# Multilingual E5 Text Embeddings: A Technical Report

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.05672 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05672/

## Key facts

- Cited by 372 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [MS MARCO: A Human Generated MAchine Reading COmprehension Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09268/) (2016)
- [FEVER: a large-scale dataset for Fact Extraction and VERification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05355/) (2018)
- [No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04672/) (2022)
- [Text Embeddings by Weakly-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03533/) (2022)
- [ELI5: Long Form Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09190/) (2019)
- [Sentence-T5: Scalable Sentence Encoders from Pre-trained Text-to-Text Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08877/) (2021)
- [Large Dual Encoders Are Generalizable Retrievers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07899/) (2021)
- [Massively Multilingual Sentence Embeddings for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10464/) (2018)
- [MiniLMv2: Multi-Head Self-Attention Relation Distillation for Compressing Pretrained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15828/) (2020)
- [Mr. TyDi: A Multi-lingual Benchmark for Dense Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08787/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 372)

- [Qwen3-VL-Embedding and Qwen3-VL-Reranker: A Unified Framework for State-of-the-Art Multimodal Retrieval and Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04720/) (2026)
- [jina-embeddings-v3: Multilingual Embeddings With Task LoRA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10173/) (2024)
- [Large Concept Models: Language Modeling in a Sentence Representation Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08821/) (2024)
- [Repetition Improves Language Model Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15449/) (2024)
- [Rank1: Test-Time Compute for Reranking in Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18418/) (2025)
- [The Semantic Hub Hypothesis: Language Models Share Semantic Representations Across Languages and Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04986/) (2024)
- [LLMmap: Fingerprinting For Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15847/) (2024)
- [Arctic-Embed 2.0: Multilingual Retrieval Without Compromise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04506/) (2024)
- [Llama-Embed-Nemotron-8B: A Universal Text Embedding Model for Multilingual and Cross-Lingual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07025/) (2025)
- [Safety Pretraining: Toward the Next Generation of Safe AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16980/) (2025)
- [jina-clip-v2: Multilingual Multimodal Embeddings for Text and Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08802/) (2024)
- [KaLM-Embedding-V2: Superior Training Techniques and Data Inspire A Versatile Embedding Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20923/) (2025)
- [FP3: A 3D Foundation Policy for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08950/) (2025)
- [SimpleDoc: Multi-Modal Document Understanding with Dual-Cue Page Retrieval and Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14035/) (2025)
- [Jina-ColBERT-v2: A General-Purpose Multilingual Late Interaction Retriever](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16672/) (2024)
- [jina-embeddings-v5-text: Task-Targeted Embedding Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15547/) (2026)
- [Recent advances in text embedding: A Comprehensive Review of Top-Performing Methods on the MTEB Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01607/) (2024)
- [MASSW: A New Dataset and Benchmark Tasks for AI-Assisted Scientific Workflows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06357/) (2024)
- [DRAMA: Diverse Augmentation from Large Language Models to Smaller Dense Retrievers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18460/) (2025)
- [Jawaher: A Multidialectal Dataset of Arabic Proverbs for LLM Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00231/) (2025)
- [FinDER: Financial Dataset for Question Answering and Evaluating Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15800/) (2025)
- [TARGET: Benchmarking Table Retrieval for Generative Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11545/) (2025)
- [Dallah: A Dialect-Aware Multimodal Large Language Model for Arabic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18129/) (2024)
- [Omni-Embed-Nemotron: A Unified Multimodal Retrieval Model for Text, Image, Audio, and Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03458/) (2025)
- [JaColBERTv2.5: Optimising Multi-Vector Retrievers to Create State-of-the-Art Japanese Retrievers with Constrained Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20750/) (2024)
- [Writing Style Matters: An Examination of Bias and Fairness in Information Retrieval Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13173/) (2024)
- [A Principled Framework for Evaluating on Typologically Diverse Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05022/) (2024)
- [Greenback Bears and Fiscal Hawks: Finance is a Jungle and Text Embeddings Must Adapt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07142/) (2024)
- [CoSQA+: Pioneering the Multi-Choice Code Search Benchmark with Test-Driven Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11589/) (2024)
- [ST-Raptor: LLM-Powered Semi-Structured Table Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18190/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This technical report presents the training methodology and evaluation results of the open-source multilingual E5 text embedding models, released in mid-2023. Three embedding models of different sizes (small / base / large) are provided, offering a balance between the inference efficiency and embedding quality. The training procedure adheres to the English E5 model recipe, involving contrastive pre-training on 1 billion multilingual text pairs, followed by fine-tuning on a combination of labeled datasets. Additionally, we introduce a new instruction-tuned embedding model, whose performance is on par with state-of-the-art, English-only models of similar sizes. Information regarding the model release can be found at https://github.com/microsoft/unilm/tree/master/e5 .