# NV-Retriever: Improving text embedding models with effective hard-negative mining

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.15831 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15831/

## Key facts

- Cited by 84 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Generation and context integration, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 19 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jul 2024.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [Generation and context integration](https://mlsanity.com/rag/generation-and-context-integration/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03771/) (2019)
- [MS MARCO: A Human Generated MAchine Reading COmprehension Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09268/) (2016)
- [Know What You Don't Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuAD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03822/) (2018)
- [Text Embeddings by Weakly-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03533/) (2022)
- [BEIR: A Heterogenous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08663/) (2021)
- [Approximate Nearest Neighbor Negative Contrastive Learning for Dense Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00808/) (2020)
- [Reading Wikipedia to Answer Open-Domain Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00051/) (2017)
- [Towards General Text Embeddings with Multi-stage Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03281/) (2023)
- [RocketQA: An Optimized Training Approach to Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08191/) (2020)
- [MiniLMv2: Multi-Head Self-Attention Relation Distillation for Compressing Pretrained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15828/) (2020)
- [RocketQAv2: A Joint Training Method for Dense Passage Retrieval and Passage Re-ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07367/) (2021)
- [Answering Complex Open-Domain Questions with Multi-Hop Dense Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12756/) (2020)
- [Arctic-Embed: Scalable, Efficient, and Accurate Text Embedding Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05374/) (2024)
- [Transformers with multi-modal features and post-fusion context for e-commerce session-based recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05124/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 84)

- [MM-Embed: Universal Multimodal Retrieval with Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02571/) (2024)
- [EmbeddingGemma: Powerful and Lightweight Text Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20354/) (2025)
- [VRAG-RL: Empower Vision-Perception-Based RAG for Visually Rich Information Understanding via Iterative Reasoning with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22019/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Promptriever: Instruction-Trained Retrievers Can Be Prompted Like Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11136/) (2024)
- [GFM-RAG: Graph Foundation Model for Retrieval Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01113/) (2025)
- [CoRNStack: High-Quality Contrastive Data for Better Code Retrieval and Reranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01007/) (2024)
- [CodeXEmbed: A Generalist Embedding Model Family for Multiligual and Multi-task Code Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12644/) (2024)
- [The Distracting Effect: Understanding Irrelevant Passages in RAG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06914/) (2025)
- [LLMs are Also Effective Embedding Models: An In-depth Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12591/) (2024)
- [Training Sparse Mixture Of Experts Text Embedding Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07972/) (2025)
- [Breaking the Batch Barrier (B3) of Contrastive Learning via Smart Batch Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11293/) (2025)
- [Llama Nemoretriever Colembed: Top-Performing Text-Image Retrieval Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05513/) (2025)
- [OCR Hinders RAG: Evaluating the Cascading Impact of OCR on Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02592/) (2024)
- [CoLLM: A Large Language Model for Composed Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19910/) (2025)
- [SweRank: Software Issue Localization with Code Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07849/) (2025)
- [Conan-embedding: General Text Embedding with More and Better Negative Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15710/) (2024)
- [Hard Negatives, Hard Lessons: Revisiting Training Data Quality for Robust Information Retrieval with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16967/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Q&A Text Retrieval with Ranking Models: Benchmarking, fine-tuning and deploying Rerankers for RAG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07691/) (2024)
- [Omni-Embed-Nemotron: A Unified Multimodal Retrieval Model for Text, Image, Audio, and Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03458/) (2025)
- [ReasonEmbed: Enhanced Text Embeddings for Reasoning-Intensive Document Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08252/) (2025)
- [HarmMetric Eval: Benchmarking Metrics and Judges for LLM Harmfulness Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24384/) (2025)
- [Hard Negative Mining for Domain-Specific Retrieval in Enterprise Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18366/) (2025)
- [Bridging Relevance and Reasoning: Rationale Distillation in Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08519/) (2024)
- [Redundancy, Isotropy, and Intrinsic Dimensionality of Prompt-based Text Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01435/) (2025)
- [Position: Text Embeddings Should Capture Implicit Semantics, Not Just Surface Meaning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08354/) (2025)
- [Nemotron ColEmbed V2: Top-Performing Late Interaction Embedding Models for Visual Document Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03992/) (2026)
- [Towards Better Instruction Following Retrieval Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21439/) (2025)
- [DocReRank: Single-Page Hard Negative Query Generation for Training Multi-Modal RAG Rerankers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22584/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text embedding models have been popular for information retrieval applications such as semantic search and Question-Answering systems based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Those models are typically Transformer models that are fine-tuned with contrastive learning objectives. One of the challenging aspects of fine-tuning embedding models is the selection of high quality hard-negative passages for contrastive learning. In this paper we introduce a family of positive-aware mining methods that use the positive relevance score as an anchor for effective false negative removal, leading to faster training and more accurate retrieval models. We provide an ablation study on hard-negative mining methods over their configurations, exploring different teacher and base models. We further demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed mining methods at scale with the NV-Retriever-v1 model, which scores 60.9 on MTEB Retrieval (BEIR) benchmark and placed 1st when it was published to the MTEB Retrieval on July, 2024.