Daily Papers

Static and contextual multilingual embeddings have complementary strengths. Static embeddings, while less expressive than contextual language models, can be more straightforwardly aligned across multiple languages. We combine the strengths of static and contextual models to improve multilingual representations. We extract static embeddings for 40 languages from XLM-R, validate those embeddings with cross-lingual word retrieval, and then align them using VecMap. This results in high-quality, highly multilingual static embeddings. Then we apply a novel continued pre-training approach to XLM-R, leveraging the high quality alignment of our static embeddings to better align the representation space of XLM-R. We show positive results for multiple complex semantic tasks. We release the static embeddings and the continued pre-training code. Unlike most previous work, our continued pre-training approach does not require parallel text.

Word embeddings are fixed-length, dense and distributed word representations that are used in natural language processing (NLP) applications. There are basically two types of word embedding models which are non-contextual (static) models and contextual models. The former method generates a single embedding for a word regardless of its context, while the latter method produces distinct embeddings for a word based on the specific contexts in which it appears. There are plenty of works that compare contextual and non-contextual embedding models within their respective groups in different languages. However, the number of studies that compare the models in these two groups with each other is very few and there is no such study in Turkish. This process necessitates converting contextual embeddings into static embeddings. In this paper, we compare and evaluate the performance of several contextual and non-contextual models in both intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation settings for Turkish. We make a fine-grained comparison by analyzing the syntactic and semantic capabilities of the models separately. The results of the analyses provide insights about the suitability of different embedding models in different types of NLP tasks. We also build a Turkish word embedding repository comprising the embedding models used in this work, which may serve as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners in the field of Turkish NLP. We make the word embeddings, scripts, and evaluation datasets publicly available.

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of various static word embeddings for Hungarian, including traditional models such as Word2Vec, FastText, as well as static embeddings derived from BERT-based models using different extraction methods. We evaluate these embeddings on both intrinsic and extrinsic tasks to provide a holistic view of their performance. For intrinsic evaluation, we employ a word analogy task, which assesses the embeddings ability to capture semantic and syntactic relationships. Our results indicate that traditional static embeddings, particularly FastText, excel in this task, achieving high accuracy and mean reciprocal rank (MRR) scores. Among the BERT-based models, the X2Static method for extracting static embeddings demonstrates superior performance compared to decontextualized and aggregate methods, approaching the effectiveness of traditional static embeddings. For extrinsic evaluation, we utilize a bidirectional LSTM model to perform Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging tasks. The results reveal that embeddings derived from dynamic models, especially those extracted using the X2Static method, outperform purely static embeddings. Notably, ELMo embeddings achieve the highest accuracy in both NER and POS tagging tasks, underscoring the benefits of contextualized representations even when used in a static form. Our findings highlight the continued relevance of static word embeddings in NLP applications and the potential of advanced extraction methods to enhance the utility of BERT-based models. This piece of research contributes to the understanding of embedding performance in the Hungarian language and provides valuable insights for future developments in the field. The training scripts, evaluation codes, restricted vocabulary, and extracted embeddings will be made publicly available to support further research and reproducibility.

Contextualized embeddings based on large language models (LLMs) are available for various languages, but their coverage is often limited for lower resourced languages. Training LLMs for such languages is often difficult due to insufficient data and high computational cost. Especially for very low resource languages, static word embeddings thus still offer a viable alternative. There is, however, a notable lack of comprehensive repositories with such embeddings for diverse languages. To address this, we present LowREm, a centralized repository of static embeddings for 87 low-resource languages. We also propose a novel method to enhance GloVe-based embeddings by integrating multilingual graph knowledge, utilizing another source of knowledge. We demonstrate the superior performance of our enhanced embeddings as compared to contextualized embeddings extracted from XLM-R on sentiment analysis. Our code and data are publicly available under https://huggingface.co/DFKI.

Despite advances in open-domain dialogue systems, automatic evaluation of such systems is still a challenging problem. Traditional reference-based metrics such as BLEU are ineffective because there could be many valid responses for a given context that share no common words with reference responses. A recent work proposed Referenced metric and Unreferenced metric Blended Evaluation Routine (RUBER) to combine a learning-based metric, which predicts relatedness between a generated response and a given query, with reference-based metric; it showed high correlation with human judgments. In this paper, we explore using contextualized word embeddings to compute more accurate relatedness scores, thus better evaluation metrics. Experiments show that our evaluation metrics outperform RUBER, which is trained on static embeddings.

Replacing static word embeddings with contextualized word representations has yielded significant improvements on many NLP tasks. However, just how contextual are the contextualized representations produced by models such as ELMo and BERT? Are there infinitely many context-specific representations for each word, or are words essentially assigned one of a finite number of word-sense representations? For one, we find that the contextualized representations of all words are not isotropic in any layer of the contextualizing model. While representations of the same word in different contexts still have a greater cosine similarity than those of two different words, this self-similarity is much lower in upper layers. This suggests that upper layers of contextualizing models produce more context-specific representations, much like how upper layers of LSTMs produce more task-specific representations. In all layers of ELMo, BERT, and GPT-2, on average, less than 5% of the variance in a word's contextualized representations can be explained by a static embedding for that word, providing some justification for the success of contextualized representations.

We propose the neural string edit distance model for string-pair matching and string transduction based on learnable string edit distance. We modify the original expectation-maximization learned edit distance algorithm into a differentiable loss function, allowing us to integrate it into a neural network providing a contextual representation of the input. We evaluate on cognate detection, transliteration, and grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, and show that we can trade off between performance and interpretability in a single framework. Using contextual representations, which are difficult to interpret, we match the performance of state-of-the-art string-pair matching models. Using static embeddings and a slightly different loss function, we force interpretability, at the expense of an accuracy drop.

Text-rich graphs, which integrate complex structural dependencies with abundant textual information, are ubiquitous yet remain challenging for existing learning paradigms. Conventional methods and even LLM-hybrids compress rich text into static embeddings or summaries before structural reasoning, creating an information bottleneck and detaching updates from the raw content. We argue that in text-rich graphs, the text is not merely a node attribute but the primary medium through which structural relationships are manifested. We introduce RAMP, a Raw-text Anchored Message Passing approach that moves beyond using LLMs as mere feature extractors and instead recasts the LLM itself as a graph-native aggregation operator. RAMP exploits the text-rich nature of the graph via a novel dual-representation scheme: it anchors inference on each node's raw text during each iteration while propagating dynamically optimized messages from neighbors. It further handles both discriminative and generative tasks under a single unified generative formulation. Extensive experiments show that RAMP effectively bridges the gap between graph propagation and deep text reasoning, achieving competitive performance and offering new insights into the role of LLMs as graph kernels for general-purpose graph learning.

Interpretability in black-box dense retrievers remains a central challenge in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Understanding how queries and documents semantically interact is critical for diagnosing retrieval behavior and improving model design. However, existing dense retrievers rely on static embeddings for both queries and documents, which obscures this bidirectional relationship. Post-hoc approaches such as re-rankers are computationally expensive, add inference latency, and still fail to reveal the underlying semantic alignment. To address these limitations, we propose Interpretable Modular Retrieval Neural Networks (IMRNNs), a lightweight framework that augments any dense retriever with dynamic, bidirectional modulation at inference time. IMRNNs employ two independent adapters: one conditions document embeddings on the current query, while the other refines the query embedding using corpus-level feedback from initially retrieved documents. This iterative modulation process enables the model to adapt representations dynamically and expose interpretable semantic dependencies between queries and documents. Empirically, IMRNNs not only enhance interpretability but also improve retrieval effectiveness. Across seven benchmark datasets, applying our method to standard dense retrievers yields average gains of +6.35% nDCG, +7.14% recall, and +7.04% MRR over state-of-the-art baselines. These results demonstrate that incorporating interpretability-driven modulation can both explain and enhance retrieval in RAG systems.

