arXiv Machine Learning

How Far Do Simple Transformations Translate Across Text Embedding Models?

arXiv:2608. 05980v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate whether simple transformations can translate representations across heterogeneous text embedding models.

arXiv AI
Jun 12

SkMTEB: Slovak Massive Text Embedding Benchmark and Model Adaptation

arXiv:2606. 13647v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce SkMTEB, the first comprehensive MTEB-style text embedding benchmark for Slovak, a low-resource West Slavic language, comprising 31 datasets across 7 task types -- nearly 4$\times$ the depth of existing multilingual benchmark coverage for Slovak.

By Marek \v{S}uppa, Andrej Ridzik, Daniel Hl\'adek, Nat\'alia K\v{n}a\v{z}ekov\'a, Vikt\'oria Ondrejov\'a
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Squeezing More from Limited Data with Recursive Transformers

The paper investigates how to effectively pre‑train language models when the data budget is limited but compute is plentiful. It shows that increasing model size only improves performance up to an optimal point, after which overfitting degrades generalization, and that this optimal size varies with both the data budget and downstream tasks. To overcome the inefficiencies of standard Transformers in this regime, the authors propose recursive Transformers that reuse a shared block across depth and employ factorized embeddings, achieving better results than standard models on 10M–100M word pre‑training budgets and competitive performance with BabyLM Challenge 2025 winners.

By Serdar G\"ulbahar, Lukas Edman, Alexander Fraser
arXiv Computation and Language
6d ago

Why Better Cross-Lingual Alignment Fails for Better Cross-Lingual Transfer: Case of Encoders

The paper challenges the assumption that improving cross‑lingual alignment automatically enhances cross‑lingual transfer. Using XLM‑R models aligned on token, sentence, and masked‑language‑modeling objectives across four language pairs, the authors evaluate zero‑shot transfer on part‑of‑speech tagging and sentence classification. They find that embedding‑based alignment metrics poorly predict downstream performance and that alignment and task gradients are often nearly orthogonal, especially when operating at different representational levels.

By Yana Veitsman, Yihong Liu, Hinrich Sch\"utze
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Double Trouble: Bilingual Pretraining Leaves Language-Conditioned Effects in Shared-Language Representations

The study compares an English-only and a bilingual decoder-only model, each 310 M parameters, trained on eight diverse languages while controlling for English exposure, compute, and document overlap. After aligning on shared English vocabulary, the authors find that token embeddings appear similar, but the deeper hidden states used for prediction diverge across models. This hidden‑state mismatch grows through middle transformer layers and persists despite controls, indicating that contextual processing differs between the models. "whyItMatters":"The findings show that embedding alignment can conceal significant internal representation differences, which is crucial for any downstream work that assumes aligned multilingual models are interchangeable."

By Anjishnu Mukherjee, Ziwei Zhu, Antonios Anastasopoulos
arXiv AI
Jun 10

PromptEmbedder: Efficient and Transferable Text Embedding via Dual-LLM Soft Prompting

arXiv:2605. 28066v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable efficacy in text embedding, yet current adaptation methods like LoRA face significant bottlenecks in computational efficiency and cross-architecture transferability.

By Yu-Che Tsai, Kuan-Yu Chen, Yuan-Hao Chen, Yu-Han Chang, Ching-Yu Tsai, Yu-Hsiang Chuang, Shou-De Lin