EmbeddingGemma 2 vs Granite Embedding Small English R2

EmbeddingGemma 2

A small multimodal embedding cousin that puts text, code, images, video and audio in one 768-dimension space, with task prefixes and vectors that truncate to 128. Five common runtimes run it and the BF16 files are 1.53 GB, with a browser build for Transformers.js. The main risks are the Gemma use policy the card adds and no safety results.

Granite Embedding Small English R2

A tiny English embedding cousin for retrieval over long documents and code, 47M parameters with 384-dimension vectors and an 8,192-token input, under Apache 2.0 with a permissive data story. It runs on any hardware through Sentence Transformers, vLLM or llama.cpp. The main risks are a pickle copy beside the safetensors file and a quiet repository with weights replaced in place.

EmbeddingGemma 2

1. Install sentence-transformers 6.1.0 or later and transformers 5.19.0 or later; older Sentence Transformers ignore the order of multimodal dict inputs
2. Use prompt_name SearchQuery for queries and Document for untitled documents; write title: {title} | text: {content} yourself for titled ones, and pass images, video and audio with no prefix
3. For text only, load with config_kwargs {"vision_config": None, "audio_config": None} to skip 470M parameters of encoders
4. Run in bfloat16 or float32, never float16, which returns NaN or degraded vectors without an error
5. Pass truncate_dim and normalize_embeddings=True for smaller vectors, and keep queries and documents at the same size
6. Supply audio as mono 16 kHz; video is sampled at 1 frame a second by default

Granite Embedding Small English R2

1. Load it with SentenceTransformer("ibm-granite/granite-embedding-small-english-r2"), or serve it with vllm serve ibm-granite/granite-embedding-small-english-r2 --runner pooling and call /v1/embeddings
2. Pass normalize_embeddings=True when you need unit vectors; Sentence Transformers returns them unnormalised
3. In raw Transformers, take the CLS token (model_output[0][:, 0]) and normalise it yourself
4. Don't add query or passage prefixes; the model takes plain text
5. Load the safetensors file and ignore pytorch_model.bin, and chunk text past 8,192 tokens
6. Treat retrieved text as untrusted before passing it to a model