Measuring the coherence of text is a vital aspect of evaluating the quality of written content. Recent advancements in neural coherence modeling have demonstrated their efficacy in capturing entity coreference and discourse relations, thereby enhancing coherence evaluation. However, many existing methods heavily depend on static embeddings or focus narrowly on nearby context, constraining their capacity to measure the overarching coherence of long texts. In this paper, we posit that coherent texts inherently manifest a sequential and cohesive interplay among sentences, effectively conveying the central theme, purpose, or standpoint. To explore this abstract relationship, we introduce the "BBScore," a novel reference-free metric grounded in Brownian bridge theory for assessing text coherence. Our findings showcase that when synergized with a simple additional classification component, this metric attains a performance level comparable to state-of-the-art techniques on standard artificial discrimination tasks. We also establish in downstream tasks that this metric effectively differentiates between human-written documents and text generated by large language models under a specific domain. Furthermore, we illustrate the efficacy of this approach in detecting written styles attributed to diverse large language models, underscoring its potential for generalizability. In summary, we present a novel Brownian bridge coherence metric capable of measuring both local and global text coherence, while circumventing the need for end-to-end model training. This flexibility allows for its application in various downstream tasks.

The evaluation of Natural Language Generation (NLG) models has gained increased attention, urging the development of metrics that evaluate various aspects of generated text. LUNA addresses this challenge by introducing a unified interface for 20 NLG evaluation metrics. These metrics are categorized based on their reference-dependence and the type of text representation they employ, from string-based n-gram overlap to the utilization of static embeddings and pre-trained language models. The straightforward design of LUNA allows for easy extension with novel metrics, requiring just a few lines of code. LUNA offers a user-friendly tool for evaluating generated texts.

Current multimodal latent reasoning often relies on external supervision (e.g., auxiliary images), ignoring intrinsic visual attention dynamics. In this work, we identify a critical Perception Gap in distillation: student models frequently mimic a teacher's textual output while attending to fundamentally divergent visual regions, effectively relying on language priors rather than grounded perception. To bridge this, we propose LaViT, a framework that aligns latent visual thoughts rather than static embeddings. LaViT compels the student to autoregressively reconstruct the teacher's visual semantics and attention trajectories prior to text generation, employing a curriculum sensory gating mechanism to prevent shortcut learning. Extensive experiments show that LaViT significantly enhances visual grounding, achieving up to +16.9% gains on complex reasoning tasks and enabling a compact 3B model to outperform larger open-source variants and proprietary models like GPT-4o.

Prevailing methods for training Large Language Models (LLMs) as text encoders rely on contrastive losses that treat the model as a black box function, discarding its generative and reasoning capabilities in favor of static embeddings. We introduce GRACE (Generative Representation Learning via Contrastive Policy Optimization), a novel framework that reimagines contrastive signals not as losses to be minimized, but as rewards that guide a generative policy. In GRACE, the LLM acts as a policy that produces explicit, human-interpretable rationales--structured natural language explanations of its semantic understanding. These rationales are then encoded into high-quality embeddings via mean pooling. Using policy gradient optimization, we train the model with a multi-component reward function that maximizes similarity between query positive pairs and minimizes similarity with negatives. This transforms the LLM from an opaque encoder into an interpretable agent whose reasoning process is transparent and inspectable. On MTEB benchmark, GRACE yields broad cross category gains: averaged over four backbones, the supervised setting improves overall score by 11.5% over base models, and the unsupervised variant adds 6.9%, while preserving general capabilities. This work treats contrastive objectives as rewards over rationales, unifying representation learning with generation to produce stronger embeddings and transparent rationales. The model, data and code are available at https://github.com/GasolSun36/GRACE.

Medical vision--language models (VLMs) have shown strong potential for medical visual question answering (VQA), yet their reasoning remains largely text-centric: images are encoded once as static context, and subsequent inference is dominated by language. This paradigm is fundamentally limited in clinical scenarios, where accurate answers often depend on subtle, localized visual evidence that cannot be reliably preserved in static embeddings. We propose MedLVR, a latent visual reasoning framework that introduces an explicit visual evidence state into autoregressive decoding. Instead of relying solely on text-based intermediate reasoning, MedLVR interleaves a short latent reasoning segment within the decoder by reusing hidden states as continuous latent steps, enabling iterative preservation and refinement of query-relevant visual evidence before answer generation. To support effective visual supervision, we adopt a two-stage training strategy: region of interest (ROI)-supervised fine-tuning aligns latent states with clinically relevant image evidence, and Visual-Latent Policy Optimization (VLPO) further optimizes latent reasoning and answer generation under outcome-level rewards. Experiments on OmniMedVQA and five external medical VQA benchmarks show that MedLVR consistently outperforms recent reasoning baselines and improves the average score over the Qwen2.5-VL-7B backbone from 48.3\% to 53.4\%. These results show that latent visual reasoning provides an effective mechanism for preserving diagnostically relevant visual evidence and improving the reliability of medical VQA.

We propose new static word embeddings optimised for sentence semantic representation. We first extract word embeddings from a pre-trained Sentence Transformer, and improve them with sentence-level principal component analysis, followed by either knowledge distillation or contrastive learning. During inference, we represent sentences by simply averaging word embeddings, which requires little computational cost. We evaluate models on both monolingual and cross-lingual tasks and show that our model substantially outperforms existing static models on sentence semantic tasks, and even rivals a basic Sentence Transformer model (SimCSE) on some data sets. Lastly, we perform a variety of analyses and show that our method successfully removes word embedding components that are irrelevant to sentence semantics, and adjusts the vector norms based on the influence of words on sentence semantics.

Static word embeddings are ubiquitous in computational social science applications and contribute to practical decision-making in a variety of fields including law and healthcare. However, assessing the statistical uncertainty in downstream conclusions drawn from word embedding statistics has remained challenging. When using only point estimates for embeddings, researchers have no streamlined way of assessing the degree to which their model selection criteria or scientific conclusions are subject to noise due to sparsity in the underlying data used to generate the embeddings. We introduce a method to obtain approximate, easy-to-use, and scalable reconstruction error variance estimates for GloVe (Pennington et al., 2014), one of the most widely used word embedding models, using an analytical approximation to a multivariate normal model. To demonstrate the value of embeddings with variance (GloVe-V), we illustrate how our approach enables principled hypothesis testing in core word embedding tasks, such as comparing the similarity between different word pairs in vector space, assessing the performance of different models, and analyzing the relative degree of ethnic or gender bias in a corpus using different word lists.

Applications of Natural Language Processing (NLP) are plentiful, from sentiment analysis to text classification. Practitioners rely on static word embeddings (e.g. Word2Vec or GloVe) or static word representation from contextual models (e.g. BERT or ELMo) to perform many of these NLP tasks. These widely available word embeddings are built from large amount of text, so they are likely to have captured most of the vocabulary in different context. However, how well would they capture domain-specific semantics and word relatedness? This paper explores this idea by creating a bank-specific word embeddings and evaluates them against other sources of word embeddings such as GloVe and BERT. Not surprising that embeddings built from bank-specific corpora does a better job of capturing the bank-specific semantics and word relatedness. This finding suggests that bank-specific word embeddings could be a good stand-alone source or a complement to other widely available embeddings when performing NLP tasks specific to the banking industry.

