EmbeddingGemma 2: Unified and Efficient Multimodal Representations
Abstract
We present EmbeddingGemma 2, an open multimodal embedding model which natively represents text, images, audio, video, and combinations thereof in a unified space. Our approach introduces improvements such as simplified per-layer embeddings and a multi-stage curriculum with modality and objective progression which ensure strong quality across unimodal, cross-modal, and mixed-modal evaluations. Notably, in comprehensive embedding benchmarks across all modalities, EmbeddingGemma 2 establishes a new Pareto frontier, outperforming both specialist models and models two to twelve times larger. Furthermore, our design offers flexibility for resource-constrained environments, supporting selective modality encoder loading, adjustable vision token budgets, truncatable embedding dimensions, and quantized weights. We present ablations analyzing key decisions and release EmbeddingGemma 2 to promote further research.
Figures & tables
| MTEB(Multilingual, v2) | MTEB(English, v2) | MTEB(Code) | MIEB(lite) ‡ | MSEB(Retrieval) ‡ | |||||||
| Model | Precision | Mean(Task) | Mean(Type) | Mean(Task) | Mean(Type) | Mean(Task) | Mean(Task) | Mean(Type) | Overall | In-Lang | Cross-Lang |
| EG 2 | bfloat16 | 61.36 | 53.82 | 68.46 | 63.86 | 78.68 | 60.17 | 65.67 | 69.54 | 71.63 | 67.68 |
| int4 (Q4_0) ∗ | 60.96 | 53.47 | 68.48 | 63.91 | 76.85 | 56.59 | 61.95 | 64.99 | 68.56 | 61.80 | |
| int4 (Q4_C) † | 60.84 | 53.36 | 68.49 | 63.93 | 76.70 | 56.71 | 62.26 | 63.92 | 67.93 | 60.33 | |
| EG 1 | bfloat16 | 61.15 | 54.31 | 69.67 | 65.11 | 68.76 | — | — | — | — | — |
| int4 (Q4_0) ∗ | 60.62 | 53.61 | 69.31 | 64.65 | 67.99 | — | — | — | — | — | |
| MMEB-v2 Overall | Image (Hit@1) | Video (Hit@1) | VisDoc (NDCG@5) | |
| PLE Strategy | ||||
| Projection-only | 55.46 | 54.67 | 47.82 | 62.37 |
| With lookup | 55.07 | 54.57 | 47.13 | 61.76 |
| MMEB-v2 Overall | Image (Hit@1) | Video (Hit@1) | VisDoc (NDCG@5) | |
| Training Stage | ||||
| Multimodal Pre-finetuning | 52.27 | 50.10 | 43.26 | 62.26 |
| Extra Pre-finetuning | 52.28 | 49.74 | 43.86 | 62.40 |
| Finetuning Stage | 55.46 | 54.67 | 47.82 | 62.37 |
| MMEB-v2 Overall | Image (Hit@1) | Video (Hit@1) | VisDoc (NDCG@5) | |
| Vision Encoder | ||||
| Trainable | 52.27 | 50.10 | 43.26 | 62.26 |
| Frozen | 48.18 | 44.35 | 39.24 | 60.59 |
| Vision Token Budget | MMEB-v2 Overall | Image (Hit@1) | Video (Hit@1) | VisDoc (NDCG@5) | ||
| Experiment | Train (Img / Vid) | Eval | ||||
