diff --git a/pyproject.toml b/pyproject.toml
index b3b4af35..de82586f 100644
--- a/pyproject.toml
+++ b/pyproject.toml
@@ -52,7 +52,8 @@ dependencies = [
     "pyyaml ~= 6.0",
     "rich >= 13.3.1",
     "schedule == 1.1.0",
-    "sentence-transformers == 2.5.1",
+    "sentence-transformers == 3.0.1",
+    "einops == 0.8.0",
     "transformers >= 4.28.0",
     "torch == 2.2.2",
     "uvicorn == 0.17.6",
diff --git a/src/khoj/database/models/__init__.py b/src/khoj/database/models/__init__.py
index 62afdd2b..096d14bc 100644
--- a/src/khoj/database/models/__init__.py
+++ b/src/khoj/database/models/__init__.py
@@ -215,11 +215,11 @@ class SearchModelConfig(BaseModel):
     # Bi-encoder model of sentence-transformer type to load from HuggingFace
     bi_encoder = models.CharField(max_length=200, default="thenlper/gte-small")
     # Config passed to the sentence-transformer model constructor. E.g. device="cuda:0", trust_remote_server=True etc.
-    bi_encoder_model_config = models.JSONField(default=dict)
+    bi_encoder_model_config = models.JSONField(default=dict, blank=True)
     # Query encode configs like prompt, precision, normalize_embeddings, etc. for sentence-transformer models
-    bi_encoder_query_encode_config = models.JSONField(default=dict)
+    bi_encoder_query_encode_config = models.JSONField(default=dict, blank=True)
     # Docs encode configs like prompt, precision, normalize_embeddings, etc. for sentence-transformer models
-    bi_encoder_docs_encode_config = models.JSONField(default=dict)
+    bi_encoder_docs_encode_config = models.JSONField(default=dict, blank=True)
     # Cross-encoder model of sentence-transformer type to load from HuggingFace
     cross_encoder = models.CharField(max_length=200, default="mixedbread-ai/mxbai-rerank-xsmall-v1")
     # Inference server API endpoint to use for embeddings inference. Bi-encoder model should be hosted on this server