Pretraining deep language models has led to large performance gains in NLP. Despite this success, Schick and Sch\"utze (2020) recently showed that these models struggle to understand rare words. For static word embeddings, this problem has been addressed by separately learning representations for rare words. In this work, we transfer this idea to pretrained language models: We introduce BERTRAM, a powerful architecture based on BERT that is capable of inferring high-quality embeddings for rare words that are suitable as input representations for deep language models. This is achieved by enabling the surface form and contexts of a word to interact with each other in a deep architecture. Integrating BERTRAM into BERT leads to large performance increases due to improved representations of rare and medium frequency words on both a rare word probing task and three downstream tasks.

Large pretrained language models (LMs) have become the central building block of many NLP applications. Training these models requires ever more computational resources and most of the existing models are trained on English text only. It is exceedingly expensive to train these models in other languages. To alleviate this problem, we introduce a novel method -- called WECHSEL -- to efficiently and effectively transfer pretrained LMs to new languages. WECHSEL can be applied to any model which uses subword-based tokenization and learns an embedding for each subword. The tokenizer of the source model (in English) is replaced with a tokenizer in the target language and token embeddings are initialized such that they are semantically similar to the English tokens by utilizing multilingual static word embeddings covering English and the target language. We use WECHSEL to transfer the English RoBERTa and GPT-2 models to four languages (French, German, Chinese and Swahili). We also study the benefits of our method on very low-resource languages. WECHSEL improves over proposed methods for cross-lingual parameter transfer and outperforms models of comparable size trained from scratch with up to 64x less training effort. Our method makes training large language models for new languages more accessible and less damaging to the environment. We make our code and models publicly available.

Vision language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on general image understanding but struggle to think with medical images, especially when performing multi-step reasoning through iterative visual interaction. Medical VLMs often rely on static visual embeddings and single-pass inference, preventing models from re-examining, verifying, or refining visual evidence during reasoning. While tool-integrated reasoning offers a promising path forward, open-source VLMs lack the training infrastructure to learn effective tool selection, invocation, and coordination in multi-modal medical reasoning. We introduce MedVistaGym, a scalable and interactive training environment that incentivizes tool-integrated visual reasoning for medical image analysis. MedVistaGym equips VLMs to determine when and which tools to invoke, localize task-relevant image regions, and integrate single or multiple sub-image evidence into interleaved multimodal reasoning within a unified, executable interface for agentic training. Using MedVistaGym, we train MedVistaGym-R1 to interleave tool use with agentic reasoning through trajectory sampling and end-to-end reinforcement learning. Across six medical VQA benchmarks, MedVistaGym-R1-8B exceeds comparably sized tool-augmented baselines by 19.10% to 24.21%, demonstrating that structured agentic training--not tool access alone--unlocks effective tool-integrated reasoning for medical image analysis.

Recent studies suggest that the existing neural models have difficulty handling repeated items in sequential recommendation tasks. However, our understanding of this difficulty is still limited. In this study, we substantially advance this field by identifying a major source of the problem: the single hidden state embedding and static item embeddings in the output softmax layer. Specifically, the similarity structure of the global item embeddings in the softmax layer sometimes forces the single hidden state embedding to be close to new items when copying is a better choice, while sometimes forcing the hidden state to be close to the items from the input inappropriately. To alleviate the problem, we adapt the recently-proposed softmax alternatives such as softmax-CPR to sequential recommendation tasks and demonstrate that the new softmax architectures unleash the capability of the neural encoder on learning when to copy and when to exclude the items from the input sequence. By only making some simple modifications on the output softmax layer for SASRec and GRU4Rec, softmax-CPR achieves consistent improvement in 12 datasets. With almost the same model size, our best method not only improves the average NDCG@10 of GRU4Rec in 5 datasets with duplicated items by 10% (4%-17% individually) but also improves 7 datasets without duplicated items by 24% (8%-39%)!

Essay writing is a critical component of student assessment, yet manual scoring is labor-intensive and inconsistent. Automated Essay Scoring (AES) offers a promising alternative, but current approaches face limitations. Recent studies have incorporated Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) into AES using static word embeddings that fail to capture contextual meaning, especially for polysemous words. Additionally, many methods rely on holistic scoring, overlooking specific writing aspects such as grammar, vocabulary, and cohesion. To address these challenges, this study proposes TransGAT, a novel approach that integrates fine-tuned Transformer models with GNNs for analytic scoring. TransGAT combines the contextual understanding of Transformers with the relational modeling strength of Graph Attention Networks (GAT). It performs two-stream predictions by pairing each fine-tuned Transformer (BERT, RoBERTa, and DeBERTaV3) with a separate GAT. In each pair, the first stream generates essay-level predictions, while the second applies GAT to Transformer token embeddings, with edges constructed from syntactic dependencies. The model then fuses predictions from both streams to produce the final analytic score. Experiments on the ELLIPSE dataset show that TransGAT outperforms baseline models, achieving an average Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) of 0.854 across all analytic scoring dimensions. These findings highlight the potential of TransGAT to advance AES systems.

Text-to-image (T2I) models have significantly advanced the development of artificial intelligence, enabling the generation of high-quality images in diverse contexts based on specific text prompts. However, existing T2I-based methods often struggle to accurately reproduce the appearance of individuals from a reference image and to create novel representations of those individuals in various settings. To address this, we leverage the pre-trained UNet from Stable Diffusion to incorporate the target face image directly into the generation process. Our approach diverges from prior methods that depend on fixed encoders or static face embeddings, which often fail to bridge encoding gaps. Instead, we capitalize on UNet's sophisticated encoding capabilities to process reference images across multiple scales. By innovatively altering the cross-attention layers of the UNet, we effectively fuse individual identities into the generative process. This strategic integration of facial features across various scales not only enhances the robustness and consistency of the generated images but also facilitates efficient multi-reference and multi-identity generation. Our method sets a new benchmark in identity-preserving image generation, delivering state-of-the-art results in similarity metrics while maintaining prompt alignment.

This paper makes two contributions to the field of text-based patent similarity. First, it compares the performance of different kinds of patent-specific pretrained embedding models, namely static word embeddings (such as word2vec and doc2vec models) and contextual word embeddings (such as transformers based models), on the task of patent similarity calculation. Second, it compares specifically the performance of Sentence Transformers (SBERT) architectures with different training phases on the patent similarity task. To assess the models' performance, we use information about patent interferences, a phenomenon in which two or more patent claims belonging to different patent applications are proven to be overlapping by patent examiners. Therefore, we use these interferences cases as a proxy for maximum similarity between two patents, treating them as ground-truth to evaluate the performance of the different embedding models. Our results point out that, first, Patent SBERT-adapt-ub, the domain adaptation of the pretrained Sentence Transformer architecture proposed in this research, outperforms the current state-of-the-art in patent similarity. Second, they show that, in some cases, large static models performances are still comparable to contextual ones when trained on extensive data; thus, we believe that the superiority in the performance of contextual embeddings may not be related to the actual architecture but rather to the way the training phase is performed.

The peer review process is crucial for ensuring the quality and reliability of scholarly work, yet assigning suitable reviewers remains a significant challenge. Traditional manual methods are labor-intensive and often ineffective, leading to nonconstructive or biased reviews. This paper introduces the exHarmony (eHarmony but for connecting experts to manuscripts) benchmark, designed to address these challenges by re-imagining the Reviewer Assignment Problem (RAP) as a retrieval task. Utilizing the extensive data from OpenAlex, we propose a novel approach that considers a host of signals from the authors, most similar experts, and the citation relations as potential indicators for a suitable reviewer for a manuscript. This approach allows us to develop a standard benchmark dataset for evaluating the reviewer assignment problem without needing explicit labels. We benchmark various methods, including traditional lexical matching, static neural embeddings, and contextualized neural embeddings, and introduce evaluation metrics that assess both relevance and diversity in the context of RAP. Our results indicate that while traditional methods perform reasonably well, contextualized embeddings trained on scholarly literature show the best performance. The findings underscore the importance of further research to enhance the diversity and effectiveness of reviewer assignments.

