embed-gov-indic

Quanfire Government Embedding — embed-gov-indic (cross-lingual, Indian government press releases)

⚠️ Measurement correction — 2026-08-21

The headline this card used to carry (+53 % Recall@1) was measured on a contaminated evaluation split. The corrected figure is +37.1 %.

The bug: the training filter dropped a pair only when its positive was in the held-out set. This corpus is bidirectional, so the reverse of a held-out pair was still eligible for training, and pairs from held-out source documents were never excluded at all. The model was partly trained on the text it was scored on.

The adapter was retrained and rescored on a split that isolates at the source-document level. Every number in Results below is the clean measurement. The gain is smaller and it is still statistically significant (disjoint 95 % CIs).

Three things a reader deserves to know:

1. The clean figures are for a retrain (gov-indic-e4c), not for the weight file currently in this repo. The published weights saw the evaluation documents during training, so no honest score for them exists — not a lower one either. Publishing the clean adapter as a new revision is pending.
2. The runs are not volume-matched. The clean run trained on 2,115 pairs against the withdrawn run's 7,270, because one press release yields many same-document pairs across 16 languages and document isolation removes most of the pool. Do not read the difference as "the leak was worth 16 points"; the honest finding is that this corpus is too document-poor to support a clean high-volume train.
3. v1.0 was never re-measured, so the v1.0-vs-v1.1 comparison this card used to make has been withdrawn rather than corrected.

Fix: without_held_out() in quanfire-multilingual-embedding (commits 66470fe, 6fe7e6b, 3deaf8d).

A cross-lingual retrieval adapter for Indian government press-release text across 16 Indian languages. It is a LoRA adaptation over a frozen intfloat/multilingual-e5-small (MIT) base — a 2.4 MB adapter, 384-dimensional normalized vectors, max_length 256 — trained on Press Information Bureau (PIB) press releases, which are published as the same release in many languages and so provide naturally-parallel cross-lingual signal.

The point of this model is cross-lingual retrieval: a query in one Indian language finding the passage about the same government release in another language. It is a specialist and a showcase of clean-provenance multilingual retrieval, not a general model — and this card shows you exactly what it does and does not do, measured.

Version 1.1 — same task, same contract, longer training. v1.1 addresses a training shortfall in v1.0: the earlier runs held epochs = 1 and the adapter was undertrained (its loss had barely moved). v1.1 trains longer on the same balanced corpus. The claim that it is significantly better than v1.0 has been withdrawn — that comparison was made on a contaminated split and v1.0 has not been re-measured, so there is no valid comparison between the two. The extra fit is not free: three mid/low-resource languages sit below the base. See What changed in v1.1.

• Framework & code: github.com/quanfire-ai/quanfire-multilingual-embedding (Apache-2.0)
• Weights licence: Apache-2.0. The adapter is ours; the training text is PIB press-release content reused under PIB's reproduction policy (free reproduction, attribution, no NonCommercial, no ShareAlike) — attribution is given below, and the model is non-reconstructive (it emits vectors, never the source text).
• Internal run: gov-indic-e4-ep6 · base e5-small · rank 32 / alpha 64, LoRA on query,value · 589,824 adapter params · 6 epochs, lr 1e-4, seed 0, batch 256 (bf16, CUDA) · the clean re-measure reported below is gov-indic-e4c: identical configuration, retrained on a document-isolated split

What it is for

Cross-lingual and in-language retrieval over Indian government press releases — search a corpus of releases with a query in any of the supported languages, and rank passages regardless of which language they are written in. It embeds a query and a passage into the same 384-d space; cosine similarity ranks.

Scope — read this before you use it

The base multilingual-e5-small is already a capable multilingual retriever, so the honest framing is: this adapter adds a significant, broad cross-lingual gain on government-domain text on top of an already-multilingual base. Absolute Recall@1 is modest (retrieving the one right passage out of a 1,541-passage pool across 16 languages is hard); on the clean split the right passage lands in the top-10 about 75% of the time.

Results (held-out, scored on CUDA)

In-distribution — 1,541 held-out cross-lingual queries (anchor and positive in different Indian languages, same release; drawn from 1,800 mined pairs). The published base is the only honest baseline; the adapter is scored on the same held-out queries.

The base column is unchanged — the contamination only ever inflated the adapter, so the correction is confined to one column.

The Recall@1 improvement is statistically significant — the 95% confidence intervals are disjoint (base [0.1651, 0.2038] → clean retrain [0.2307, 0.2741]). No claim of significance over v1.0 is made any more: v1.0's number came from the same contaminated split and has not been re-measured.

