Features
- Supports synchronous usage. No dependency on Tokio.
- Uses @pykeio/ort for performant ONNX inference.
- Uses @huggingface/tokenizers for fast encodings.
Not looking for Rust?
- Python: fastembed
- Go: fastembed-go
- JavaScript: fastembed-js
Supported Models
Text Embedding
Click to list models
- BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5 - Default
- BAAI/bge-base-en-v1.5
- BAAI/bge-large-en-v1.5
- BAAI/bge-small-zh-v1.5
- BAAI/bge-large-zh-v1.5
- BAAI/bge-m3
- sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2
- sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L12-v2
- sentence-transformers/all-mpnet-base-v2
- sentence-transformers/paraphrase-MiniLM-L12-v2
- sentence-transformers/paraphrase-multilingual-mpnet-base-v2
- nomic-ai/nomic-embed-text-v1
- nomic-ai/nomic-embed-text-v1.5 - pairs with
nomic-embed-vision-v1.5for image-to-text search - intfloat/multilingual-e5-small
- intfloat/multilingual-e5-base
- intfloat/multilingual-e5-large
- mixedbread-ai/mxbai-embed-large-v1
- Alibaba-NLP/gte-base-en-v1.5
- Alibaba-NLP/gte-large-en-v1.5
- lightonai/ModernBERT-embed-large
- Qdrant/clip-ViT-B-32-text - pairs with
clip-ViT-B-32-visionfor image-to-text search - jinaai/jina-embeddings-v2-base-code
- jinaai/jina-embeddings-v2-base-en
- google/embeddinggemma-300m
- nomic-ai/nomic-embed-text-v2-moe - requires
nomic-v2-moefeature (candle backend) - Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B - requires
qwen3feature (candle backend) - Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-4B - requires
qwen3feature (candle backend) - Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B - requires
qwen3feature (candle backend) - Qwen/Qwen3-VL-Embedding-2B - requires
qwen3feature (candle backend, multimodal viaQwen3VLEmbedding) - snowflake/snowflake-arctic-embed-xs
- snowflake/snowflake-arctic-embed-s
- snowflake/snowflake-arctic-embed-m
- snowflake/snowflake-arctic-embed-m-long
- snowflake/snowflake-arctic-embed-l
Quantized versions are also available for several models above (append Q to the model enum variant, e.g., EmbeddingModel::BGESmallENV15Q). EmbeddingGemma additionally ships a 4-bit build as EmbeddingModel::EmbeddingGemma300MQ4.
Sparse Text Embedding
Click to list models
- prithivida/Splade_PP_en_v1 - Default
- BAAI/bge-m3
Image Embedding
Click to list models
Reranking
Click to list models
✊ Support
To support the library, please donate to our primary upstream dependency, ort - The Rust wrapper for the ONNX runtime.
Installation
Run the following in your project directory:
Or add the following line to your Cargo.toml:
[dependencies] fastembed = "5"
Text Embeddings
use fastembed::{TextEmbedding, TextInitOptions, EmbeddingModel}; // With default options let mut model = TextEmbedding::try_new(Default::default())?; // With custom options let mut model = TextEmbedding::try_new( TextInitOptions::new(EmbeddingModel::AllMiniLML6V2).with_show_download_progress(true).with_intra_threads(4), )?; let documents = vec![ "passage: Hello, World!", "query: Hello, World!", "passage: This is an example passage.", // You can leave out the prefix but it's recommended "fastembed-rs is licensed under Apache 2.0" ]; // Generate embeddings with the default batch size, 256 let embeddings = model.embed(documents, None)?; println!("Embeddings length: {}", embeddings.len()); // -> Embeddings length: 4 println!("Embedding dimension: {}", embeddings[0].len()); // -> Embedding dimension: 384
Sparse Text Embeddings
use fastembed::{SparseEmbedding, SparseInitOptions, SparseModel, SparseTextEmbedding}; // With default options let mut model = SparseTextEmbedding::try_new(Default::default())?; // With custom options let mut model = SparseTextEmbedding::try_new( SparseInitOptions::new(SparseModel::SPLADEPPV1).with_show_download_progress(true), )?; let documents = vec![ "passage: Hello, World!", "query: Hello, World!", "passage: This is an example passage.", "fastembed-rs is licensed under Apache 2.0" ]; // Generate embeddings with the default batch size, 256 let embeddings: Vec<SparseEmbedding> = model.embed(documents, None)?;
Image Embeddings
use fastembed::{ImageEmbedding, ImageInitOptions, ImageEmbeddingModel}; // With default options let mut model = ImageEmbedding::try_new(Default::default())?; // With custom options let mut model = ImageEmbedding::try_new( ImageInitOptions::new(ImageEmbeddingModel::ClipVitB32).with_show_download_progress(true), )?; let images = vec!["assets/image_0.png", "assets/image_1.png"]; // Generate embeddings with the default batch size, 256 let embeddings = model.embed(images, None)?; println!("Embeddings length: {}", embeddings.len()); // -> Embeddings length: 2 println!("Embedding dimension: {}", embeddings[0].len()); // -> Embedding dimension: 512
Candidates Reranking
use fastembed::{TextRerank, RerankInitOptions, RerankerModel}; // With default options let mut model = TextRerank::try_new(Default::default())?; // With custom options let mut model = TextRerank::try_new( RerankInitOptions::new(RerankerModel::BGERerankerBase).with_show_download_progress(true), )?; let documents = vec![ "hi", "The giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca), sometimes called a panda bear, is a bear species endemic to China.", "panda is animal", "i dont know", "kind of mammal", ]; // Rerank with the default batch size, 256 and return document contents let results = model.rerank("what is panda?", documents, true, None)?; println!("Rerank result: {:?}", results);
Locally Available Models
Alternatively, local model files can be used for inference via the try_new_from_user_defined(...) methods of respective structs.
