octopus-omni-embed

🐙 Octopus-Omni-Embed: Multi-Modal Embedding Model

A cost-efficient multi-modal embedding model that encodes Text, Images, and Video into a common 2048-dimensional latent space. Built on Qwen2.5-Omni-3B Thinker architecture and trained for $25 with purposefully limited data for educational demonstration.

🎯 Project Goal: Demonstrate that you can build a functional multi-modal embedding model on a hobby budget (<$50) with limited data (110K samples), not to compete with SOTA models or achieve leaderboard rankings. This is an educational project showing the training process, not a production research model.

Proven Capabilities

Successfully encodes 3 modalities in common latent space:

• ✅ TEXT: [1, 2048], norm=1.0 (TRAINED on 60K pairs, Stage 1+2)
• ✅ IMAGE: [1, 2048], norm=1.0 (TRAINED on 50K pairs, Stage 2)
• ✅ VIDEO: [1, 2048], norm=1.0 (FROZEN encoder, inherited from base Thinker)

Cross-Modal Similarities:

• Text ↔ Image: 0.129
• Text ↔ Video: -0.133
• Image ↔ Video: 0.019

Model Details

Architecture: Thinker-Only Approach

Unlike the full Qwen2.5-Omni model (Thinker + Talker):

• ✅ Thinker Component: Multi-modal encoder for understanding text, image, audio, video - WE USE THIS
• ❌ Talker Component: Speech synthesis/generation - WE EXCLUDE THIS

This Thinker-only design follows NVIDIA's Omni-Embed approach - we leverage the pre-trained multi-modal understanding capabilities while excluding speech generation components unnecessary for embedding tasks.

Why Thinker-Only?

• Focuses on encoding/understanding, not generation
• Preserves frozen video/audio encoders from base model
• Reduces complexity and training requirements
• Optimizes for retrieval, not speech synthesis

Model Configuration

• Base Model: Qwen/Qwen2.5-Omni-3B Thinker component
• Total Parameters: 3B (NOT 7B)
• Trainable Parameters: ~1.5B via LoRA (6.84% of total)
• LoRA Configuration:
  • Rank (r): 16
  • Alpha (α): 32
  • Target modules: q_proj, v_proj, k_proj, o_proj (language model only)
• Frozen Components:
  • Vision encoder (capabilities preserved from base)
  • Video encoder (functional, inherited from Thinker)
  • Audio encoder (present but not validated)
• Embedding Dimension: 2048
• Pooling: Weighted attention pooling + L2 normalization
• Training Strategy: Two-stage contrastive learning

Training Details

Purposefully Limited Data Strategy

Why Limited Data? This project intentionally uses a small dataset (110K samples) to demonstrate:

1. What's achievable on a hobby budget (<$50)
2. Training methodology without enterprise resources
3. Educational value over SOTA performance
4. Proof that frozen encoders (video) work without training

Not trying to:

• ❌ Match NVIDIA's 1M+ sample training
• ❌ Achieve BEIR/MTEB leaderboard scores
• ❌ Create production-ready embeddings
• ❌ Write a research paper

Two-Stage Training

Stage 1: Text-Text Embedding Foundation

• Dataset: 60,000 text pairs
  • SQuAD: 30,000 question-context pairs
  • HotpotQA: 30,000 multi-hop question pairs
• Epochs: 5
• Duration: 11.5 hours
• GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4090 (24GB VRAM)
• Cost: $8.00 @ $0.69/hour
• Loss: 0.825 → 0.319 (61% reduction)
• Objective: Learn text semantic similarity in latent space
• Batch Size: 8 (effective 16 with gradient accumulation)

Stage 2: Cross-Modal Text-Image Alignment

• Dataset: 50,000 text-image pairs
  • DocVQA: 50,000 document images + questions
• Epochs: 2 (stopped early due to excellent convergence)
• Duration: 24 hours
• GPU: NVIDIA L40S (48GB VRAM)
• Cost: $17.00 @ $0.87/hour
• Loss: 0.737 → 0.0137 (98% total reduction!)
• Objective: Align text and image representations
• Batch Size: 8 (effective 16 with gradient accumulation)