Zero-shot composed image retrieval (ZS-CIR) enables image search using a reference image and text prompt without requiring specialized text-image composition networks trained on large-scale paired data. However, current ZS-CIR approaches face three critical limitations in their reliance on composed text embeddings: static query embedding representations, insufficient utilization of image embeddings, and suboptimal performance when fusing text and image embeddings. To address these challenges, we introduce the Prompt Directional Vector (PDV), a simple yet effective training-free enhancement that captures semantic modifications induced by user prompts. PDV enables three key improvements: (1) dynamic composed text embeddings where prompt adjustments are controllable via a scaling factor, (2) composed image embeddings through semantic transfer from text prompts to image features, and (3) weighted fusion of composed text and image embeddings that enhances retrieval by balancing visual and semantic similarity. Our approach serves as a plug-and-play enhancement for existing ZS-CIR methods with minimal computational overhead. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that PDV consistently improves retrieval performance when integrated with state-of-the-art ZS-CIR approaches, particularly for methods that generate accurate compositional embeddings. The code will be publicly available.

Previous work has shown that the representations output by contextual language models are more anisotropic than static type embeddings, and typically display outlier dimensions. This seems to be true for both monolingual and multilingual models, although much less work has been done on the multilingual context. Why these outliers occur and how they affect the representations is still an active area of research. We investigate outlier dimensions and their relationship to anisotropy in multiple pre-trained multilingual language models. We focus on cross-lingual semantic similarity tasks, as these are natural tasks for evaluating multilingual representations. Specifically, we examine sentence representations. Sentence transformers which are fine-tuned on parallel resources (that are not always available) perform better on this task, and we show that their representations are more isotropic. However, we aim to improve multilingual representations in general. We investigate how much of the performance difference can be made up by only transforming the embedding space without fine-tuning, and visualise the resulting spaces. We test different operations: Removing individual outlier dimensions, cluster-based isotropy enhancement, and ZCA whitening. We publish our code for reproducibility.

While pretrained language models (PLMs) primarily serve as general-purpose text encoders that can be fine-tuned for a wide variety of downstream tasks, recent work has shown that they can also be rewired to produce high-quality word representations (i.e., static word embeddings) and yield good performance in type-level lexical tasks. While existing work primarily focused on the lexical specialization of monolingual PLMs with immense quantities of monolingual constraints, in this work we expose massively multilingual transformers (MMTs, e.g., mBERT or XLM-R) to multilingual lexical knowledge at scale, leveraging BabelNet as the readily available rich source of multilingual and cross-lingual type-level lexical knowledge. Concretely, we use BabelNet's multilingual synsets to create synonym pairs (or synonym-gloss pairs) across 50 languages and then subject the MMTs (mBERT and XLM-R) to a lexical specialization procedure guided by a contrastive objective. We show that such massively multilingual lexical specialization brings substantial gains in two standard cross-lingual lexical tasks, bilingual lexicon induction and cross-lingual word similarity, as well as in cross-lingual sentence retrieval. Crucially, we observe gains for languages unseen in specialization, indicating that multilingual lexical specialization enables generalization to languages with no lexical constraints. In a series of subsequent controlled experiments, we show that the number of specialization constraints plays a much greater role than the set of languages from which they originate.

Different from Object Detection, Visual Grounding deals with detecting a bounding box for each text-image pair. This one box for each text-image data provides sparse supervision signals. Although previous works achieve impressive results, their passive utilization of annotation, i.e. the sole use of the box annotation as regression ground truth, results in a suboptimal performance. In this paper, we present SegVG, a novel method transfers the box-level annotation as Segmentation signals to provide an additional pixel-level supervision for Visual Grounding. Specifically, we propose the Multi-layer Multi-task Encoder-Decoder as the target grounding stage, where we learn a regression query and multiple segmentation queries to ground the target by regression and segmentation of the box in each decoding layer, respectively. This approach allows us to iteratively exploit the annotation as signals for both box-level regression and pixel-level segmentation. Moreover, as the backbones are typically initialized by pretrained parameters learned from unimodal tasks and the queries for both regression and segmentation are static learnable embeddings, a domain discrepancy remains among these three types of features, which impairs subsequent target grounding. To mitigate this discrepancy, we introduce the Triple Alignment module, where the query, text, and vision tokens are triangularly updated to share the same space by triple attention mechanism. Extensive experiments on five widely used datasets validate our state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance.

We present Latin BERT, a contextual language model for the Latin language, trained on 642.7 million words from a variety of sources spanning the Classical era to the 21st century. In a series of case studies, we illustrate the affordances of this language-specific model both for work in natural language processing for Latin and in using computational methods for traditional scholarship: we show that Latin BERT achieves a new state of the art for part-of-speech tagging on all three Universal Dependency datasets for Latin and can be used for predicting missing text (including critical emendations); we create a new dataset for assessing word sense disambiguation for Latin and demonstrate that Latin BERT outperforms static word embeddings; and we show that it can be used for semantically-informed search by querying contextual nearest neighbors. We publicly release trained models to help drive future work in this space.

We present a static token lookup methodology for text embedding generation that achieves 1.12 ms p50 latency for single text embeddings while maintaining 60.6 MTEB average score across 8 representative tasks, corresponding to 89% of contextual model quality. The Rust implementation delivers 50,000 requests per second throughput through static embedding lookup, optimized mean pooling, and zero-copy IEEE754 binary serialization. Evaluation demonstrates exceptional duplicate detection performance (90.1% AP), strong semantic similarity (76.1% Spearman correlation), and domain-specific performance ranging from 75% to 131% of baseline across specialized domains. The system enables real-time embedding applications where sub-5ms latency is critica

Word alignments are useful for tasks like statistical and neural machine translation (NMT) and cross-lingual annotation projection. Statistical word aligners perform well, as do methods that extract alignments jointly with translations in NMT. However, most approaches require parallel training data, and quality decreases as less training data is available. We propose word alignment methods that require no parallel data. The key idea is to leverage multilingual word embeddings, both static and contextualized, for word alignment. Our multilingual embeddings are created from monolingual data only without relying on any parallel data or dictionaries. We find that alignments created from embeddings are superior for four and comparable for two language pairs compared to those produced by traditional statistical aligners, even with abundant parallel data; e.g., contextualized embeddings achieve a word alignment F1 for English-German that is 5 percentage points higher than eflomal, a high-quality statistical aligner, trained on 100k parallel sentences.

Word embeddings and language models have transformed natural language processing (NLP) by facilitating the representation of linguistic elements in continuous vector spaces. This review visits foundational concepts such as the distributional hypothesis and contextual similarity, tracing the evolution from sparse representations like one-hot encoding to dense embeddings including Word2Vec, GloVe, and fastText. We examine both static and contextualized embeddings, underscoring advancements in models such as ELMo, BERT, and GPT and their adaptations for cross-lingual and personalized applications. The discussion extends to sentence and document embeddings, covering aggregation methods and generative topic models, along with the application of embeddings in multimodal domains, including vision, robotics, and cognitive science. Advanced topics such as model compression, interpretability, numerical encoding, and bias mitigation are analyzed, addressing both technical challenges and ethical implications. Additionally, we identify future research directions, emphasizing the need for scalable training techniques, enhanced interpretability, and robust grounding in non-textual modalities. By synthesizing current methodologies and emerging trends, this survey offers researchers and practitioners an in-depth resource to push the boundaries of embedding-based language models.