Similarity Search
Helpers in the similarity module score and rank the vectors embed returns, so a quick in-memory search needs no extra crate:
use fastembed::similarity::{cosine_similarity, top_k}; // `embeddings` is the Vec<Embedding> from model.embed(...) let query = &embeddings[0]; // Score two vectors directly ([-1.0, 1.0], higher = closer) let score = cosine_similarity(query, &embeddings[1]); // Or rank the corpus: (index, score) pairs, best first let hits = top_k(query, &embeddings, 5); println!("Closest: {:?}", hits);
For larger corpora or persistence, push the vectors to a vector search engine (e.g. Qdrant) and query there.
Qwen3 Embeddings
Qwen3 embedding models are available behind the qwen3 feature flag (candle backend).
[dependencies] fastembed = { version = "5", features = ["qwen3"] }
use candle_core::{DType, Device}; use fastembed::Qwen3TextEmbedding; let device = Device::Cpu; let model = Qwen3TextEmbedding::from_hf( "Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B", &device, DType::F32, 512, )?; // Text-only usage with the Qwen3-VL embedding checkpoint is also supported: // let model = Qwen3TextEmbedding::from_hf("Qwen/Qwen3-VL-Embedding-2B", &device, DType::F32, 512)?; let embeddings = model.embed(&["query: ...", "passage: ..."])?; println!("Embeddings length: {}", embeddings.len());
For multimodal text/image usage with Qwen/Qwen3-VL-Embedding-2B:
use candle_core::{DType, Device}; use fastembed::Qwen3VLEmbedding; let device = Device::Cpu; let model = Qwen3VLEmbedding::from_hf( "Qwen/Qwen3-VL-Embedding-2B", &device, DType::F32, 2048, )?; let image_embeddings = model.embed_images(&["tests/assets/image_0.png", "tests/assets/image_1.png"])?; let text_embeddings = model.embed_texts(&["query: blue cat", "query: red cat"])?; println!("Image embeddings: {}", image_embeddings.len()); println!("Text embeddings: {}", text_embeddings.len());
Nomic Embed Text v2 MoE
The nomic-embed-text-v2-moe model is available behind the nomic-v2-moe feature flag (candle backend). First general-purpose MoE embedding model with 100+ language support.
[dependencies] fastembed = { version = "5", features = ["nomic-v2-moe"] }
use candle_core::{DType, Device}; use fastembed::NomicV2MoeTextEmbedding; let device = Device::Cpu; let model = NomicV2MoeTextEmbedding::from_hf( "nomic-ai/nomic-embed-text-v2-moe", &device, DType::F32, 512, )?; let embeddings = model.embed(&["search_query: ...", "search_document: ..."])?; println!("Embeddings length: {}", embeddings.len());
BGE-M3 Joint Embeddings
The BGE-M3 model produces dense, sparse, and ColBERT embeddings simultaneously in a single forward pass.
use fastembed::{Bgem3Embedding, Bgem3InitOptions, Bgem3Model}; // With default options let mut model = Bgem3Embedding::try_new(Default::default())?; // With custom options (supporting custom max length up to 8192 tokens) let mut model = Bgem3Embedding::try_new( Bgem3InitOptions::new(Bgem3Model::BGEM3Q) .with_max_length(1024) .with_show_download_progress(true), )?; let documents = vec![ "Hello, World!", "This is an example passage.", "fastembed-rs is licensed under Apache 2.0", "i dont know" ]; // Generate all three representations in a single forward pass let output = model.embed(documents, None)?; println!("Dense dimension: {}", output.dense[0].len()); // -> Dense dimension: 1024 let sparse_emb = &output.sparse[0]; println!("Sparse non-zero tokens: {}", sparse_emb.indices.len()); println!("ColBERT token count: {}", output.colbert[0].len());
Note
The default quantized model (BGEM3Q) is optimized for CPUs; passing a GPU execution provider (like CUDA) will fail. For GPU inference or custom requirements, you can export your own custom model (FP32, FP16, or INT8) using the ONNX export script from hf gpahal/bge-m3-onnx-int8 and load it via try_new_from_path.
Model cache
Models download on first use and load from cache afterwards (no network needed at runtime once cached).
FASTEMBED_CACHE_DIR— cache location (default:.fastembed_cache). Equivalent toTextInitOptions::with_cache_dir.HF_HOME— if set, takes precedence over the above.HF_ENDPOINT— Hugging Face mirror base URL, for restricted networks.
DirectML (Windows)
To run models on a GPU via DirectML on Windows, enable the directml feature:
[dependencies] fastembed = { version = "5", features = ["directml"] }
Then pass a DirectML execution provider when initializing a model:
use fastembed::{TextEmbedding, TextInitOptions, EmbeddingModel}; use ort::ep::DirectML; let model = TextEmbedding::try_new( TextInitOptions::new(EmbeddingModel::AllMiniLML6V2) .with_execution_providers(vec![DirectML::default().into()]), )?;
When DirectML is detected, fastembed automatically disables memory pattern optimization and parallel execution on the ONNX Runtime session, as required by the DirectML execution provider.

























