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SubscribeMTEB: Massive Text Embedding Benchmark
Text embeddings are commonly evaluated on a small set of datasets from a single task not covering their possible applications to other tasks. It is unclear whether state-of-the-art embeddings on semantic textual similarity (STS) can be equally well applied to other tasks like clustering or reranking. This makes progress in the field difficult to track, as various models are constantly being proposed without proper evaluation. To solve this problem, we introduce the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB). MTEB spans 8 embedding tasks covering a total of 58 datasets and 112 languages. Through the benchmarking of 33 models on MTEB, we establish the most comprehensive benchmark of text embeddings to date. We find that no particular text embedding method dominates across all tasks. This suggests that the field has yet to converge on a universal text embedding method and scale it up sufficiently to provide state-of-the-art results on all embedding tasks. MTEB comes with open-source code and a public leaderboard at https://github.com/embeddings-benchmark/mteb.
VN-MTEB: Vietnamese Massive Text Embedding Benchmark
Vietnam ranks among the top countries in terms of both internet traffic and online toxicity. As a result, implementing embedding models for recommendation and content control duties in applications is crucial. However, a lack of large-scale test datasets, both in volume and task diversity, makes it tricky for scientists to effectively evaluate AI models before deploying them in real-world, large-scale projects. To solve this important problem, we introduce a Vietnamese benchmark, VN-MTEB for embedding models, which we created by translating a large number of English samples from the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark using our new automated framework. We leverage the strengths of large language models (LLMs) and cutting-edge embedding models to conduct translation and filtering processes to retain high-quality samples, guaranteeing a natural flow of language and semantic fidelity while preserving named entity recognition (NER) and code snippets. Our comprehensive benchmark consists of 41 datasets from six tasks specifically designed for Vietnamese text embeddings. In our analysis, we find that bigger and more complex models using Rotary Positional Embedding outperform those using Absolute Positional Embedding in embedding tasks. Datasets are available at HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/collections/GreenNode/vn-mteb-68871433f0f7573b8e1a6686
Maintaining MTEB: Towards Long Term Usability and Reproducibility of Embedding Benchmarks
The Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB) has become a standard evaluation platform for text embedding models. While previous work has established the core benchmark methodology, this paper focuses on the engineering aspects that ensure MTEB's continued reproducibility and extensibility. We present our approach to maintaining robust continuous integration pipelines that validate dataset integrity, automate test execution, and assess benchmark results' generalizability. We detail the design choices that collectively enhance reproducibility and usability. Furthermore, we discuss our strategies for handling community contributions and extending the benchmark with new tasks and datasets. These engineering practices have been instrumental in scaling MTEB to become more comprehensive while maintaining quality and, ultimately, relevance to the field. Our experiences offer valuable insights for benchmark maintainers facing similar challenges in ensuring reproducibility and usability in machine learning evaluation frameworks. The MTEB repository is available at: https://github.com/embeddings-benchmark/mteb
MTEB-NL and E5-NL: Embedding Benchmark and Models for Dutch
Recently, embedding resources, including models, benchmarks, and datasets, have been widely released to support a variety of languages. However, the Dutch language remains underrepresented, typically comprising only a small fraction of the published multilingual resources. To address this gap and encourage the further development of Dutch embeddings, we introduce new resources for their evaluation and generation. First, we introduce the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark for Dutch (MTEB-NL), which includes both existing Dutch datasets and newly created ones, covering a wide range of tasks. Second, we provide a training dataset compiled from available Dutch retrieval datasets, complemented with synthetic data generated by large language models to expand task coverage beyond retrieval. Finally, we release a series of E5-NL models compact yet efficient embedding models that demonstrate strong performance across multiple tasks. We make our resources publicly available through the Hugging Face Hub and the MTEB package.
VLM2Vec: Training Vision-Language Models for Massive Multimodal Embedding Tasks
Embedding models have been crucial in enabling various downstream tasks such as semantic similarity, information retrieval, and clustering. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in developing universal text embedding models that can generalize across tasks (e.g., MTEB). However, progress in learning universal multimodal embedding models has been relatively slow despite their importance. In this work, we aim to explore the potential for building universal embeddings capable of handling a wide range of downstream tasks. Our contributions are twofold: (1) MMEB (Massive Multimodal Embedding Benchmark), which covers 4 meta-tasks (i.e. classification, visual question answering, multimodal retrieval, and visual grounding) and 36 datasets, including 20 training and 16 evaluation datasets, and (2) VLM2Vec (Vision-Language Model -> Vector), a contrastive training framework that converts any state-of-the-art vision-language model into an embedding model via training on MMEB. Unlike previous models such as CLIP and BLIP, VLM2Vec can process any combination of images and text to generate a fixed-dimensional vector based on task instructions. We build a series of VLM2Vec models on Phi-3.5-V and evaluate them on MMEB's evaluation split. Our results show that \model achieves an absolute average improvement of 10% to 20% over existing multimodal embedding models on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution datasets in MMEB.
