---
license: apache-2.0
base_model: intfloat/multilingual-e5-small
library_name: quanfire-multilingual-embedding
pipeline_tag: sentence-similarity
tags:
  - sentence-embeddings
  - legal
  - indian-law
  - judgments
  - retrieval
  - lora
  - e5
language:
  - en
---

# Quanfire Legal Embedding — `embed-legal-en` (Supreme Court judgments)

> ### ⚠️ Measurement correction — 2026-08-21
>
> **The headline this card used to carry (+76.2 % Recall@1) was measured on a
> contaminated evaluation split. The corrected figure is +59.7 %.**
>
> The bug: the training filter dropped a pair only when its *positive* was in the
> held-out set, and pairs drawn from a held-out judgment were never excluded at
> all. Adjacent-passage pairs from the same judgment therefore sat on both sides
> of the split — the model was partly trained on the documents it was scored on.
>
> The adapter was retrained and rescored on a split that isolates at the
> **judgment-document** level (1,379 documents held out, 48,304 pairs dropped
> from the pool). **Every in-distribution number in *Results* below is the clean
> measurement.** This was the best-surviving of the three corrections we pushed
> that day: the gain lost about a quarter of its magnitude and kept its
> direction, its significance and its shape.
>
> Two things a reader deserves to know:
>
> 1. **The clean figures are for a retrain (`legal-indic-e1c`), not for the
>    weight file currently in this repo.** The published weights saw the
>    evaluation documents during training, so no honest score for *them* exists.
>    Publishing the clean adapter as a new revision is pending.
> 2. **The runs are not volume-matched** — 46,115 training pairs clean against
>    92,419 before. Do not read the difference as a clean measure of "what the
>    leak was worth".
>
> The **out-of-origin transfer** result is unaffected in kind — it is scored on a
> different corpus, so the split bug cannot reach it — but the figures below
> belong to the withdrawn adapter and have not been recomputed for the retrain.
>
> Fix: `without_held_out()` in
> [quanfire-multilingual-embedding](https://github.com/quanfire-ai/quanfire-multilingual-embedding)
> (commits `66470fe`, `6fe7e6b`, `3deaf8d`).


A retrieval adapter for **English-language Indian Supreme Court judgment text**. It
is a LoRA adaptation over a frozen
[`intfloat/multilingual-e5-small`](https://huggingface.co/intfloat/multilingual-e5-small)
(MIT) base — a 2.4 MB adapter, 384-dimensional normalized vectors, `max_length` 256 —
trained **only on statutory public-domain judgment text**.

This is **not** a from-scratch model, and it is **not** a general "Indian legal"
model. It is a specialist: on judgment-to-judgment retrieval it is markedly stronger
than the base; on other legal registers (statutes) it is not — and this card shows
you both, measured.

- **Framework & code:** [github.com/quanfire-ai/quanfire-multilingual-embedding](https://github.com/quanfire-ai/quanfire-multilingual-embedding) (Apache-2.0)
- **PyPI:** `pip install quanfire-multilingual-embedding`
- **Weights licence:** Apache-2.0 (see *Licence & provenance* — the training text is statutory public domain, so no share-alike floor applies)
- **Internal run:** `legal-indic-e1` · base e5-small · rank 32 / alpha 64, LoRA on `query,value` · 589,824 adapter params · 1 epoch, lr 1e-4, batch 256 (bf16, CUDA) · the clean re-measure reported below is `legal-indic-e1c`: identical configuration, retrained on a document-isolated split

## What it is for

Retrieving and ranking **passages of English Supreme Court judgments** — case-law
search, judgment-to-judgment similarity, semantic retrieval over a judgment corpus.
It embeds a query and a passage into the same 384-d space; cosine similarity ranks.

## Scope — read this before you use it

| | Validated? |
|---|---|
| English Supreme Court **judgment** retrieval | ✅ **Yes** — +59.7 % Recall@1 on a clean, document-isolated split; measured below |
| **Statutory / bare-act** text, FAQs, other legal registers | ❌ **No** — transfer tested, came back flat (see below) |
| **Non-English** legal text (Hindi, Tamil, …) | ❌ **No** — the model and its training data are English-only |

The gain this adapter provides is **judgment-specific**. If your text is statutes,
contracts, or non-English legal material, use the base model or a purpose-built model
— this one will not help there, and we measured that rather than assuming it.

## Results (held-out, scored on CUDA)

**In-distribution — 2,000 held-out Supreme Court judgment pairs.** The published base
is the only honest baseline; the adapter is scored on the *same* held-out pairs.

| Metric | base e5-small | **clean retrain (`legal-indic-e1c`)** | change | withdrawn figure |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Recall@1 | 0.3090 | **0.4935** | **+59.7 %** | ~~0.545 / +76.2 %~~ |
| Recall@5 | 0.4940 | **0.7180** | +45.3 % | ~~0.772~~ |
| Recall@10 | 0.5670 | **0.7910** | +39.5 % | ~~0.829~~ |
| MRR | 0.3988 | **0.5996** | +50.4 % | ~~0.647~~ |
| nDCG@10 | 0.4326 | **0.6408** | +48.1 % | ~~0.687~~ |

The base column is unchanged — the contamination only ever inflated the adapter, so the
correction is confined to one column.

The Recall@1 95 % confidence intervals are disjoint (base `[0.2891, 0.3296]` →
clean retrain `[0.4716, 0.5154]`), so the gain is not sampling noise. It holds where it is
hardest: on the **low-lexical-overlap** bucket (`<0.3`, pure-semantic matches, no
shared words to lean on) Recall@1 rises **0.156 → 0.290** (+85.7 %; the withdrawn figure
was 0.325).

