Evaluators (Sparse Encoder)

All sparse-encoder evaluators live in sentence_transformers.sparse_encoder.evaluation. They mirror the bi-encoder versions with a Sparse prefix and default to dot product similarity (cosine on sparse vectors is less meaningful).

Choosing the right evaluator

Wrap multiple in SequentialEvaluator (from sentence_transformers.base.evaluation):

from sentence_transformers.base.evaluation import SequentialEvaluator
evaluator = SequentialEvaluator([sparse_nano_beir, my_custom_ir])

The default: SparseNanoBEIREvaluator

Small, fast subset of BEIR adapted for sparse retrieval. Typical runtime <1 minute on a mid-range GPU.

from sentence_transformers.sparse_encoder.evaluation import SparseNanoBEIREvaluator

evaluator = SparseNanoBEIREvaluator(
    dataset_names=["msmarco", "nfcorpus", "nq"],   # default: all 13 NanoBEIR datasets
    batch_size=32,
    show_progress_bar=False,
)

Output key for metric_for_best_model: eval_NanoBEIR_mean_dot_ndcg@10 (sparse defaults to dot product).

Sparsity tracking

Unlike the dense variant, the sparse evaluator also reports active dimension counts so you can monitor sparsity during training:

• query_active_dims — non-zero entries per query vector
• document_active_dims — non-zero entries per document vector

A healthy SPLADE checkpoint typically shows ~30–50 active dims for queries and ~150–250 for documents. If these drift toward the vocab size (~30k), the FLOPS regularization isn't doing its job — raise query_regularizer_weight / document_regularizer_weight in SpladeLoss.

Retrieval on your own corpus

SparseInformationRetrievalEvaluator

Same shape as the dense version but operates on sparse vectors internally:

from sentence_transformers.sparse_encoder.evaluation import SparseInformationRetrievalEvaluator

evaluator = SparseInformationRetrievalEvaluator(
    queries={qid: text for qid, text in ...},
    corpus={doc_id: text for doc_id, text in ...},
    relevant_docs={qid: {doc_id, ...} for qid in ...},
    name="my-sparse-ir",
    ndcg_at_k=[10],
    mrr_at_k=[10],
    accuracy_at_k=[1, 5, 10],
    map_at_k=[100],
    batch_size=32,
)

Output keys: eval_{name}_dot_ndcg@10, eval_{name}_dot_mrr@10, etc. Also reports active-dims.

Heavy for large corpora. Use SparseNanoBEIREvaluator during training; reserve full IR for post-training.

Hybrid retrieval

ReciprocalRankFusionEvaluator

Measures the performance of combining your sparse encoder with BM25 (or any other retriever) via reciprocal-rank fusion. Useful when shipping a hybrid system is the actual deployment target.

Other sparse evaluators

SparseEmbeddingSimilarityEvaluator

STS-style. Computes Pearson/Spearman between sparse vector similarities and gold labels. Uses dot product by default.

SparseBinaryClassificationEvaluator

For labeled pair classification with sparse embeddings.

SparseTripletEvaluator

For (anchor, positive, negative) triplets — reports fraction where the positive is closer than the negative (by dot product).

SparseRerankingEvaluator

For custom re-ranking with sparse embeddings. Same semantics as the dense RerankingEvaluator.

SparseMSEEvaluator

For distillation setups. Compares sparse student embeddings against teacher outputs.

SparseTranslationEvaluator

For cross-lingual / make_multilingual-style alignment checking with sparse embeddings.

Writing metric_for_best_model

Pattern: f"eval_{evaluator.primary_metric}". Inspect after construction: print(evaluator.primary_metric). Common values:

• eval_NanoBEIR_mean_dot_ndcg@10 — SparseNanoBEIREvaluator default
• eval_{name}_dot_ndcg@10 — SparseInformationRetrievalEvaluator
• eval_{name}_spearman_dot — SparseEmbeddingSimilarityEvaluator

Gotchas

• Always run evaluator(model) once before training — confirms the pipeline works (a fill-mask base scores ~0 on retrieval until trained).
• Sparse evaluators default to dot product; cosine on sparse vectors isn't meaningful.
• Don't compare dense and sparse metrics directly — different scales (cosine ∈ [-1, 1] vs. dot ∈ [0, ∞)).
• Always check query_active_dims / document_active_dims — thousands of active dims per doc means the FLOPS regularizer is mistuned, even if nDCG looks OK.