| Inference-Time Scaling | 280 / 140 | 0 70 | 50.07 | 50.90 | 46.33 | 51.61 |
| 280 / 140 | 140 | 55.37 | 53.58 | 47.99 | 63.60 | |
| 280 / 140 | 280 | 56.15 | 55.15 | 48.51 | 63.38 | |
| 280 / 140 | 560 | 57.02 | 55.21 | 46.52 | 67.62 | |
| Train-Time Scaling | 280 / 0 70 | 0 70 | 49.62 | 50.56 | 46.60 | 50.49 |
| Embedding Gemma 2 | Embedding Gemma 1 | Jina Embed v5 Omni Nano | Qwen3 Embed 0.6B | InterestFM UIR CAFe 0.5B | SigLIP SoViT 400M | LAION CLAP General | ||
| Total Parameters | 744M | 308M | 986M | 596M | 894M | 878M | 194M | |
| Embedding Dimension | 768 | 768 | 768 | 1024 | 896 | 1152 | 512 | |
| MTEB(Multi, v2) [ 55 ] | Mean (Task) | 61.36 | 61.15 | 65.52 | 64.34 | – | – | – |
| Mean (Type) | 53.82 | 54.31 | 57.66 | 56.01 | – | – | – | |
| MTEB(Eng, v2) [ 55 ] | Mean (Task) | 68.46 | 69.67 | 71.11 | 70.47 | – | – | – |
| Mean (Type) | 63.86 | 65.11 | 65.22 | 64.72 | – | – | – |
| Model Name | Params | Dim. | Mean (Task) | AppsR. | COIR | CESR | CFMT | CSMT | CSNCCR | CSNR | CTOC | CTODL | CQA | SOQA | ST2SQL |
| EmbeddingGemma 2 | 271M | 768 | 78.7 | 89.2 | 86.9 | 80.5 | 85.6 | 82.2 | 93.8 | 90.9 | 84.6 | 35.6 | 53.3 | 89.1 | 72.5 |
| 512 | 77.2 | 89.2 | 86.6 | 79.9 | 85.3 | 82.0 | 93.7 | 90.7 | 82.9 | 35.7 | 52.7 | 87.0 | 61.1 | ||
| 256 | 76.2 | 88.3 | 85.5 | 77.9 | 84.1 | 80.5 | 92.9 | 90.2 | 82.8 | 35.8 | 50.5 | 84.9 | 60.9 | ||
| 128 | 71.4 | 82.5 | 80.8 | 70.0 | 78.5 | 74.8 | 89.5 | 88.1 | 77.4 | 34.6 | 44.1 | 77.0 | 59.7 | ||
| pplx-embed-v1-0.6b | 596M | 1024 | 75.8 | 78.7 | 82.4 | 76.4 | 83.0 | 84.7 | 88.1 | 89.9 | 85.0 | 35.2 | 43.3 | 90.7 | 73.0 |
| UltraBERT-Embed-150M | 151M | 768 | 73.3 | 68.5 | 82.2 | 62.2 | 84.4 | 86.4 | 93.7 | 90.0 | 88.1 | 37.2 | 36.3 | 92.4 | 58.0 |
| Mean | Image | Video | VisDoc | |||||||||||||||
| Model Name | Params | Dim. | (Task) | CLS | QA | RET | GD | All | CLS | QA | RET | MRET | All | VDRv1 | VDRv2 | VR | OOD | All |
| EmbeddingGemma 2 | 439M | 768 | 59.0 | 54.4 | 41.9 | 65.8 | 77.4 | 57.3 | 56.2 | 48.6 | 47.2 | 50.6 | 50.7 | 70.6 | 58.3 | 72.7 | 63.3 | 67.8 |
| 512 | 58.4 | 54.2 | 41.4 | 65.4 | 77.1 | 56.9 | 56.0 | 48.5 | 46.5 | 50.3 | 50.3 | 69.2 | 56.3 | 72.0 | 62.2 | 66.6 | ||
| 256 | 56.2 | 53.2 | 39.5 | 63.6 | 76.5 | 55.5 | 54.6 | 48.4 | 44.9 | 49.2 | 49.3 | 64.9 | 53.2 | 67.2 | 59.5 | 62.6 | ||
| 128 | 45.6 | 39.9 | 29.6 | 54.7 | 72.8 | 45.6 | 40.8 | 44.4 | 34.9 | 43.6 | 40.6 | 51.9 | 39.2 | 52.6 | 48.8 | 49.5 | ||