MMTEB: Massive Multilingual Text Embedding Benchmark
Text embeddings are typically evaluated on a limited set of tasks, which are constrained by language, domain, and task diversity. To address these limitations and provide a more comprehensive evaluation, we introduce the Massive Multilingual Text Embedding Benchmark (MMTEB) - a large-scale, community-driven expansion of MTEB, covering over 500 quality-controlled evaluation tasks across 250+ languages. MMTEB includes a diverse set of challenging, novel tasks such as instruction following, long-document retrieval, and code retrieval, representing the largest multilingual collection of evaluation tasks for embedding models to date. Using this collection, we develop several highly multilingual benchmarks, which we use to evaluate a representative set of models. We find that while large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters can achieve state-of-the-art performance on certain language subsets and task categories, the best-performing publicly available model is multilingual-e5-large-instruct with only 560 million parameters. To facilitate accessibility and reduce computational cost, we introduce a novel downsampling method based on inter-task correlation, ensuring a diverse selection while preserving relative model rankings. Furthermore, we optimize tasks such as retrieval by sampling hard negatives, creating smaller but effective splits. These optimizations allow us to introduce benchmarks that drastically reduce computational demands. For instance, our newly introduced zero-shot English benchmark maintains a ranking order similar to the full-scale version but at a fraction of the computational cost.
Extending the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark to French
In recent years, numerous embedding models have been made available and widely used for various NLP tasks. Choosing a model that performs well for several tasks in English has been largely simplified by the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB), but extensions to other languages remain challenging. This is why we expand MTEB to propose the first massive benchmark of sentence embeddings for French. Not only we gather 22 existing datasets in an easy-to-use interface, but we also create three new French datasets for a global evaluation over 8 different tasks. We perform a large scale comparison with 46 carefully selected embedding models, conduct comprehensive statistical tests, and analyze the correlation between model performance and many of their characteristics. We find out that even if no model is the best on all tasks, large multilingual models pre-trained on sentence similarity perform particularly well. Our work comes with open-source code, new datasets and a public leaderboard.
C-Pack: Packaged Resources To Advance General Chinese Embedding
We introduce C-Pack, a package of resources that significantly advance the field of general Chinese embeddings. C-Pack includes three critical resources. 1) C-MTEB is a comprehensive benchmark for Chinese text embeddings covering 6 tasks and 35 datasets. 2) C-MTP is a massive text embedding dataset curated from labeled and unlabeled Chinese corpora for training embedding models. 3) C-TEM is a family of embedding models covering multiple sizes. Our models outperform all prior Chinese text embeddings on C-MTEB by up to +10% upon the time of the release. We also integrate and optimize the entire suite of training methods for C-TEM. Along with our resources on general Chinese embedding, we release our data and models for English text embeddings. The English models achieve state-of-the-art performance on MTEB benchmark; meanwhile, our released English data is 2 times larger than the Chinese data. All these resources are made publicly available at https://github.com/FlagOpen/FlagEmbedding.
jina-embeddings-v3: Multilingual Embeddings With Task LoRA
We introduce jina-embeddings-v3, a novel text embedding model with 570 million parameters, achieves state-of-the-art performance on multilingual data and long-context retrieval tasks, supporting context lengths of up to 8192 tokens. The model includes a set of task-specific Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapters to generate high-quality embeddings for query-document retrieval, clustering, classification, and text matching. Additionally, Matryoshka Representation Learning is integrated into the training process, allowing flexible truncation of embedding dimensions without compromising performance. Evaluation on the MTEB benchmark shows that jina-embeddings-v3 outperforms the latest proprietary embeddings from OpenAI and Cohere on English tasks, while achieving superior performance compared to multilingual-e5-large-instruct across all multilingual tasks.
