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Improving Text Embeddings with Large Language Models: Is Contrastive Pre-training Necessary?by@autoencoder

Improving Text Embeddings with Large Language Models: Is Contrastive Pre-training Necessary?

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This paper introduces a novel method for generating high-quality text embeddings using synthetic data, achieving state-of-the-art results with minimal training
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Large Language Models: Is Contrastive Pre-training Necessary?
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Authors:

(1) Liang Wang, Microsoft Corporation, and Correspondence to ([email protected]);

(2) Nan Yang, Microsoft Corporation, and correspondence to ([email protected]);

(3) Xiaolong Huang, Microsoft Corporation;

(4) Linjun Yang, Microsoft Corporation;

(5) Rangan Majumder, Microsoft Corporation;

(6) Furu Wei, Microsoft Corporation and Correspondence to ([email protected]).

Abstract and 1 Introduction

2 Related Work

3 Method

3.1 Synthetic Data Generation

3.2 Training

4 Experiments

4.1 Statistics of the Synthetic Data

4.2 Model Fine-tuning and Evaluation

4.3 Main Results

4.4 Multilingual Retrieval

5 Analysis

5.1 Is Contrastive Pre-training Necessary?

5.2 Extending to Long Text Embeddings and 5.3 Analysis of Training Hyperparameters

6 Conclusion and References

A Implementation Details

B Test Set Contamination Analysis

C Prompts for Synthetic Data Generation

D Instructions for Training and Evaluation

5 Analysis

5.1 Is Contrastive Pre-training Necessary?

Figure 3: Effects of contrastive pre-training. Detailed numbers are in Appendix Table 6.


Weakly-supervised contrastive pre-training is one of the key factors behind the success of existing text embedding models. For instance, Contriever [18] treats random cropped spans as positive pairs for pre-training, while E5 [46] and BGE [48] collect and filter text pairs from various sources.



This paper is available on arxiv under CC0 1.0 DEED license.