Language Models in deepset Cloud

deepset Cloud is model agnostic and can load models directly from model providers, such as Hugging Face or OpenAI. You can use publically available models but also your private ones if you connect deepset Cloud with the model provider.

Models in Your Pipelines

You use models through pipeline nodes. There are a couple of pipeline nodes that use models. Have a look at this table for an overview of model applications and nodes that use them:

Model Type or ApplicationNode That Uses ItDescription
Large language modelsPromptNodeUse LLMs for various NLP tasks, like generative QA, through PromptNode. You can use models from providers such as OpenAI, Cohere, Azure, and more, or models hosted on AWS SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock.
Information retrieval modelsVector-based retrievers: EmbeddingRetriever and DensePassageRetrieverRetrievers act like filters that go through the documents and fetch the ones most relevant to the query. Vector-based retrievers used models to encode both the documents and the query for the best results.
Question answering modelsReadersReaders are used in extractive question answering. They highlight the answer in the document to pinpoint it and they use transformer-based models to do that.
Ranking modelsModel-based rankers: SentenceTransformersRanker and EmbeddingRankerRankers prioritize documents based on the criteria you specify, for example, a particular value in a document's metadata field. Model-based are powerful rankers that use transformer models to embed the documents and the query and thus build a strong semantic representation of the text.

To use a model, simply pass its name as a parameter to the node (it's usually the model_name_or_path parameter). If you're using a proprietary model, you can either pass the API key to the node or connect deepset Cloud to the model provider. deepset Cloud takes care of loading the models.

You can run models locally or remotely. Smaller models, like Reader or Retriever models, are fast when run locally. Large models, like GPT-3.5 or GPT-4, are faster to run remotely as they need optimized hardware. To run a model remotely, you may need to pass additional parameters in model kwargs. For detailed instructions, see the documentation for the node that uses the model.

When using LLMs with PromptNode, you can specify all additional model settings, like temperature, in the model_kwargs parameter, for example:

components:
  - name: PromptNode 
    type: PromptNode
    params:
      model_name_or_path: google/flan-t5-xl
      model_kwargs:
      	temperature: 0.6

Recommended Models

Larger models are generally more accurate at the cost of speed.

If you don't know which model to start with, you can use one of the models we recommend.

Large Language Models for RAG

This table lists the model that we recommend for retrieval augmented generation (RAG) QA. You can use them with PromptNode in your pipelines. You can use models hosted on AWS Bedrock, SageMaker, and Hugging Face, as well as local models.

Model URLDescriptionType
Llama 2 models, specifically Llama2-70b-chat-v1Currently, the most performant open source LLMs.Open source
Claude models by AnthropicA transformer-based LLM that can be an alternative to the GPT models. It can generate natural language and assist with code and translations.Proprietary
GPT-3.5 models by OpenAIFaster and cheaper than GPT-4, it can generate and understand natural language and code.Proprietary
GPT-4 models by OpenAILarge multimodal models. More expensive and slower than GPT-3.5.Proprietary

For an overview of the models, see Large Language Models Overview.

Hosted LLMs

deepset Cloud can load models hosted in:

  • Hugging Face
  • Cohere
  • OpenAI
  • Amazon Sagemaker
  • Amazon Bedrock
  • Microsoft Azure (hosted OpenAI models)

For instructions on how to set up the connections, see Using Hosted LLMs in Your Pipelines.

Reader Models for Question Answering

This table describes the models that we recommend for the question answering task. You can use them with your Readers.

Model URLDescriptionLanguage
deepset/roberta-base-squad2-distilledA distilled model, relatively fast and with good performance.English
deepset/roberta-large-squad2A large model with good performance. Slower than the distilled one.English
deepset/xlm-roberta-base-squad2A base model with good speed and performance.Multilingual
deepset/tinyroberta-squad2A very fast model.English

You can also view state-of-the-art question answering models on the Hugging Face leaderboard.

Retriever Models for Information Retrieval

This table describes the embedding models that we recommend for the information retrieval (document search) task. You can use them with your Retrievers.

Model ProviderModel NameDescriptionLanguage
Cohereembed-english-v2.0
embed-english-light-v2.0
See Cohere documentation.English
Cohereembed-multilingual-v2.0See Cohere documentation.Multilingual
OpenAItext-adda-002See OpenAI documentation.English
Sentence Transformerssentence-transformers/multi-qa-mpnet-base-do-v1Vector dimension*: 768English
Sentence Transformersintfloat/e5-base-v2Vector dimension*: 768
With this model, we recommend setting the similarity parameter of DocumentStore to cosine.
English
Sentence Transformersintfloat/e5-large-v2Vector dimension*: 1024
Slower than e5-base-v2 but performs better
With this model, we recommend setting the similarity parameter of DocumentStore to cosine.
English
Sentence Transformersintfloat/multilingual-e5-baseVector dimension*: 768
With this model, we recommend setting the similarity parameter of DocumentStore to cosine.
Multilingual
Sentence Transformersintfloat/multilingual-e5-largeVector dimension* 1024
With this model, we recommend setting the similarity parameter of DocumentStore to cosine.
Multilingual

*In language models, vector dimension refers to the number of elements a vector that represents a word contains, capturing its meaning and usage. The more dimensions, or numbers, in this vector, the more detail the model can understand about the word, though it also makes the model more complex to handle.
For models with the vector dimension provided, set the embedding_dim parameter of DocumentStore to the model's vector dimension like this:

...
components:
  - name: DocumentStore
    type: DeepsetCloudDocumentStore 
    params:
      embedding_dim: 1024 #Here you specify the vector dimension of the Retriever model
  - name: Retriever 
    type: EmbeddingRetriever 
    params:
      document_store: DocumentStore
      embedding_model: intfloat/e5-large-v2 #This model's vector dimension is 1024, as set in embedding_dim of DocumentStore
      top_k: 20 # The number of results to return

It's best to try out different models and see what works best for your data.

Ranker Models

This table lists models you can use with SentenceTransformersRanker to rank documents.

ModelDescriptionLanguage
intfloat/simlm-msmarco-rerankerThe best ranker model currently available.English
cross-encoder/ms-marco-MiniLM-L-12-v2A slightly bigger and slower model.English
cross-encoder/ms-marco-MiniLM-L-6-v2Slightly faster than ms-marco-MiniLM-L-12-v2English
svalabs/cross-electra-ms-marco-german-uncasedIn our practice, this is the best model for Geman.German
jeffwan/mmarco-mMiniLMv2-L12-H384-v1A quite fast, multilingual model.Multilingual

These are the recommended models for CohereRanker:

ModelLanguage
rerank-english-v2.0English
rerank-multilingual-v2.0Multilingual

For EmbeddingRanker, we recommend the same models as for retrieval.