Language Models are Universal Embedders
In the large language model (LLM) revolution, embedding is a key component of various systems. For example, it is used to retrieve knowledge or memories for LLMs, to build content moderation filters, etc. As such cases span from English to other natural or programming languages, from retrieval to classification and beyond, it is desirable to build a unified embedding model rather than dedicated ones for each scenario. In this work, we make an initial step towards this goal, demonstrating that multiple languages (both natural and programming) pre-trained transformer decoders can embed universally when finetuned on limited English data. We provide a comprehensive practice with thorough evaluations. On English MTEB, our models achieve competitive performance on different embedding tasks by minimal training data. On other benchmarks, such as multilingual classification and code search, our models (without any supervision) perform comparably to, or even surpass heavily supervised baselines and/or APIs. These results provide evidence of a promising path towards building powerful unified embedders that can be applied across tasks and languages.
Your Mixture-of-Experts LLM Is Secretly an Embedding Model For Free
While large language models (LLMs) excel on generation tasks, their decoder-only architecture often limits their potential as embedding models if no further representation finetuning is applied. Does this contradict their claim of generalists? To answer the question, we take a closer look at Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) LLMs. Our study shows that the expert routers in MoE LLMs can serve as an off-the-shelf embedding model with promising performance on a diverse class of embedding-focused tasks, without requiring any finetuning. Moreover, our extensive analysis shows that the MoE routing weights (RW) is complementary to the hidden state (HS) of LLMs, a widely-used embedding. Compared to HS, we find that RW is more robust to the choice of prompts and focuses on high-level semantics. Motivated by the analysis, we propose MoEE combining RW and HS, which achieves better performance than using either separately. Our exploration of their combination and prompting strategy shed several novel insights, e.g., a weighted sum of RW and HS similarities outperforms the similarity on their concatenation. Our experiments are conducted on 6 embedding tasks with 20 datasets from the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB). The results demonstrate the significant improvement brought by MoEE to LLM-based embedding without further finetuning.
NV-Embed: Improved Techniques for Training LLMs as Generalist Embedding Models
Decoder-only large language model (LLM)-based embedding models are beginning to outperform BERT or T5-based embedding models in general-purpose text embedding tasks, including dense vector-based retrieval. In this work, we introduce the NV-Embed model with a variety of architectural designs and training procedures to significantly enhance the performance of LLM as a versatile embedding model, while maintaining its simplicity and reproducibility. For model architecture, we propose a latent attention layer to obtain pooled embeddings, which consistently improves retrieval and downstream task accuracy compared to mean pooling or using the last <EOS> token embedding from LLMs. To enhance representation learning, we remove the causal attention mask of LLMs during contrastive training. For model training, we introduce a two-stage contrastive instruction-tuning method. It first applies contrastive training with instructions on retrieval datasets, utilizing in-batch negatives and curated hard negative examples. At stage-2, it blends various non-retrieval datasets into instruction tuning, which not only enhances non-retrieval task accuracy but also improves retrieval performance. Combining these techniques, our NV-Embed model, using only publicly available data, has achieved a record-high score of 69.32, ranking No. 1 on the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB) (as of May 24, 2024), with 56 tasks, encompassing retrieval, reranking, classification, clustering, and semantic textual similarity tasks. Notably, our model also attains the highest score of 59.36 on 15 retrieval tasks in the MTEB benchmark (also known as BEIR). We will open-source the model at: https://huggingface.co/nvidia/NV-Embed-v1.
LLM2Vec: Large Language Models Are Secretly Powerful Text Encoders
Large decoder-only language models (LLMs) are the state-of-the-art models on most of today's NLP tasks and benchmarks. Yet, the community is only slowly adopting these models for text embedding tasks, which require rich contextualized representations. In this work, we introduce LLM2Vec, a simple unsupervised approach that can transform any decoder-only LLM into a strong text encoder. LLM2Vec consists of three simple steps: 1) enabling bidirectional attention, 2) masked next token prediction, and 3) unsupervised contrastive learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LLM2Vec by applying it to 3 popular LLMs ranging from 1.3B to 7B parameters and evaluate the transformed models on English word- and sequence-level tasks. We outperform encoder-only models by a large margin on word-level tasks and reach a new unsupervised state-of-the-art performance on the Massive Text Embeddings Benchmark (MTEB). Moreover, when combining LLM2Vec with supervised contrastive learning, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on MTEB among models that train only on publicly available data. Our strong empirical results and extensive analysis demonstrate that LLMs can be effectively transformed into universal text encoders in a parameter-efficient manner without the need for expensive adaptation or synthetic GPT-4 generated data.