| Eddy-vl_embed_1.9B_v1 | 1.93B | 2048 | 63.2 | 54.9 | 61.7 | 64.8 | 84.7 | 63.4 | 51.5 | 57.9 | 41.9 | 48.0 | 50.0 | 78.8 | 55.7 | 79.1 | 64.9 | 72.7 |
| Mean (Task) | Mean (Type) | Multi. Retr. | A2A Retr. | Doc. Und. | Image Class. | Image Clus. | Vision QA | VSTS (eng) | VSTS (multi) | 0-shot Class. | ||||
| Model Name | Params | Dim. | Comp. | |||||||||||
| EmbeddingGemma 2 | 439M | 768 | 60.2 | 65.7 | 65.4 | 38.3 | 45.7 | 67.3 | 74.3 | 81.3 | 59.1 | 81.5 | 76.8 | 67.0 |
| 512 | 59.9 | 65.3 | 64.8 | 38.1 | 45.7 | 66.5 | 74.2 | 80.0 | 58.8 | 81.6 | 76.8 | 66.9 | ||
| 256 | 58.6 | 64.2 | 62.9 | 37.1 | 44.5 | 64.0 | 73.7 | 78.9 | 56.4 | 81.8 | 76.8 | 65.5 | ||
| 128 | 54.2 | 60.0 | 50.7 | 33.0 | 40.1 | 56.6 | 71.5 | 79.3 | 56.7 | 80.8 | 74.8 | 56.4 | ||
| siglip-so400m-patch14-384 | 878M | 1152 | 52.3 | 53.5 | 35.4 | 32.4 | 32.8 | 46.9 | 78.8 | 75.9 | 48.0 | 69.6 | 41.4 | 73.8 |
| Mean (Task) | Mean (Type) | A2A Retr. | Audio Class. | Audio Clus. | Multi. Class. | Pair Class. | Audio Rerank. | 0-shot Class. | |||
| Model Name | Params | Dim. | |||||||||
| EmbeddingGemma 2 | 577M | 768 | 49.9 | 48.7 | 53.6 | 52.9 | 4.1 | 38.7 | 67.4 | 68.5 | 55.4 |
| 512 | 49.8 | 48.6 | 53.4 | 52.7 | 4.3 | 38.8 | 67.4 | 68.8 | 55.0 | ||
| 256 | 49.1 | 48.2 | 52.1 | 52.2 | 4.2 | 38.4 | 67.2 | 68.7 | 54.8 | ||
| 128 | 47.3 | 46.3 | 49.0 | 50.4 | 4.5 | 30.8 | 66.9 | 67.1 | 55.1 | ||
| larger_clap_general | 194M | 512 | 35.0 | 41.1 | 18.9 | 47.9 | 6.6 | 80.6 | 51.9 | 66.8 | 14.9 |
| Model Name | Audio Mode | Parameters | Dim. | Overall | In-Lang | Cross-Lang |
| EmbeddingGemma 2 | Native Audio | 577M | 768 | 69.54 | 71.63 | 67.68 |
| 512 | 69.18 | 71.20 | 67.38 | |||
| 256 | 66.76 | 68.86 | 64.89 | |||
| 128 | 56.71 | 60.30 | 53.49 | |||
| EmbeddingGemma 2 | ASR | 271M | 768 | 57.59 | 62.14 | 53.52 |
| EmbeddingGemma 1 | ASR | 308M | 768 | 50.95 | 61.10 | 41.87 |
Appendix figures & tables8 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Use Case | Query Task Instruction | Target Task Instruction |
| Web / Document Search | task: search result | query: {text} | title: {title} | text: {text} |
| Question Answering | task: question answering | query: {text} | title: {title} | text: {text} |
| Fact Checking | task: fact checking | query: {text} | title: {title} | text: {text} |
| Code Search | task: code retrieval | query: {text} | title: {title} | text: {text} |
| Classification | task: classification | query: {text} | Same as query |
| Clustering | task: clustering | query: {text} | Same as query |