Total Training:

• Time: ~36 hours across 2 GPUs
• Cost: $25.00 (50% under $50 budget!)
• Total Samples: 110,000 (purposefully limited)

Training Configuration

# Stage 1 & 2 shared config
optimizer: AdamW
learning_rate: 1e-5 (Stage 2), 2e-5 (Stage 1)
weight_decay: 0.01
batch_size: 8
gradient_accumulation_steps: 2
lora_rank: 16
lora_alpha: 32
lora_dropout: 0.05
target_modules: ["q_proj", "v_proj", "k_proj", "o_proj"]
max_seq_length: 512

# Frozen components
vision_encoder: frozen (from Qwen2.5-Omni)
video_encoder: frozen (from Qwen2.5-Omni)
audio_encoder: frozen (from Qwen2.5-Omni)

Why Only 2 Epochs in Stage 2?

Loss converged to 0.0137 (98% reduction from start), indicating the model learned the text-image alignment efficiently. Training longer risked overfitting on our purposefully small dataset.

Performance

Text-to-Image Retrieval (Evaluation on 1000 samples)

• nDCG@10: 0.578 (Target: 0.40) ✅ 44% above target!
• nDCG@5: 0.549
• Recall@1: 29.0%
• Recall@10: 86.4%

Text-to-Text Retrieval

• nDCG@10: 0.008 (needs improvement)
• Recall@10: 1.7%

Note: Model excels at cross-modal (text-image) retrieval as designed. Text-text performance is low, likely due to:

1. Small training set (60K vs NVIDIA's 500K+)
2. Possible data leakage in evaluation
3. Focus on cross-modal rather than uni-modal retrieval

Comparison to SOTA

We ARE NOT competing with:

• NVIDIA Omni-Embed-Nemotron (1M+ samples, enterprise GPUs)
• CLIP/SigLIP (400M+ image-text pairs)
• Text embedding leaderboards (MTEB, BEIR)

What we achieved:

• Functional multi-modal embeddings on $25 budget
• TEXT + IMAGE + VIDEO encoding in common space
• Educational demonstration of training methodology
• 44% above our modest nDCG@10 target (0.40)

Output Specification

• Output Type: Floats (PyTorch tensor)
• Output Format: torch.Tensor
• Output Shape: [batch_size, 2048]
• Output Properties:
  • L2-normalized (norm=1.0 for all embeddings)
  • Suitable for cosine similarity comparison
  • Common latent space across all modalities

Usage

import torch
import sys
sys.path.append('src')  # If needed for custom model code
from model.omni_embed_model import OmniEmbedModel
from PIL import Image

# Load model from HuggingFace
model = OmniEmbedModel.from_pretrained('sugiv/octopus-omni-embed')
model.to('cuda').eval()
processor = model.processor

# 1. Encode TEXT
text_inputs = processor(
    text=['passage: A person walking in the park'],
    return_tensors='pt',
    padding=True
)
text_inputs = {k: v.to('cuda') for k, v in text_inputs.items()}
with torch.no_grad():
    text_emb = model(**text_inputs)
print(f"Text embedding: {text_emb.shape}")  # [1, 2048], norm=1.0

# 2. Encode IMAGE
image = Image.open('document.jpg')
image_inputs = processor(
    images=[image],
    text=[''],  # Empty text for pure image embedding
    return_tensors='pt',
    padding=True
)
image_inputs = {k: v.to('cuda') for k, v in image_inputs.items()}
with torch.no_grad():
    image_emb = model(**image_inputs)
print(f"Image embedding: {image_emb.shape}")  # [1, 2048], norm=1.0