LG-ANNA-Embedding technical report
This report presents a unified instruction-based framework for learning generalized text embeddings optimized for both information retrieval (IR) and non-IR tasks. Built upon a decoder-only large language model (Mistral-7B), our approach combines in-context learning, soft supervision, and adaptive hard-negative mining to generate context-aware embeddings without task-specific fine-tuning. Structured instructions and few-shot examples are used to guide the model across diverse tasks, enabling strong performance on classification, semantic similarity, clustering, and reranking benchmarks. To improve semantic discrimination, we employ a soft labeling framework where continuous relevance scores, distilled from a high-performance dense retriever and reranker, serve as fine-grained supervision signals. In addition, we introduce adaptive margin-based hard-negative mining, which filters out semantically ambiguous negatives based on their similarity to positive examples, thereby enhancing training stability and retrieval robustness. Our model is evaluated on the newly introduced MTEB (English, v2) benchmark, covering 41 tasks across seven categories. Results show that our method achieves strong generalization and ranks among the top-performing models by Borda score, outperforming several larger or fully fine-tuned baselines. These findings highlight the effectiveness of combining in-context prompting, soft supervision, and adaptive sampling for scalable, high-quality embedding generation.
QZhou-Embedding Technical Report
We present QZhou-Embedding, a general-purpose contextual text embedding model with exceptional text representation capabilities. Built upon the Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct foundation model, we designed a unified multi-task framework comprising specialized data transformation and training strategies. The data transformation scheme enables the incorporation of more diverse textual training datasets, while the task-specific training strategies enhance model learning efficiency. We developed a data synthesis pipeline leveraging LLM API, incorporating techniques such as paraphrasing, augmentation, and hard negative example generation to improve the semantic richness and sample difficulty of the training set. Additionally, we employ a two-stage training strategy, comprising initial retrieval-focused pretraining followed by full-task fine-tuning, enabling the embedding model to extend its capabilities based on robust retrieval performance. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results on the MTEB and CMTEB benchmarks, ranking first on both leaderboards (August 27 2025), and simultaneously achieves state-of-the-art performance on tasks including reranking, clustering, etc. Our findings demonstrate that higher-quality, more diverse data is crucial for advancing retrieval model performance, and that leveraging LLMs generative capabilities can further optimize data quality for embedding model breakthroughs. Our model weights are released on HuggingFace under Apache 2.0 license. For reproducibility, we provide evaluation code and instructions on GitHub.
Qwen3 Embedding: Advancing Text Embedding and Reranking Through Foundation Models
In this work, we introduce the Qwen3 Embedding series, a significant advancement over its predecessor, the GTE-Qwen series, in text embedding and reranking capabilities, built upon the Qwen3 foundation models. Leveraging the Qwen3 LLMs' robust capabilities in multilingual text understanding and generation, our innovative multi-stage training pipeline combines large-scale unsupervised pre-training with supervised fine-tuning on high-quality datasets. Effective model merging strategies further ensure the robustness and adaptability of the Qwen3 Embedding series. During the training process, the Qwen3 LLMs serve not only as backbone models but also play a crucial role in synthesizing high-quality, rich, and diverse training data across multiple domains and languages, thus enhancing the training pipeline. The Qwen3 Embedding series offers a spectrum of model sizes (0.6B, 4B, 8B) for both embedding and reranking tasks, addressing diverse deployment scenarios where users can optimize for either efficiency or effectiveness. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that the Qwen3 Embedding series achieves state-of-the-art results across diverse benchmarks. Notably, it excels on the multilingual evaluation benchmark MTEB for text embedding, as well as in various retrieval tasks, including code retrieval, cross-lingual retrieval and multilingual retrieval. To facilitate reproducibility and promote community-driven research and development, the Qwen3 Embedding models are publicly available under the Apache 2.0 license.
Jina Embeddings 2: 8192-Token General-Purpose Text Embeddings for Long Documents
Text embedding models have emerged as powerful tools for transforming sentences into fixed-sized feature vectors that encapsulate semantic information. While these models are essential for tasks like information retrieval, semantic clustering, and text re-ranking, most existing open-source models, especially those built on architectures like BERT, struggle to represent lengthy documents and often resort to truncation. One common approach to mitigate this challenge involves splitting documents into smaller paragraphs for embedding. However, this strategy results in a much larger set of vectors, consequently leading to increased memory consumption and computationally intensive vector searches with elevated latency. To address these challenges, we introduce Jina Embeddings 2, an open-source text embedding model capable of accommodating up to 8192 tokens. This model is designed to transcend the conventional 512-token limit and adeptly process long documents. Jina Embeddings 2 not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on a range of embedding-related tasks in the MTEB benchmark but also matches the performance of OpenAI's proprietary ada-002 model. Additionally, our experiments indicate that an extended context can enhance performance in tasks such as NarrativeQA.
