Repurposing Language Models into Embedding Models: Finding the Compute-Optimal Recipe
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Abstract (arXiv)
Text embeddings are essential for many tasks, such as document retrieval, clustering, and semantic similarity assessment. In this paper, we study how to contrastively train text embedding models in a compute-optimal fashion, given a suite of pre-trained decoder-only language models. Our innovation is an algorithm that produces optimal configurations of model sizes, data quantities, and fine-tuning methods for text-embedding models at different computational budget levels. The resulting recipe, which we obtain through extensive experiments, can be used by practitioners to make informed design choices for their embedding models. Specifically, our findings suggest that full fine-tuning and low-rank adaptation fine-tuning produce optimal models at lower and higher computational budgets respectively.
Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 35 of its 45 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 6 Jun 2024.
Builds on
35 of 45 references.
References · 35
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23 more
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Citing papers per year: 2025: 3; 2026: 1.
4 papers.
- 2026Diffusion-Pretrained Dense and Contextual Embeddings11 Feb 2026
- 2025Contrastive Representations for Temporal Reasoning18 Aug 2025
- 2025Attention with Trained Embeddings Provably Selects Important Tokens22 May 2025
- 2025Enhancing Lexicon-Based Text Embeddings with Large Language Models16 Jan 2025