Recently, multilingual BERT works remarkably well on cross-lingual transfer tasks, superior to static non-contextualized word embeddings. In this work, we provide an in-depth experimental study to supplement the existing literature of cross-lingual ability. We compare the cross-lingual ability of non-contextualized and contextualized representation model with the same data. We found that datasize and context window size are crucial factors to the transferability.

Multilingual contextual embeddings, such as multilingual BERT and XLM-RoBERTa, have proved useful for many multi-lingual tasks. Previous work probed the cross-linguality of the representations indirectly using zero-shot transfer learning on morphological and syntactic tasks. We instead investigate the language-neutrality of multilingual contextual embeddings directly and with respect to lexical semantics. Our results show that contextual embeddings are more language-neutral and, in general, more informative than aligned static word-type embeddings, which are explicitly trained for language neutrality. Contextual embeddings are still only moderately language-neutral by default, so we propose two simple methods for achieving stronger language neutrality: first, by unsupervised centering of the representation for each language and second, by fitting an explicit projection on small parallel data. Besides, we show how to reach state-of-the-art accuracy on language identification and match the performance of statistical methods for word alignment of parallel sentences without using parallel data.

Semantic occupancy has emerged as a powerful representation in world models for its ability to capture rich spatial semantics. However, most existing occupancy world models rely on static and fixed embeddings or grids, which inherently limit the flexibility of perception. Moreover, their ``in-place classification" over grids exhibits a potential misalignment with the dynamic and continuous nature of real scenarios. In this paper, we propose SparseWorld, a novel 4D occupancy world model that is flexible, adaptive, and efficient, powered by sparse and dynamic queries. We propose a Range-Adaptive Perception module, in which learnable queries are modulated by the ego vehicle states and enriched with temporal-spatial associations to enable extended-range perception. To effectively capture the dynamics of the scene, we design a State-Conditioned Forecasting module, which replaces classification-based forecasting with regression-guided formulation, precisely aligning the dynamic queries with the continuity of the 4D environment. In addition, We specifically devise a Temporal-Aware Self-Scheduling training strategy to enable smooth and efficient training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SparseWorld achieves state-of-the-art performance across perception, forecasting, and planning tasks. Comprehensive visualizations and ablation studies further validate the advantages of SparseWorld in terms of flexibility, adaptability, and efficiency.

Dynamic graph clustering aims to detect and track time-varying clusters in dynamic graphs, revealing the evolutionary mechanisms of complex real-world dynamic systems. Matrix factorization-based methods are promising approaches for this task; however, these methods often struggle with scalability and can be time-consuming when applied to large-scale dynamic graphs. Moreover, they tend to lack robustness and are vulnerable to real-world noisy data. To address these issues, we make three key contributions. First, to improve scalability, we propose temporal separated matrix factorization, where a single matrix is divided into multiple smaller matrices for independent factorization, resulting in faster computation. Second, to improve robustness, we introduce bi-clustering regularization, which jointly optimizes graph embedding and clustering, thereby filtering out noisy features from the graph embeddings. Third, to further enhance effectiveness and efficiency, we propose selective embedding updating, where we update only the embeddings of dynamic nodes while the embeddings of static nodes are fixed among different timestamps. Experimental results on six synthetic and five real-world benchmarks demonstrate the scalability, robustness and effectiveness of our proposed method. Source code is available at https://github.com/Clearloveyuan/DyG-MF.

Text embeddings are standard for semantic similarity tasks, yet their evaluation remains an open challenge. Current benchmarks are static, cover only a limited set of languages, are often domain-specific, susceptible to overfitting, and poorly representative of low-resource languages. To address these limitations, we introduce ALEE, a framework that extends Sentence Smith (Li et al., 2025) to the cross-lingual and paragraph level. ALEE uses Abstract Meaning Representations (AMR) to generate English minimal pairs with controlled, fine-grained semantic shifts, which are paired with translations in target languages. This approach enables targeted diagnostics for models in any language with English parallel data. We conduct a large-scale empirical study across a diverse set of embedding models and 275+ languages spanning three parallel datasets. On ALEE, performance varies substantially across languages, text lengths, and linguistic phenomena, exposing persistent gaps in cross-lingual semantic representation that track language prevalence in training resources and subword tokenization. We release ALEE at https://github.com/Andrian0s/any-lang-embed-eval

Malware is becoming increasingly complex and widespread, making it essential to develop more effective and timely detection methods. Traditional static analysis often fails to defend against modern threats that employ code obfuscation, polymorphism, and other evasion techniques. In contrast, behavioral malware detection, which monitors runtime activities, provides a more reliable and context-aware solution. In this work, we propose BEACON, a novel deep learning framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate dense, contextual embeddings from raw sandbox-generated behavior reports. These embeddings capture semantic and structural patterns of each sample and are processed by a one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D CNN) for multi-class malware classification. Evaluated on the Avast-CTU Public CAPE Dataset, our framework consistently outperforms existing methods, highlighting the effectiveness of LLM-based behavioral embeddings and the overall design of BEACON for robust malware classification.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have revolutionized the reconstruction of static scenes and objects in 3D, offering unprecedented quality. However, extending NeRFs to model dynamic objects or object articulations remains a challenging problem. Previous works have tackled this issue by focusing on part-level reconstruction and motion estimation for objects, but they often rely on heuristics regarding the number of moving parts or object categories, which can limit their practical use. In this work, we introduce LEIA, a novel approach for representing dynamic 3D objects. Our method involves observing the object at distinct time steps or "states" and conditioning a hypernetwork on the current state, using this to parameterize our NeRF. This approach allows us to learn a view-invariant latent representation for each state. We further demonstrate that by interpolating between these states, we can generate novel articulation configurations in 3D space that were previously unseen. Our experimental results highlight the effectiveness of our method in articulating objects in a manner that is independent of the viewing angle and joint configuration. Notably, our approach outperforms previous methods that rely on motion information for articulation registration.

Current language models rely on static vocabularies determined at pretraining time, which can lead to decreased performance and increased computational cost for domains underrepresented in the original vocabulary. New tokens can be added to solve this problem, when coupled with a good initialization for their new embeddings. However, existing embedding initialization methods either require expensive further training or pretraining of additional modules. In this paper, we propose AweDist and show that by distilling representations obtained using the original tokenization, we can quickly learn high-quality input embeddings for new tokens. Experimental results with a wide range of open-weight models show that AweDist is able to outperform even strong baselines.

Word2vec is one of the most used algorithms to generate word embeddings because of a good mix of efficiency, quality of the generated representations and cognitive grounding. However, word meaning is not static and depends on the context in which words are used. Differences in word meaning that depends on time, location, topic, and other factors, can be studied by analyzing embeddings generated from different corpora in collections that are representative of these factors. For example, language evolution can be studied using a collection of news articles published in different time periods. In this paper, we present a general framework to support cross-corpora language studies with word embeddings, where embeddings generated from different corpora can be compared to find correspondences and differences in meaning across the corpora. CADE is the core component of our framework and solves the key problem of aligning the embeddings generated from different corpora. In particular, we focus on providing solid evidence about the effectiveness, generality, and robustness of CADE. To this end, we conduct quantitative and qualitative experiments in different domains, from temporal word embeddings to language localization and topical analysis. The results of our experiments suggest that CADE achieves state-of-the-art or superior performance on tasks where several competing approaches are available, yet providing a general method that can be used in a variety of domains. Finally, our experiments shed light on the conditions under which the alignment is reliable, which substantially depends on the degree of cross-corpora vocabulary overlap.