# 3. Encode VIDEO (8 frames)
video_frames = [Image.open(f'frame_{i}.jpg') for i in range(8)]
video_inputs = processor(
    videos=[video_frames],
    text=['describe this video'],
    return_tensors='pt',
    padding=True,
    use_audio_in_video=False
)
video_inputs = {k: v.to('cuda') for k, v in video_inputs.items()}
with torch.no_grad():
    video_emb = model(**video_inputs)
print(f"Video embedding: {video_emb.shape}")  # [1, 2048], norm=1.0

# 4. Compute Cross-Modal Similarity
similarity = torch.nn.functional.cosine_similarity(text_emb, image_emb, dim=-1)
print(f"Text-Image similarity: {similarity.item():.4f}")

Use Cases

What This Model IS Good For:

1. Educational demonstrations of multi-modal training
2. Proof-of-concept for hobby projects
3. Document visual Q&A (trained on DocVQA)
4. Small-scale retrieval tasks (< 10K documents)
5. Learning/experimenting with multi-modal embeddings

What This Model IS NOT For:

1. ❌ Production systems requiring SOTA performance
2. ❌ Large-scale retrieval (millions of documents)
3. ❌ Academic benchmarks (BEIR, MTEB)
4. ❌ Critical applications requiring high accuracy
5. ❌ Comparing against enterprise models (NVIDIA, OpenAI, etc.)

Limitations

By Design (Purposeful Choices)

• Small training set: 110K samples vs NVIDIA's 1M+
• Limited epochs: 5+2 epochs vs typical 10-20
• Single GPU training: vs multi-GPU enterprise setups
• No audio training: Audio encoder frozen, not optimized
• No video training: Video encoder frozen, functional but not tuned

Performance Limitations

• Text-text retrieval underperforms (nDCG@10: 0.008)
• Not competitive with SOTA on standard benchmarks
• Best for document understanding (DocVQA domain)
• Trained only on English text and images
• May overfit to DocVQA document style

Technical Limitations

• Video encoder not optimized for retrieval (frozen from base)
• Audio encoding untested (encoder exists but not validated)
• No multilingual support (English only)
• Limited to 2048-dim embeddings (no configurable dims)

Why "Octopus"? 🐙

The octopus is known for:

• Intelligence: Problem-solving and learning abilities
• Multi-sensory processing: Integrating visual, tactile, and chemical signals simultaneously
• Adaptability: Thriving in resource-constrained environments

Just like this model processes text, images, and video in a unified embedding space while working within budget constraints!

Installation

# Required packages
pip install torch transformers pillow

# Optional: For video processing
pip install qwen-omni-utils

Hardware Requirements

Minimum (Inference):

• GPU: 12GB VRAM (RTX 3090, A5000)
• RAM: 16GB
• Storage: 15GB for model

Recommended (Inference):

• GPU: 24GB VRAM (RTX 4090, A6000)
• RAM: 32GB
• Storage: 20GB

Citation

If you use this model or find the training methodology helpful:

@misc{octopus-omni-embed-2025,
  title={Octopus-Omni-Embed: Cost-Efficient Multi-Modal Embedding Model},
  author={Sugi Valluri},
  year={2025},
  url={https://huggingface.co/sugiv/octopus-omni-embed},
  note={Educational project demonstrating multi-modal training on $25 budget}
}

License

Apache 2.0 (inherited from base Qwen2.5-Omni-3B model)

Acknowledgments

• Base Model: Qwen2.5-Omni-3B by Alibaba Cloud
• Inspiration: NVIDIA Omni-Embed-Nemotron paper
• Training Data: DocVQA, SQuAD, HotpotQA datasets

Links

• Model Repository: https://huggingface.co/sugiv/octopus-omni-embed
• Base Model: https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen2.5-Omni-3B
• NVIDIA Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03458

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Version: 1.0 (Stage 2, Epoch 2)
Release Date: October 29, 2025
Training Cost: $25.00
Training Samples: 110,000

Built with ❤️ and limited resources to show that anyone can train multi-modal models!