Does sentence-transformers prefer safetensors when available?

[steve-marmalade]

I have recently started seeing pretrained models on the huggingface hub in model.safetensors files in addition to the (less secure) pickled pytorch_model.bin. The transformers PreTrainedModel.from_pretrained has a use_safetensors argument that controls whether these files should be used.

Does sentence-transformers have something equivalent and/or default to using them where available?

[tomaarsen]

Hello!

Yes, model.safetensors files are automatically prioritized over pytorch_model.bin. However, currently the full HF Hub repository is downloaded, often resulting in a download for both model.safetensors and pytorch_model.bin, but #2345 will resolve this inefficiency.

• Tom Aarsen

[steve-marmalade]

Thanks, @tomaarsen !