Extracting insight from the enormous quantity of data generated from molecular simulations requires the identification of a small number of collective variables whose corresponding low-dimensional free-energy landscape retains the essential features of the underlying system. Data-driven techniques provide a systematic route to constructing this landscape, without the need for extensive a priori intuition into the relevant driving forces. In particular, autoencoders are powerful tools for dimensionality reduction, as they naturally force an information bottleneck and, thereby, a low-dimensional embedding of the essential features. While variational autoencoders ensure continuity of the embedding by assuming a unimodal Gaussian prior, this is at odds with the multi-basin free-energy landscapes that typically arise from the identification of meaningful collective variables. In this work, we incorporate this physical intuition into the prior by employing a Gaussian mixture variational autoencoder (GMVAE), which encourages the separation of metastable states within the embedding. The GMVAE performs dimensionality reduction and clustering within a single unified framework, and is capable of identifying the inherent dimensionality of the input data, in terms of the number of Gaussians required to categorize the data. We illustrate our approach on two toy models, alanine dipeptide, and a challenging disordered peptide ensemble, demonstrating the enhanced clustering effect of the GMVAE prior compared to standard VAEs. The resulting embeddings appear to be promising representations for constructing Markov state models, highlighting the transferability of the dimensionality reduction from static equilibrium properties to dynamics.

We present a probabilistic language model for time-stamped text data which tracks the semantic evolution of individual words over time. The model represents words and contexts by latent trajectories in an embedding space. At each moment in time, the embedding vectors are inferred from a probabilistic version of word2vec [Mikolov et al., 2013]. These embedding vectors are connected in time through a latent diffusion process. We describe two scalable variational inference algorithms--skip-gram smoothing and skip-gram filtering--that allow us to train the model jointly over all times; thus learning on all data while simultaneously allowing word and context vectors to drift. Experimental results on three different corpora demonstrate that our dynamic model infers word embedding trajectories that are more interpretable and lead to higher predictive likelihoods than competing methods that are based on static models trained separately on time slices.

Protein structure tokenization converts 3D structures into discrete or vectorized representations, enabling the integration of structural and sequence data. Despite many recent works on structure tokenization, the properties of the underlying discrete representations are not well understood. In this work, we first demonstrate that the successful utilization of structural tokens in a language model for structure prediction depends on using rich, pre-trained sequence embeddings to bridge the semantic gap between the sequence and structural "language". The analysis of the structural vocabulary itself then reveals significant semantic redundancy, where multiple distinct tokens correspond to nearly identical local geometries, acting as "structural synonyms". This redundancy, rather than being a flaw, can be exploited with a simple "synonym swap" strategy to generate diverse conformational ensembles by perturbing a predicted structure with its structural synonyms. This computationally lightweight method accurately recapitulates protein flexibility, performing competitively with state-of-the-art models. Our study provides fundamental insights into the nature of discrete protein structure representations and introduces a powerful, near-instantaneous method for modeling protein dynamics. Source code is available in https://github.com/IDEA-XL/TokenMD.

LLMs for clinical decision support often fail under small but clinically meaningful input shifts such as masking a symptom or negating a finding, despite high performance on static benchmarks. These reasoning failures frequently go undetected by standard NLP metrics, which are insensitive to latent representation shifts that drive diagnosis instability. We propose a geometry-aware evaluation framework, LAPD (Latent Agentic Perturbation Diagnostics), which systematically probes the latent robustness of clinical LLMs under structured adversarial edits. Within this framework, we introduce Latent Diagnosis Flip Rate (LDFR), a model-agnostic diagnostic signal that captures representational instability when embeddings cross decision boundaries in PCA-reduced latent space. Clinical notes are generated using a structured prompting pipeline grounded in diagnostic reasoning, then perturbed along four axes: masking, negation, synonym replacement, and numeric variation to simulate common ambiguities and omissions. We compute LDFR across both foundation and clinical LLMs, finding that latent fragility emerges even under minimal surface-level changes. Finally, we validate our findings on 90 real clinical notes from the DiReCT benchmark (MIMIC-IV), confirming the generalizability of LDFR beyond synthetic settings. Our results reveal a persistent gap between surface robustness and semantic stability, underscoring the importance of geometry-aware auditing in safety-critical clinical AI.

We propose PromptBERT, a novel contrastive learning method for learning better sentence representation. We firstly analyze the drawback of current sentence embedding from original BERT and find that it is mainly due to the static token embedding bias and ineffective BERT layers. Then we propose the first prompt-based sentence embeddings method and discuss two prompt representing methods and three prompt searching methods to make BERT achieve better sentence embeddings. Moreover, we propose a novel unsupervised training objective by the technology of template denoising, which substantially shortens the performance gap between the supervised and unsupervised settings. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our method. Compared to SimCSE, PromptBert achieves 2.29 and 2.58 points of improvement based on BERT and RoBERTa in the unsupervised setting.

Existing large language model (LLM)-based embeddings typically adopt an encoder-only paradigm, treating LLMs as static feature extractors and overlooking their core generative strengths. We introduce GIRCSE (Generative Iterative Refinement for Contrastive Sentence Embeddings), a novel framework that leverages autoregressive generation to iteratively refine semantic representations. By producing sequences of soft tokens optimized under contrastive objective, GIRCSE captures latent concepts and implicit semantics that encoder-only methods often miss. To guide this process, we propose an Iterative Contrastive Refinement (ICR) objective that encourages each refinement step to yield better representations. Extensive experiments show that GIRCSE outperforms strong LLM-based embedding baselines on the MTEB benchmark and instruction-following tasks. Moreover, GIRCSE exhibits an emergent test-time scaling property: generating more tokens at inference steadily improves embedding quality. Our results establish generative iterative refinement as a new paradigm for representation learning.

Tokenization is a central component of natural language processing in current large language models (LLMs), enabling models to convert raw text into processable units. Although learned tokenizers are widely adopted, they exhibit notable limitations, including their large, fixed vocabulary sizes and poor adaptability to new domains or languages. We present a family of models with up to 70 billion parameters based on the hierarchical autoregressive transformer (HAT) architecture. In HAT, an encoder transformer aggregates bytes into word embeddings and then feeds them to the backbone, a classical autoregressive transformer. The outputs of the backbone are then cross-attended by the decoder and converted back into bytes. We show that we can reuse available pre-trained models by converting the Llama 3.1 8B and 70B models into the HAT architecture: Llama-3.1-8B-TFree-HAT and Llama-3.1-70B-TFree-HAT are byte-level models whose encoder and decoder are trained from scratch, but where we adapt the pre-trained Llama backbone, i.e., the transformer blocks with the embedding matrix and head removed, to handle word embeddings instead of the original tokens. We also provide a 7B HAT model, Llama-TFree-HAT-Pretrained, trained entirely from scratch on nearly 4 trillion words. The HAT architecture improves text compression by reducing the number of required sequence positions and enhances robustness to intra-word variations, e.g., spelling differences. Through pre-training, as well as subsequent supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization in English and German, we show strong proficiency in both languages, improving on the original Llama 3.1 in most benchmarks. We release our models (including 200 pre-training checkpoints) on Hugging Face.