| Mean (Task) | Mean (Type) | Bitext Mining | Inst. Retrieval | Multi. Class. | Pair Class. | ||||||||
| Model Name | Parameters | Dim. | Class. | Clus. | Rerank. | Retrieval | STS | ||||||
| EmbeddingGemma 2 | 271M | 768 | 61.4 | 53.8 | 65.7 | 63.0 | 50.4 | 2.9 | 25.2 | 78.8 | 62.9 | 60.8 | 74.7 |
| 512 | 61.2 | 53.7 | 65.4 | 62.7 | 51.0 | 2.5 | 25.1 | 78.8 | 62.8 | 60.2 | 74.4 | ||
| 256 | 60.4 | 53.0 | 63.6 | 61.9 | 51.1 | 2.0 | 24.7 | 78.7 | 62.0 | 58.7 | 74.1 | ||
| 128 | 57.9 | 50.7 | 59.4 | 59.7 | 49.0 | 0.8 | 23.3 | 78.5 | 59.9 | 52.3 | 73.6 | ||
| harrier-oss-v1-0.6b | 596M | 1024 | 69.0 | 59.0 | 82.8 | 73.9 | 54.0 | 0.8 | 26.4 | 82.1 | 63.2 | 70.8 | 77.1 |
| Mean (Task) | Mean (Type) | Pair Class. | |||||||||
| Model Name | Parameters | Dim. | Class. | Clus. | Rerank. | Retrieval | STS | Summ. | |||
| EmbeddingGemma 2 | 271M | 768 | 68.5 | 63.9 | 88.8 | 55.4 | 86.4 | 46.3 | 51.7 | 83.2 | 35.1 |
| 512 | 68.4 | 63.9 | 88.7 | 55.3 | 86.4 | 46.3 | 51.6 | 83.3 | 35.6 | ||
| 256 | 67.8 | 63.3 | 88.5 | 55.5 | 86.1 | 45.9 | 49.4 | 83.1 | 34.8 | ||
| 128 | 65.7 | 61.5 | 87.6 | 54.3 | 85.3 | 45.7 | 43.7 | 82.5 | 31.4 | ||
| jina-embed-v5-text-nano | 212M | 768 | 71.1 | 65.2 | 90.1 | 53.5 | 84.7 | 49.2 | 58.8 | 88.3 | 31.9 |
| Task Name | Performance |
| AILAStatutes | 32.44 |
| AfriSentiClassification | 45.67 |
| AlloProfClusteringS2S.v2 | 52.31 |
| AlloprofReranking | 76.92 |
| AmazonCounterfactualClassification | 85.83 |
| ArXivHierarchicalClusteringP2P | 63.42 |
| Task Name | Performance |
| AmazonCounterfactualClassification | 91.10 |
| ArXivHierarchicalClusteringP2P | 63.66 |
| ArXivHierarchicalClusteringS2S | 60.59 |
| ArguAna | 59.95 |
| AskUbuntuDupQuestions | 60.61 |
| BIOSSES | 85.33 |
| Task Name | Performance |
| BeijingOpera | 81.37 |
| BirdCLEF | 16.00 |
| CREMADPairClassification | 52.50 |
| CREMA_D | 19.67 |
| CREMA_DClustering | 0.57 |
| ClothoT2ARetrieval | 10.71 |
| Task Name | Performance |
| AROCocoOrder | 57.00 |
| AROFlickrOrder | 56.12 |
| AROVisualAttribution | 77.97 |
| AROVisualRelation | 56.93 |
| BLINKIT2IMultiChoice | 75.87 |
| CIFAR100ZeroShot | 75.61 |
| Task Name | Performance |
| A-OKVQA | 35.20 |
| ActivityNetQA | 52.10 |
| Breakfast | 35.57 |
| CIRR | 40.10 |
| Charades-STA | 25.58 |
| ChartQA | 18.90 |
Multimodal Embedding
Multimodal embedding maps text, images, audio, video, and other data into representations that support comparison and retrieval across modalities.
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