Towards Domain Specification of Embedding Models in Medicine
Medical text embedding models are foundational to a wide array of healthcare applications, ranging from clinical decision support and biomedical information retrieval to medical question answering, yet they remain hampered by two critical shortcomings. First, most models are trained on a narrow slice of medical and biological data, beside not being up to date in terms of methodology, making them ill suited to capture the diversity of terminology and semantics encountered in practice. Second, existing evaluations are often inadequate: even widely used benchmarks fail to generalize across the full spectrum of real world medical tasks. To address these gaps, we leverage MEDTE, a GTE model extensively fine-tuned on diverse medical corpora through self-supervised contrastive learning across multiple data sources, to deliver robust medical text embeddings. Alongside this model, we propose a comprehensive benchmark suite of 51 tasks spanning classification, clustering, pair classification, and retrieval modeled on the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB) but tailored to the nuances of medical text. Our results demonstrate that this combined approach not only establishes a robust evaluation framework but also yields embeddings that consistently outperform state of the art alternatives in different tasks.
Sparse Mixture of Experts as Unified Competitive Learning
Sparse Mixture of Experts (SMoE) improves the efficiency of large language model training by directing input tokens to a subset of experts. Despite its success in generation tasks, its generalization ability remains an open question. In this paper, we demonstrate that current SMoEs, which fall into two categories: (1) Token Choice ;and (2) Expert Choice, struggle with tasks such as the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB). By analyzing their mechanism through the lens of competitive learning, our study finds that the Token Choice approach may overly focus on irrelevant experts, while the Expert Choice approach risks discarding important tokens, potentially affecting performance. Motivated by this analysis, we propose Unified Competitive Learning SMoE (USMoE), a novel and efficient framework designed to improve the performance of existing SMoEs in both scenarios: with and without training. Extensive experiments across various tasks show that USMoE achieves up to a 10% improvement over traditional approaches or reduces computational inference costs by 14% while maintaining strong performance.
Generative Representational Instruction Tuning
All text-based language problems can be reduced to either generation or embedding. Current models only perform well at one or the other. We introduce generative representational instruction tuning (GRIT) whereby a large language model is trained to handle both generative and embedding tasks by distinguishing between them through instructions. Compared to other open models, our resulting GritLM 7B sets a new state of the art on the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB) and outperforms all models up to its size on a range of generative tasks. By scaling up further, GritLM 8x7B outperforms all open generative language models that we tried while still being among the best embedding models. Notably, we find that GRIT matches training on only generative or embedding data, thus we can unify both at no performance loss. Among other benefits, the unification via GRIT speeds up Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) by > 60% for long documents, by no longer requiring separate retrieval and generation models. Models, code, etc. are freely available at https://github.com/ContextualAI/gritlm.
MM-Embed: Universal Multimodal Retrieval with Multimodal LLMs
State-of-the-art retrieval models typically address a straightforward search scenario, where retrieval tasks are fixed (e.g., finding a passage to answer a specific question) and only a single modality is supported for both queries and retrieved results. This paper introduces techniques for advancing information retrieval with multimodal large language models (MLLMs), enabling a broader search scenario, termed universal multimodal retrieval, where multiple modalities and diverse retrieval tasks are accommodated. To this end, we first study fine-tuning an MLLM as a bi-encoder retriever on 10 datasets with 16 retrieval tasks. Our empirical results show that the fine-tuned MLLM retriever is capable of understanding challenging queries, composed of both text and image, but underperforms a smaller CLIP retriever in cross-modal retrieval tasks due to modality bias from MLLMs. To address the issue, we propose modality-aware hard negative mining to mitigate the modality bias exhibited by MLLM retrievers. Second, we propose to continually fine-tune the universal multimodal retriever to enhance its text retrieval capability while maintaining multimodal retrieval capability. As a result, our model, MM-Embed, achieves state-of-the-art performance on the multimodal retrieval benchmark M-BEIR, which spans multiple domains and tasks, while also surpassing the state-of-the-art text retrieval model, NV-Embed-v1, on MTEB retrieval benchmark. Finally, we explore to prompt the off-the-shelf MLLMs as the zero-shot rerankers to refine the ranking of the candidates from the multimodal retriever. We find that through prompt-and-reranking, MLLMs can further improve multimodal retrieval when the user queries (e.g., text-image composed queries) are more complex and challenging to understand. These findings also pave the way to advance universal multimodal retrieval in the future.
