# Building Interpretable Feature Representations for Resume-Vacancy Matching by Distilling Production LLM Signals

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03112 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03112/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Oct 2026.

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

- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Qwen3 Embedding: Advancing Text Embedding and Reranking Through Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05176/) (2025)
- [ChatGPT Outperforms Crowd-Workers for Text-Annotation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15056/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05782/) (2023)
- [Passage Re-ranking with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04085/) (2019)
- [Supervised Learning of Universal Sentence Representations from Natural Language Inference Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02364/) (2017)
- [Enhanced LSTM for Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.06038/) (2016)
- [RocketQAv2: A Joint Training Method for Dense Passage Retrieval and Passage Re-ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07367/) (2021)
- [Distilling Task-Specific Knowledge from BERT into Simple Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12136/) (2019)
- [Improving Efficient Neural Ranking Models with Cross-Architecture Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02666/) (2020)
- [Augmented SBERT: Data Augmentation Method for Improving Bi-Encoders for Pairwise Sentence Scoring Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08240/) (2020)
- [Natural Language Inference by Tree-Based Convolution and Heuristic Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.08422/) (2015)
- [Learning to Match Jobs with Resumes from Sparse Interaction Data using Multi-View Co-Teaching Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13299/) (2020)
- [Scaling Down, Serving Fast: Compressing and Deploying Efficient LLMs for Recommendation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14305/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Talent Search Ranking with Role-Aware Expert Mixtures and LLM-based Fine-Grained Job Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00004/) (2025)
- [ConFit v3: Improving Resume-Job Matching with LLM-based Re-Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09760/) (2026)
- [LANTERN: Scalable Distillation of Large Language Models for Job-Person Fit and Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05490/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Matching candidates to vacancies is central to recruitment, and a recruiter needs to see why a candidate fits, not only a single opaque relevance score. We provide this evidence as named, interpretable matching dimensions recruiters can act on - eight in our current deployment. We propose a two-part approach. The first is an LLM-based labeler whose prompts and feature definitions were refined from recruiter feedback while it served as an earlier production matching stage. In the current architecture, it is used only for offline labeling and is not called on online requests. The second is a feature bi-encoder distilled from it: a LoRA-adapted embedding backbone with compact per-dimension heads that runs on CPU and serves all online requests. Both parts keep improving: prompts are revised as feedback arrives, and the bi-encoder is retrained on the updated labels. The model is trained on 168,772 labeled vacancy-resume pairs (17,921 vacancies and 180,030 resumes). Recruiters using the service can confirm or revise surfaced feature predictions. On 927 recruiter-recorded values from this selected production-feedback subset, the deployed student agrees with the recorded decisions in 888 cases (95.79%). This is operational, non-blinded agreement rather than an independent human evaluation.