# Sentence Representation Learning with Generative Objective rather than Contrastive Objective

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.08474 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08474/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [A large annotated corpus for learning natural language inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.05326/) (2015)
- [Understanding Contrastive Representation Learning through Alignment and Uniformity on the Hypersphere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10242/) (2020)
- [SemEval-2017 Task 1: Semantic Textual Similarity - Multilingual and Cross-lingual Focused Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00055/) (2017)
- [EDA: Easy Data Augmentation Techniques for Boosting Performance on Text Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11196/) (2019)
- [Supervised Learning of Universal Sentence Representations from Natural Language Inference Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02364/) (2017)
- [ConSERT: A Contrastive Framework for Self-Supervised Sentence Representation Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11741/) (2021)
- [Whitening Sentence Representations for Better Semantics and Faster Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15316/) (2021)
- [TSDAE: Using Transformer-based Sequential Denoising Auto-Encoder for Unsupervised Sentence Embedding Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06979/) (2021)
- [On the Sentence Embeddings from Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.05864/) (2020)
- [Universal Sentence Representation Learning with Conditional Masked Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14388/) (2020)
- [Cross-Thought for Sentence Encoder Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03652/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings from Scratch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15077/) (2023)
- [RankCSE: Unsupervised Sentence Representations Learning via Learning to Rank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16726/) (2023)
- [Following the Autoregressive Nature of LLM Embeddings via Compression and Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11401/) (2025)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Sentence Representations: From the BERT Epoch to the ChatGPT Era and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12641/) (2023)
- [Learning Disentangled Semantic Spaces of Explanations via Invertible Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01713/) (2023)
- [Bridging Continuous and Discrete Spaces: Interpretable Sentence Representation Learning via Compositional Operations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14599/) (2023)
- [DenoSent: A Denoising Objective for Self-Supervised Sentence Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13621/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Unsupervised Sentence Embeddings via Knowledge-Driven Data Augmentation and Gaussian-Decayed Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12887/) (2024)
- [On The Role of Pretrained Language Models in General-Purpose Text Embeddings: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20783/) (2025)
- [RepCL: Exploring Effective Representation for Continual Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07289/) (2023)
- [Text2Token: Unsupervised Text Representation Learning with Token Target Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10224/) (2025)
- [AlertBERT: A noise-robust alert grouping framework for simultaneous cyber attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06534/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Though offering amazing contextualized token-level representations, current pre-trained language models take less attention on accurately acquiring sentence-level representation during their self-supervised pre-training. However, contrastive objectives which dominate the current sentence representation learning bring little linguistic interpretability and no performance guarantee on downstream semantic tasks. We instead propose a novel generative self-supervised learning objective based on phrase reconstruction. To overcome the drawbacks of previous generative methods, we carefully model intra-sentence structure by breaking down one sentence into pieces of important phrases. Empirical studies show that our generative learning achieves powerful enough performance improvement and outperforms the current state-of-the-art contrastive methods not only on the STS benchmarks, but also on downstream semantic retrieval and reranking tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/chengzhipanpan/PaSeR.