# When is an Embedding Model More Promising than Another?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.07640 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07640/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 111 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [Character-level Convolutional Networks for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.01626/) (2015)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Open Graph Benchmark: Datasets for Machine Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00687/) (2020)
- [LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02114/) (2021)
- [Improving language models by retrieving from trillions of tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04426/) (2021)
- [Text Embeddings by Weakly-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03533/) (2022)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13902/) (2020)
- [Probing Classifiers: Promises, Shortcomings, and Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12452/) (2021)
- [A Primer in BERTology: What we know about how BERT works](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12327/) (2020)
- [Convolutional Networks on Graphs for Learning Molecular Fingerprints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.09292/) (2015)
- [Towards General Text Embeddings with Multi-stage Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03281/) (2023)
- [Making Monolingual Sentence Embeddings Multilingual using Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09813/) (2020)
- [Principal Neighbourhood Aggregation for Graph Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05718/) (2020)
- [Sentence-T5: Scalable Sentence Encoders from Pre-trained Text-to-Text Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08877/) (2021)
- [InfoGraph: Unsupervised and Semi-supervised Graph-Level Representation Learning via Mutual Information Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01000/) (2019)
- [Efficient Intent Detection with Dual Sentence Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04807/) (2020)
- [TweetEval: Unified Benchmark and Comparative Evaluation for Tweet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12421/) (2020)
- [An Evaluation Dataset for Intent Classification and Out-of-Scope Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02027/) (2019)
- [ChemBERTa: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pretraining for Molecular Property Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09885/) (2020)
- [OGB-LSC: A Large-Scale Challenge for Machine Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09430/) (2021)
- [GPT-GNN: Generative Pre-Training of Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15437/) (2020)
- [GuacaMol: Benchmarking Models for De Novo Molecular Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.09621/) (2018)
- [PAWS-X: A Cross-lingual Adversarial Dataset for Paraphrase Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11828/) (2019)
- [Therapeutics Data Commons: Machine Learning Datasets and Tasks for Drug Discovery and Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09548/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Towards an Explainable Comparison and Alignment of Feature Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06231/) (2025)
- [From Topology to Retrieval: Decoding Embedding Spaces with Unified Signatures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22150/) (2025)
- [Embedding World Knowledge into Tabular Models: Towards Best Practices for Embedding Pipeline Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17737/) (2026)
- [KODA: Contrastive Representation Comparison and Alignment for Vision-Language Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.04180/) (2026)
- [Statistical Deficiency for Task Inclusion Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05491/) (2025)
- [Layer-wise Representation Dynamics: An Empirical Investigation Across Embedders and Base LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12714/) (2026)
- [FLARE: Task-agnostic embedding model evaluation through a normalization process](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17344/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Embedders play a central role in machine learning, projecting any object into numerical representations that can, in turn, be leveraged to perform various downstream tasks. The evaluation of embedding models typically depends on domain-specific empirical approaches utilizing downstream tasks, primarily because of the lack of a standardized framework for comparison. However, acquiring adequately large and representative datasets for conducting these assessments is not always viable and can prove to be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we present a unified approach to evaluate embedders. First, we establish theoretical foundations for comparing embedding models, drawing upon the concepts of sufficiency and informativeness. We then leverage these concepts to devise a tractable comparison criterion (information sufficiency), leading to a task-agnostic and self-supervised ranking procedure. We demonstrate experimentally that our approach aligns closely with the capability of embedding models to facilitate various downstream tasks in both natural language processing and molecular biology. This effectively offers practitioners a valuable tool for prioritizing model trials.