Models for minimalist RAG: B1ade 335M Embedding and 1B Parameter Small Language Models

arXiv:2607.27506v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language and embedding models used in RAG systems are conventionally assumed to require large-scale pretraining and explicit grounding supervision. We present B1ade, an efficient RAG architecture comprising two purpose-built components: a compact embedding model and a purpose-built SLM. B1ade-embed, a 335M parameter retrieval model constructed via parameter-free fusion of five pretrained encoders achieves top MTEB scores among sub-500M models with ...