HUME: Measuring the Human-Model Performance Gap in Text Embedding Task
Comparing human and model performance offers a valuable perspective for understanding the strengths and limitations of embedding models, highlighting where they succeed and where they fail to capture meaning and nuance. However, such comparisons are rarely made, as human performance on embedding tasks is difficult to measure. To fill this gap, we introduce HUME: Human Evaluation Framework for Text Embeddings. While frameworks like MTEB provide broad model evaluation, they lack reliable estimates of human performance, limiting the interpretability of model scores. We measure human performance across 16 MTEB datasets spanning reranking, classification, clustering, and semantic textual similarity across linguistically diverse high- and low-resource languages. Humans achieve an average performance of 77.6% compared to 80.1% for the best embedding model, although variation is substantial: models reach near-ceiling performance on some datasets while struggling on others, suggesting dataset issues and revealing shortcomings in low-resource languages. We provide human performance baselines, insight into task difficulty patterns, and an extensible evaluation framework that enables a more meaningful interpretation of the model and informs the development of both models and benchmarks. Our code, dataset, and leaderboard are publicly available at https://github.com/embeddings-benchmark/mteb.
Multi-Task Contrastive Learning for 8192-Token Bilingual Text Embeddings
We introduce a novel suite of state-of-the-art bilingual text embedding models that are designed to support English and another target language. These models are capable of processing lengthy text inputs with up to 8192 tokens, making them highly versatile for a range of natural language processing tasks such as text retrieval, clustering, and semantic textual similarity (STS) calculations. By focusing on bilingual models and introducing a unique multi-task learning objective, we have significantly improved the model performance on STS tasks, which outperforms the capabilities of existing multilingual models in both target language understanding and cross-lingual evaluation tasks. Moreover, our bilingual models are more efficient, requiring fewer parameters and less memory due to their smaller vocabulary needs. Furthermore, we have expanded the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB) to include benchmarks for German and Spanish embedding models. This integration aims to stimulate further research and advancement in text embedding technologies for these languages.
Improving General Text Embedding Model: Tackling Task Conflict and Data Imbalance through Model Merging
Text embeddings are vital for tasks such as text retrieval and semantic textual similarity (STS). Recently, the advent of pretrained language models, along with unified benchmarks like the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB), has facilitated the development of versatile general-purpose text embedding models. Advanced embedding models are typically developed using large-scale multi-task data and joint training across multiple tasks. However, our experimental analysis reveals two significant drawbacks of joint training: 1) Task Conflict: Gradients from different tasks interfere with each other, leading to negative transfer. 2) Data Imbalance: Disproportionate data distribution introduces biases that negatively impact performance across tasks. To overcome these challenges, we explore model merging-a technique that combines independently trained models to mitigate gradient conflicts and balance data distribution. We introduce a novel method, Self Positioning, which efficiently searches for optimal model combinations within the interpolation space of task vectors using stochastic gradient descent. Our experiments demonstrate that Self Positioning significantly enhances multi-task performance on the MTEB dataset, achieving an absolute improvement of 0.7 points. It outperforms traditional resampling methods while reducing computational costs. This work offers a robust approach to building generalized text embedding models with superior performance across diverse embedding-related tasks.
GATE: General Arabic Text Embedding for Enhanced Semantic Textual Similarity with Matryoshka Representation Learning and Hybrid Loss Training
Semantic textual similarity (STS) is a critical task in natural language processing (NLP), enabling applications in retrieval, clustering, and understanding semantic relationships between texts. However, research in this area for the Arabic language remains limited due to the lack of high-quality datasets and pre-trained models. This scarcity of resources has restricted the accurate evaluation and advance of semantic similarity in Arabic text. This paper introduces General Arabic Text Embedding (GATE) models that achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Semantic Textual Similarity task within the MTEB benchmark. GATE leverages Matryoshka Representation Learning and a hybrid loss training approach with Arabic triplet datasets for Natural Language Inference, which are essential for enhancing model performance in tasks that demand fine-grained semantic understanding. GATE outperforms larger models, including OpenAI, with a 20-25% performance improvement on STS benchmarks, effectively capturing the unique semantic nuances of Arabic.
