spring-projects/spring-ai · error · java.lang.IllegalArgumentException

No embedding input is provided - instructions list is empty

Error message

No embedding input is provided - instructions list is empty

What it means

GoogleGenAiTextEmbeddingModel.call() validates the EmbeddingRequest's instructions before sending them to the Google GenAI API. If the instructions list is null or empty there is nothing to embed, so the model throws IllegalArgumentException instead of issuing a pointless or failing API request.

Source

Thrown at models/spring-ai-google-genai-embedding/src/main/java/org/springframework/ai/google/genai/text/GoogleGenAiTextEmbeddingModel.java:165

				EmbedContentConfig.Builder configBuilder = EmbedContentConfig.builder();

				// Set dimensions if specified
				if (options.getDimensions() != null) {
					configBuilder.outputDimensionality(options.getDimensions());
				}

				// Set task type if specified - this might need to be handled differently
				// as the new SDK might not have a direct taskType field
				// We'll need to check the SDK documentation for this

				EmbedContentConfig config = configBuilder.build();

				// Convert instructions to Content list for embedding
				List<String> texts = embeddingRequest.getInstructions();

				// Validate that we have texts to embed
				if (texts == null || texts.isEmpty()) {
					throw new IllegalArgumentException("No embedding input is provided - instructions list is empty");
				}

				// Filter out null or empty strings
				List<String> validTexts = texts.stream().filter(StringUtils::hasText).toList();

				if (validTexts.isEmpty()) {
					throw new IllegalArgumentException("No embedding input is provided - all texts are null or empty");
				}

				// Call the embedding API with retry
				EmbedContentResponse embeddingResponse = RetryUtils.execute(this.retryTemplate,
						() -> this.genAiClient.models.embedContent(modelName, validTexts, config));

				// Process the response
				// Note: We need to handle the case where some texts were filtered out
				// The response will only contain embeddings for valid texts
				int totalTokenCount = 0;
				List<Embedding> embeddingList = new ArrayList<>();

View on GitHub (pinned to 98a7beda4f)

Solutions

1. Ensure the EmbeddingRequest contains at least one non-empty instruction string before calling the model
2. Guard upstream batch logic to skip or reject empty batches
3. Check that document splitting/retrieval actually produced content (files not empty, not filtered out)

Example fix

// before
EmbeddingRequest req = new EmbeddingRequest(List.of(), EmbeddingOptionsBuilder.builder().build());
model.embed(req); // throws
// after
if (!texts.isEmpty()) {
    EmbeddingRequest req = new EmbeddingRequest(texts, EmbeddingOptionsBuilder.builder().build());
    model.embed(req);
}

List<String> texts = embeddingRequest.getInstructions();
if (texts == null || texts.isEmpty()) {
    throw new IllegalArgumentException("EmbeddingRequest must contain at least one instruction");
}

boolean hasEmbeddingInput(EmbeddingRequest req) { return req.getInstructions() != null && !req.getInstructions().isEmpty(); }

try { model.embed(request); } catch (IllegalArgumentException e) { if (e.getMessage().contains("instructions list is empty")) { return EmbeddingResponse.empty(); } throw e; }

When it happens

Trigger: Calling embed()/call() with an EmbeddingRequest constructed with an empty list of instructions or null instructions.

Common situations: Upstream code producing zero documents (empty query, failed file/chunk parsing); building the request conditionally without checking size; framework batchers passing empty batches.

Understand the failure class

Background: "must not be empty", "cannot be empty" — required-field validation errors across open-source libraries — this error's family across 41 libraries.

Related errors

• No embedding input is provided - all texts are null or empty
• ImagePrompt must contain at least one non-empty message
• model cannot be null or empty
• think level must be one of
• SSE connection '<connectionName>' requires a 'url' property.

AI-assisted analysis of spring-projects/spring-ai@98a7beda4f (2026-09-11). Data as JSON: /api/errors/3872761ca013f5b0. Report an issue: GitHub.