Hugging Face Blog

Training and Finetuning Multi-Vector Embedding Models with Sentence Transformers

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