**Out-of-origin transfer — 1,578 English *statutory* adjacency pairs** (a different
legal register: bare-act sections and regulatory FAQs, origin-walled from the
judgment training corpus). This is the honest generalization test, and it is
**flat**. *These two rows are the withdrawn adapter's numbers and have not been recomputed
for the clean retrain; the split bug could not reach them (different corpus), but a retrained
adapter is a different adapter:*

| Metric | base e5-small | embed-legal-en |
|---|---|---|
| Recall@1 | 0.036 | 0.036 (−1.8 %) |
| nDCG@10 | 0.219 | 0.208 |

The instrument is informative, not degenerate — the base model has real signal on it
(high-overlap Recall@5 0.76). The adapter simply does not improve statutory
retrieval. **We publish this row on purpose:** the in-distribution gain is a
judgment-domain result, not a "legal English" result, and the difference is exactly what a
buyer needs to know. For statutory text, use the purpose-built sibling
[`embed-statute-en`](https://huggingface.co/quanfire-ai/embed-statute-en).

## Which weights should I use?

Two revisions are published. They share the recipe and differ in **what can be said about
them**:

| Revision | Trained on | Has a valid score? |
|---|---|---|
| `main` (default) | 92,419 pairs — the full mined pool | ❌ **No.** It trained on the evaluation documents, so no clean held-out set exists for it *within this corpus* |
| `clean-2026-08-21` | 46,115 pairs — document-isolated split | ✅ **Yes** — every figure in *Results* above is this adapter |

```bash
hf download quanfire-ai/embed-legal-en --revision clean-2026-08-21 --local-dir embed-legal-en-clean
```

**Which one to take.** If you need a number you can cite or audit, take
`clean-2026-08-21` — it is the one the Results section describes. `main` saw
2x the training data and may well be the stronger retriever in practice, but "may
well be" is precisely the kind of claim this card no longer makes.

**We have not swapped the default**, and the reason is worth stating: doing so would trade a
plausibly-stronger model for a measurable one with no evidence that the trade is good.
Settling it properly needs a head-to-head of the two adapters on a corpus *neither* of them
trained on. That is planned, and until it runs, both revisions stay up and this section stays
honest about which is which.

## Usage

Pull the adapter and run it through the Quanfire framework, which applies the LoRA
over the frozen base and produces normalized embeddings:

```bash
pip install 'quanfire-multilingual-embedding[neural]'

hf download quanfire-ai/embed-legal-en --local-dir embed-legal-en
```

**As an HTTP embeddings service** (OpenAI-compatible `POST /v1/embeddings`):

```bash
qfme serve --adapter embed-legal-en --port 8000

curl -s localhost:8000/v1/embeddings \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"input": ["Whether the appellant was denied a fair hearing under Article 21."]}'
```

**In-process, as a search pipeline:**

```python
from multilingual_embedding.pipelines.search import SemanticSearchPipeline

pipe = SemanticSearchPipeline.from_adapter("embed-legal-en")
pipe.index([
    "The conviction under Section 302 is set aside for want of corroboration.",
    "Bail is granted subject to the appellant surrendering the passport.",
    "The writ petition challenges the vires of the impugned notification.",
])
for hit in pipe.search("appeal against a murder conviction", top_k=3):
    print(hit.rank, round(hit.score, 3), hit.text)
```

Vectors are L2-normalized `float32` (dimension 384). The model is symmetric (empty
prefixes), so `input_type` is not required. Exact (brute-force cosine) search is the
intended regime up to ~10⁵–10⁶ vectors; add an ANN index beyond that.

## Licence & provenance

**Weights: Apache-2.0.** Use them commercially and redistribute them freely, with
attribution. There is **no share-alike obligation**, because — unlike a
Wikipedia-derived model — every input to this adapter is public-domain text:

| Source | Role | Licence / status |
|---|---|---|
| Indian Supreme Court judgment text (official court portals) | training corpus | **Public domain** — Copyright Act 1957, §52(1)(q) places judgment text outside copyright |
| `intfloat/multilingual-e5-small` | frozen base checkpoint | MIT |

**What was removed, and why it matters.** §52(1)(q) frees the *text of the judgment*
— it does **not** free the reporter-written **headnote / syllabus**, which is
separately copyrightable editorial matter. The training corpus was built by
extracting each judgment with a layout-faithful parser, dropping page furniture, and
**excising the headnote span** between the coram line and the start of the reported
judgment body. Only the statutory-public-domain judgment text was trained on. The
base checkpoint is frozen and unmodified (MIT); the adapter is a separate set of
weights over it.

The framework source code is Apache-2.0 (separate from these weights).

## Limitations

- A LoRA adapter over a published checkpoint — not an independently pretrained model.
- **English only.** It does not embed Hindi, Tamil or other Indic legal text; a
  cross-lingual Indian-legal model is separate work requiring parallel legal data.
- **Judgment-specific.** Transfer to statutory / bare-act text was tested and is flat
  (table above). Do not rely on it outside judgment-style text without your own
  evaluation. It is evaluated only on held-out Indian Supreme Court judgment pairs
  from the same distribution as its training data; transfer to other jurisdictions or
  legal systems is not measured and should not be assumed.
- Exact cosine search is the intended regime up to ~10⁵–10⁶ vectors.

## Citation

```
Quanfire Legal Embedding — embed-legal-en (internal run legal-indic-e1).
Quanfire, 2026. https://github.com/quanfire-ai/quanfire-multilingual-embedding
```