Per positive-language (Recall@1, base → v1.1; all 16 eval languages, n = eval queries):

12 of 16 languages improve, Nepali (n=7) is flat, and three regress against the base — Manipuri, Gujarati and Khasi (n=14).

The clean split changes which languages are in that regression list, so the old version of this paragraph was wrong in both directions: Odia now improves (0.138 → 0.181) where the contaminated run showed it regressing, and Manipuri now falls to 0.000 where the contaminated run claimed it recovered to 0.039. On a 2,115-pair train, the lowest-resource languages get too little signal to move, and Manipuri gets none.

What changed in v1.1

v1.0 (gov-indic-e3) shipped at 1 epoch. Its training loss was essentially flat and the adapter had barely moved — it was undertrained, not at its ceiling. v1.1 (gov-indic-e4-ep6) reruns the identical corpus, seed, rank and learning rate for 6 epochs (loss 4.18 → 1.22), so the two are directly comparable.

The v1.0 → v1.1 comparison has been withdrawn. It read "overall Recall@1 0.235 → 0.281, top-10 recall 74% → 84%, Manipuri recovers from v1.0's collapse". Both sides of that comparison were measured on the contaminated split, and only v1.1 has been re-measured, so there is nothing left to compare against. v1.0 remains available by revision tag; we no longer make a claim about which of the two is stronger.

The tradeoff that survives, stated plainly: longer training sharpens the majority at the expense of a few. Against the base, on the clean split, Gujarati (0.367 → 0.330), Manipuri (0.029 → 0.000) and Khasi (0.143 → 0.071, n=14) sit below where the untuned model was. If your workload is Gujarati-dominant, measure before switching. This is a genuine speciality-vs-uniformity tradeoff, not a strict upgrade, and we would rather say so than hide it.

Which weights should I use?

Two revisions are published. They share the recipe and differ in what can be said about them:

hf download quanfire-ai/embed-gov-indic --revision clean-2026-08-21 --local-dir embed-gov-indic-clean

Which one to take. If you need a number you can cite or audit, take clean-2026-08-21 — it is the one the Results section describes. main saw 3.4x the training data and may well be the stronger retriever in practice, but "may well be" is precisely the kind of claim this card no longer makes.

We have not swapped the default, and the reason is worth stating: doing so would trade a plausibly-stronger model for a measurable one with no evidence that the trade is good. Settling it properly needs a head-to-head of the two adapters on a corpus neither of them trained on. That is planned, and until it runs, both revisions stay up and this section stays honest about which is which.

Licence & provenance

• Base: intfloat/multilingual-e5-small (MIT).
• Training data: Press Information Bureau (PIB, pib.gov.in) press releases, reused under PIB's stated reproduction policy — free reproduction with source acknowledgement, no NonCommercial and no ShareAlike clause. Embedded third-party material is excluded. Attribution: Source — Press Information Bureau (pib.gov.in), Government of India.
• Weights: Apache-2.0. Because the model is non-reconstructive (it emits 384-d vectors and never reproduces the source text), and the source is reproduction-permitted with attribution (satisfied here), no ShareAlike floor applies to the weights.

How it was built (honest, across four runs)

• e1 — mixed pair kinds, language-imbalanced: +8.7%, not significant, with regressions in low-resource languages.
• e2 — cross-lingual title↔body pairs only, language-balanced: +16.2%, regressions fixed, but still not significant on a small eval.
• e3 (v1.0) — a larger balanced corpus and a larger held-out eval: +27.9%, statistically significant — but held at 1 epoch and, in hindsight, undertrained.
• e4 (v1.1, this release) — same corpus/eval as e3, trained to 6 epochs. Originally reported as +53% over base; on a clean, document-isolated split this is +37.1% over base, significant against the base only (the comparison against v1.0 is withdrawn — see the correction notice at the top), with the Gujarati/Manipuri/Khasi tradeoff documented above.
• Every figure in this lineage above e4 was produced by the same contaminated split rule and none of them has been re-measured. Read them as a record of how the work progressed, not as comparable numbers.

The corpus was built by re-sourcing PIB releases directly (never via third-party scraped compilations), joining each release to its sibling-language versions, and mining cross-lingual title↔body pairs with a lexical-overlap cap so a gain reflects meaning, not string matching.

Intended use & limits

Use it to retrieve/rank Indian government press-release passages, including across languages. Do not expect it to transfer to other domains, treat the lowest-resource languages as indicative, and prefer v1.0 if your workload is Gujarati- or Odia-dominant. It is a specialist showcase of what clean, provenance-transparent data yields for Indian-language cross-lingual retrieval.