2.18) was the real warning sign
- Model learned to mimic output distribution but not semantic meaning
Evaluation Bug ❌
- Eval loss = NaN prevented early detection of failure
- Should have caught quality issues during training

Lessons learned for v2:

✅ Monitor alignment loss as primary metric (target: <1.0)
✅ Increase student size to 120M params (12 layers)
✅ Use 200k+ multilingual samples
✅ Implement proper eval during training (MTEB subset every 500 steps)
✅ Train with 2048 token context
✅ Curriculum learning: 512→1024→2048 tokens progressively

Training Details

Methodology

Knowledge Distillation from EmbeddingGemma-300m (300M → 75M params)
LEAF Framework with multi-objective training:
- Distillation loss (0.5 weight)
- Alignment loss (1.0 weight)
- Contrastive loss (0.3 weight)
INT8 Quantization for CPU optimization

Training Configuration

Teacher Model: google/embeddinggemma-300m
Training Data: 50,000 samples from:
- sentence-transformers/all-nli
- sentence-transformers/stsb
- ms_marco
Validation: 5,000 samples
Training Steps: 12,500 (3 epochs)
Hardware: NVIDIA RTX 4050 (6GB VRAM)
Training Time: ~2h10min
Final Losses:
- Distillation: 0.976
- Alignment: 2.18

Student Architecture

Layers: 6 (vs more in teacher)
Attention Heads: 6
Hidden Size Ratio: 0.5x
Compression Ratio: 4x

Training Logs

View full training metrics on WandB

Usage

Requirements

pip install torch>=2.6.0 transformers>=4.57.0 huggingface-hub

Basic Usage

python

import torch
from transformers import AutoTokenizer
from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download

# Download model
model_path = hf_hub_download(
    repo_id="tss-deposium/gemma300-leaf-embeddings-test",
    filename="model_quantized.pt"
)

# Load model
checkpoint = torch.load(model_path, map_location='cpu', weights_only=False)
model = checkpoint['model']
model.eval()

# Load tokenizer
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(
    "tss-deposium/gemma300-leaf-embeddings-test"
)
model.set_tokenizer(tokenizer)

# Generate embeddings
texts = ["Hello world", "Machine learning"]
with torch.no_grad():
    embeddings = model.encode(texts, device='cpu', normalize=True)

print(embeddings.shape)  # (2, 768)

API Integration

This model is deployed as part of a FastAPI service:

python

import requests

response = requests.post(
    "https://your-api-url/api/embed",
    json={"model": "leaf", "input": "Your text here"}
)

embeddings = response.json()["embeddings"]

Model Card

Property	Value
Base Model	google/embeddinggemma-300m
Framework	LEAF (Knowledge Distillation)
Model Type	Sentence Embeddings
Dimensions	768
Max Tokens	512 (reduced from 2048 for efficiency)
Quantization	INT8
PyTorch Version	2.6+
Language	English (base model supports 100+ languages)
Training Dataset	50k samples (NLI, STS, MS MARCO)

Files

model_quantized.pt (441MB) - INT8 quantized model for CPU inference
model_fp32.pt (477MB) - FP32 full precision version (optional)
tokenizer.json (33MB) - Tokenizer vocabulary
config.json - Model configuration
tokenizer_config.json - Tokenizer settings

Limitations

Context Length

512 tokens maximum (vs 2048 in base model)
Longer texts will be truncated
Consider chunking for documents >512 tokens

Quality Trade-offs

Distillation: Compressed from 300M → 75M parameters may reduce quality
Quantization: INT8 quantization may introduce small accuracy loss
Training Data: 50k samples may not cover all domains

Language Support

Primarily tested on English
Base model supports 100+ languages, but distilled model not yet evaluated on multilingual tasks

Experimental Status

Not production-ready: Requires thorough evaluation
No MTEB scores: Quality benchmarks pending
Limited testing: More evaluation needed on downstream tasks

❌ DO NOT USE - Model Failed Quality Checks

This model is NOT suitable for ANY production use cases.

❌ NOT suitable for:

❌ Semantic search - Scores too low (0.22 Spearman)
❌ Document similarity - Does not capture semantic meaning
❌ Text clustering - Embeddings not semantically meaningful
❌ Information retrieval - Poor correlation with human judgments
❌ Duplicate detection - Unreliable similarity scores
❌ Any production deployment - Quality insufficient
❌ Multilingual tasks - Cross-lingual capabilities destroyed
❌ Mission-critical applications - Do not use

✅ Only suitable for:

✅ Research purposes - Understanding failure modes in knowledge distillation
✅ Baseline comparison - For comparing with improved v2 model
✅ Educational purposes - Learning what NOT to do in model compression

Comparison with Base Model

Metric	LEAF v1 (This Model)	EmbeddingGemma-300m	Quality Gap
Parameters	~75M	300M	-75%
Size (INT8/FP32)	441MB	~600MB	-26% ✅
Speed (CPU)	695 texts/s	~50-100 texts/s	+6-10x ✅
Context Length	512	2048	-75% ❌
STSBenchmark	0.223	0.81	-72% ❌
STS22 English	0.373	0.75	-50% ❌
MTEB Score (est.)	~25	61.15	-59% ❌
Latency	~1.4ms	~10-20ms	-85% ✅

Verdict: Speed improvements do NOT justify the catastrophic quality loss. Use base model instead.

Future Work - Version 2 (In Development)

Based on lessons learned from this failed v1 experiment, we are developing v2 with:

Architecture Improvements

✅ 12 layers (vs 6 in v1) - 2x deeper for semantic preservation
✅ 120M parameters (vs 75M) - Less aggressive compression (2.5x vs 4x)
✅ 2048 token context (vs 512) - Full context length like base model
✅ Hidden size ratio 0.75 (vs 0.5) - Better capacity

Training Improvements

✅ 200k samples (vs 50k) - 4x more data
✅ Multilingual balanced - 100+ languages with proper distribution
✅ Curriculum learning - Progressive 512→1024→2048 tokens
✅ 10 epochs (vs 3) - More training time
✅ Alignment loss priority - Weight 2.5 (vs 1.0) + triplet loss

Evaluation Improvements

✅ Eval every 500 steps - Early detection of quality issues
✅ MTEB subset validation - STSBenchmark during training
✅ Alignment loss < 1.0 target - Primary quality metric
✅ Early stopping - On alignment loss, not distillation loss

Quality Targets (v2)

🎯 STSBenchmark: 0.70+ Spearman (vs 0.22 in v1)
🎯 STS22 Average: 0.50+ Spearman (vs 0.21 in v1)
🎯 MTEB Score: 55+ (vs ~25 estimated in v1)
🎯 Cross-lingual: 0.30+ (vs -0.14 in v1)

Expected release: After full training and validation (~12-15 hours on RTX 4050)

Citation

bibtex

@misc{leaf-embeddings-test,
  author = {TSS Deposium},
  title = {LEAF Embeddings INT8 - Distilled from EmbeddingGemma-300m},
  year = {2025},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/tss-deposium/gemma300-leaf-embeddings-test}},
  note = {Based on google/embeddinggemma-300m}
}

@misc{embeddinggemma,
  author = {Google},
  title = {EmbeddingGemma-300m},
  year = {2024},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/google/embeddinggemma-300m}}
}

Acknowledgments

Base Model: google/embeddinggemma-300m
Training Framework: Custom LEAF implementation
Datasets: Sentence Transformers, MS MARCO

Contact

For questions or issues, please open an issue on the model repository.

Disclaimer: This is an experimental model for testing purposes. Performance and quality may vary. Thorough evaluation recommended before production use.