Recently decades have witnessed the empirical success of framing Knowledge Graph (KG) embeddings via language models. However, language model-based KG embeddings are usually deployed as static artifacts, which are challenging to modify without re-training after deployment. To address this issue, we propose a new task of editing language model-based KG embeddings in this paper. The proposed task aims to enable data-efficient and fast updates to KG embeddings without damaging the performance of the rest. We build four new datasets: E-FB15k237, A-FB15k237, E-WN18RR, and A-WN18RR, and evaluate several knowledge editing baselines demonstrating the limited ability of previous models to handle the proposed challenging task. We further propose a simple yet strong baseline dubbed KGEditor, which utilizes additional parametric layers of the hyper network to edit/add facts. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that KGEditor can perform better when updating specific facts while not affecting the rest with low training resources. Code and datasets will be available in https://github.com/zjunlp/PromptKG/tree/main/deltaKG.

Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) suites accumulate step-text duplication whose maintenance cost is established in prior work. Existing detection techniques require running the tests (Binamungu et al., 2018-2023) or are confined to a single organisation (Irshad et al., 2020-2022), leaving a gap: a purely static, paraphrase-robust, step-level detector usable on any repository. We fill the gap with cukereuse, an open-source Python CLI combining exact hashing, Levenshtein ratio, and sentence-transformer embeddings in a layered pipeline, released alongside an empirical corpus of 347 public GitHub repositories, 23,667 parsed .feature files, and 1,113,616 Gherkin steps. The step-weighted exact-duplicate rate is 80.2 %; the median-repository rate is 58.6 % (Spearman rho = 0.51 with size). The top hybrid cluster groups 20.7k occurrences across 2.2k files. Against 1,020 pairs manually labelled by the three authors under a released rubric (inter-annotator Fleiss' kappa = 0.84 on a 60-pair overlap), we report precision, recall, and F1 with bootstrap 95 % CIs under two protocols: the primary rubric and a score-free second-pass relabelling. The strongest honest pair-level number is near-exact at F1 = 0.822 on score-free labels; the primary-rubric semantic F1 = 0.906 is inflated by a stratification artefact that pins recall at 1.000. Lexical baselines (SourcererCC-style, NiCad-style) reach primary F1 = 0.761 and 0.799. The paper also presents a CDN-structured critique of Gherkin (Cognitive Dimensions of Notations); eight of fourteen dimensions are rated problematic or unsupported. The tool, corpus, labelled pairs, rubric, and pipeline are released under permissive licences.

Multi-vector visual retrievers (e.g., ColPali-style late interaction models) deliver strong accuracy, but scale poorly because each page yields thousands of vectors, making indexing and search increasingly expensive. We present Visual RAG Toolkit, a practical system for scaling visual multi-vector retrieval with training-free, model-aware pooling and multi-stage retrieval. Motivated by Matryoshka Embeddings, our method performs static spatial pooling - including a lightweight sliding-window averaging variant - over patch embeddings to produce compact tile-level and global representations for fast candidate generation, followed by exact MaxSim reranking using full multi-vector embeddings. Our design yields a quadratic reduction in vector-to-vector comparisons by reducing stored vectors per page from thousands to dozens, notably without requiring post-training, adapters, or distillation. Across experiments with interaction-style models such as ColPali and ColSmol-500M, we observe that over the limited ViDoRe v2 benchmark corpus 2-stage retrieval typically preserves NDCG and Recall @ 5/10 with minimal degradation, while substantially improving throughput (approximately 4x QPS); with sensitivity mainly at very large k. The toolkit additionally provides robust preprocessing - high resolution PDF to image conversion, optional margin/empty-region cropping and token hygiene (indexing only visual tokens) - and a reproducible evaluation pipeline, enabling rapid exploration of two-, three-, and cascaded retrieval variants. By emphasizing efficiency at common cutoffs (e.g., k <= 10), the toolkit lowers hardware barriers and makes state-of-the-art visual retrieval more accessible in practice.

Most graph neural network models learn embeddings of nodes in static attributed graphs for predictive analysis. Recent attempts have been made to learn temporal proximity of the nodes. We find that real dynamic attributed graphs exhibit complex co-evolution of node attributes and graph structure. Learning node embeddings for forecasting change of node attributes and birth and death of links over time remains an open problem. In this work, we present a novel framework called CoEvoGNN for modeling dynamic attributed graph sequence. It preserves the impact of earlier graphs on the current graph by embedding generation through the sequence. It has a temporal self-attention mechanism to model long-range dependencies in the evolution. Moreover, CoEvoGNN optimizes model parameters jointly on two dynamic tasks, attribute inference and link prediction over time. So the model can capture the co-evolutionary patterns of attribute change and link formation. This framework can adapt to any graph neural algorithms so we implemented and investigated three methods based on it: CoEvoGCN, CoEvoGAT, and CoEvoSAGE. Experiments demonstrate the framework (and its methods) outperform strong baselines on predicting an entire unseen graph snapshot of personal attributes and interpersonal links in dynamic social graphs and financial graphs.

The integration of quantum machine learning with classical deep learning offers promising avenues for medical image analysis by mapping data into high-dimensional Hilbert spaces. However, effectively unifying these distinct paradigms remains challenging due to common optimization asymmetries. In this paper, a novel hybrid quantum-classical architecture for breast cancer diagnosis based on a dual-branch feature-extraction pipeline is proposed. Our framework extracts and unifies complementary representations from classical models and quantum circuits, exploring both trainable and deterministic (non-trainable) quantum paradigms. To integrate these embeddings, three progressive feature fusion strategies are introduced: Static Hybrid Fusion (SHF) for offline extraction, Dynamic Hybrid Fusion (DHF) for end-to-end co-adaptation, and a novel Temperature-Scaled Hybrid Fusion (TSHF). The TSHF strategy incorporates a learnable scalar, inspired by multimodal learning, that dynamically balances hybrid gradient dynamics and resolves optimization bottlenecks. Empirical validation on the BreastMNIST dataset confirms our hypothesis that unifying diverse feature representations creates a richer data context. The TSHF strategy, specifically when pairing a ResNet backbone with a trainable quantum circuit, achieved a peak accuracy of 87.82%, F1-score of 91.77%, and an AUC-ROC of 89.08%, outperforming purely classical baselines. These results demonstrate that the proposed hybrid framework improves classification accuracy and threshold reliability, providing a stable, high-performance architecture for the clinical deployment of quantum-enhanced diagnostic tools.

We present a novel approach to the generation of static and articulated 3D assets that has a 3D autodecoder at its core. The 3D autodecoder framework embeds properties learned from the target dataset in the latent space, which can then be decoded into a volumetric representation for rendering view-consistent appearance and geometry. We then identify the appropriate intermediate volumetric latent space, and introduce robust normalization and de-normalization operations to learn a 3D diffusion from 2D images or monocular videos of rigid or articulated objects. Our approach is flexible enough to use either existing camera supervision or no camera information at all -- instead efficiently learning it during training. Our evaluations demonstrate that our generation results outperform state-of-the-art alternatives on various benchmark datasets and metrics, including multi-view image datasets of synthetic objects, real in-the-wild videos of moving people, and a large-scale, real video dataset of static objects.

Generating avatar videos that are not merely visually similar to a target individual but behaviorally recognizable, faithfully reproducing their talking rhythm, gestural tendencies, and expression dynamics, remains an open challenge. Existing methods predominantly condition on single static images, which provide insufficient identity information and cannot capture dynamic motion traits, while standard pixel-level objectives underserve the perceptually critical facial regions that determine avatar fidelity. We present Avatar V, a production-scale framework that addresses these limitations through video-reference-conditioned identity modeling. Rather than compressing identity into fixed-size embeddings, the model conditions directly on the full token sequence of a reference video, learning to reproduce both static identity attributes (facial geometry, skin texture) and dynamic behavioral patterns (talking rhythm, micro-expressions) through attention over the reference context. We introduce Sparse Reference Attention, an asymmetric mechanism achieving linear-complexity conditioning on arbitrarily long references; a motion representation stream enabling closed-loop talking style transfer; and an identity-aware super-resolution refiner inheriting the full reference conditioning. These are supported by a data engine curating 100M+ training clips from 50M raw videos, and a five-stage training pipeline with flow matching pre-training, personality fine-tuning, two-phase distillation (>10x acceleration), and RLHF alignment, deployed across thousands of GPUs. Avatar V generates 1080p videos of unlimited duration, achieving state-of-the-art identity preservation, lip synchronization, and generation quality on our cross-scene benchmark, consistently outperforming leading systems including Seedance 2.0, Kling O3 Pro, Veo 3.1, and OmniHuman 1.5 in both automated metrics and human evaluation.

Language plays a vital role in the realm of human motion. Existing methods have largely depended on CLIP text embeddings for motion generation, yet they fall short in effectively aligning language and motion due to CLIP's pretraining on static image-text pairs. This work introduces LaMP, a novel Language-Motion Pretraining model, which transitions from a language-vision to a more suitable language-motion latent space. It addresses key limitations by generating motion-informative text embeddings, significantly enhancing the relevance and semantics of generated motion sequences. With LaMP, we advance three key tasks: text-to-motion generation, motion-text retrieval, and motion captioning through aligned language-motion representation learning. For generation, we utilize LaMP to provide the text condition instead of CLIP, and an autoregressive masked prediction is designed to achieve mask modeling without rank collapse in transformers. For retrieval, motion features from LaMP's motion transformer interact with query tokens to retrieve text features from the text transformer, and vice versa. For captioning, we finetune a large language model with the language-informative motion features to develop a strong motion captioning model. In addition, we introduce the LaMP-BertScore metric to assess the alignment of generated motions with textual descriptions. Extensive experimental results on multiple datasets demonstrate substantial improvements over previous methods across all three tasks. The code of our method will be made public.

Industrial-scale user representation learning requires balancing robust universality with acute task-sensitivity. However, existing paradigms primarily yield static, task-agnostic embeddings that struggle to reconcile the divergent requirements of downstream scenarios within unified vector spaces. Furthermore, heterogeneous multi-source data introduces inherent noise and modality conflicts, degrading representation. We propose Query-as-Anchor, a framework shifting user modeling from static encoding to dynamic, query-aware synthesis. To empower Large Language Models (LLMs) with deep user understanding, we first construct UserU, an industrial-scale pre-training dataset that aligns multi-modal behavioral sequences with user understanding semantics, and our Q-Anchor Embedding architecture integrates hierarchical coarse-to-fine encoders into dual-tower LLMs via joint contrastive-autoregressive optimization for query-aware user representation. To bridge the gap between general pre-training and specialized business logic, we further introduce Cluster-based Soft Prompt Tuning to enforce discriminative latent structures, effectively aligning model attention with scenario-specific modalities. For deployment, anchoring queries at sequence termini enables KV-cache-accelerated inference with negligible incremental latency. Evaluations on 10 Alipay industrial benchmarks show consistent SOTA performance, strong scalability, and efficient deployment. Large-scale online A/B testing in Alipay's production system across two real-world scenarios further validates its practical effectiveness. Our code is prepared for public release and will be available at: https://github.com/JhCircle/Q-Anchor.

Deploying dynamic heterogeneous graph embeddings in production faces key challenges of scalability, data freshness, and cold-start. This paper introduces a practical, two-stage solution that balances deep graph representation with low-latency incremental updates. Our framework combines HetSGFormer, a scalable graph transformer for static learning, with Incremental Locally Linear Embedding (ILLE), a lightweight, CPU-based algorithm for real-time updates. HetSGFormer captures global structure with linear scalability, while ILLE provides rapid, targeted updates to incorporate new data, thus avoiding costly full retraining. This dual approach is cold-start resilient, leveraging the graph to create meaningful embeddings from sparse data. On billion-scale graphs, A/B tests show HetSGFormer achieved up to a 6.11% lift in Advertiser Value over previous methods, while the ILLE module added another 3.22% lift and improved embedding refresh timeliness by 83.2%. Our work provides a validated framework for deploying dynamic graph learning in production environments.

We propose TextToon, a method to generate a drivable toonified avatar. Given a short monocular video sequence and a written instruction about the avatar style, our model can generate a high-fidelity toonified avatar that can be driven in real-time by another video with arbitrary identities. Existing related works heavily rely on multi-view modeling to recover geometry via texture embeddings, presented in a static manner, leading to control limitations. The multi-view video input also makes it difficult to deploy these models in real-world applications. To address these issues, we adopt a conditional embedding Tri-plane to learn realistic and stylized facial representations in a Gaussian deformation field. Additionally, we expand the stylization capabilities of 3D Gaussian Splatting by introducing an adaptive pixel-translation neural network and leveraging patch-aware contrastive learning to achieve high-quality images. To push our work into consumer applications, we develop a real-time system that can operate at 48 FPS on a GPU machine and 15-18 FPS on a mobile machine. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in generating textual avatars over existing methods in terms of quality and real-time animation. Please refer to our project page for more details: https://songluchuan.github.io/TextToon/.

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) serve as a critical foundation for AI systems, yet their automated construction inevitably introduces noise, compromising data trustworthiness. Existing triple verification methods, based on graph embeddings or language models, often suffer from single-source bias by relying on either internal structural constraints or external semantic evidence, and usually follow a static inference paradigm. As a result, they struggle with complex or long-tail facts and provide limited interpretability. To address these limitations, we propose SHARP (Schema-Hybrid Agent for Reliable Prediction), a training-free autonomous agent that reformulates triple verification as a dynamic process of strategic planning, active investigation, and evidential reasoning. Specifically, SHARP combines a Memory-Augmented Mechanism with Schema-Aware Strategic Planning to improve reasoning stability, and employs an enhanced ReAct loop with a Hybrid Knowledge Toolset to dynamically integrate internal KG structure and external textual evidence for cross-verification. Experiments on FB15K-237 and Wikidata5M-Ind show that SHARP significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines, achieving accuracy gains of 4.2% and 12.9%, respectively. Moreover, SHARP provides transparent, fact-based evidence chains for each judgment, demonstrating strong interpretability and robustness for complex verification tasks.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models advance robotic control via strong visual-linguistic priors. However, existing VLAs predominantly frame pretraining as supervised behavior cloning, overlooking the fundamental nature of robot learning as a goal-reaching process that requires understanding temporal task progress. We present PRTS (Primitive Reasoning and Tasking System), a VLA foundation model that reformulates pretraining through Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning. By treating language instructions as goals and employing contrastive reinforcement learning, PRTS learns a unified embedding space where the inner product of state-action and goal embeddings approximates the log-discounted goal occupancy, the probability of reaching the language-specified goal from the current state-action, quantitatively assessing physical feasibility beyond static semantic matching. PRTS draws this dense goal-reachability supervision directly from offline trajectories without reward annotations, and folds it into the VLM backbone via a role-aware causal mask, incurring negligible overhead over vanilla behavior cloning. This paradigm endows the high-level reasoning system with intrinsic goal reachability awareness, bridging semantic reasoning and temporal task progress, and further benefits goal-conditioned action prediction. Pretrained on 167B tokens of diverse manipulation and embodied-reasoning data, PRTS reaches state-of-the-art performance on LIBERO, LIBERO-Pro, LIBERO-Plus, SimplerEnv, and a real-world suite of 14 complex tasks, with particularly substantial gains on long-horizon, contact-rich, and zero-shot novel-instruction settings, confirming that injecting goal-reachability awareness significantly improves both execution success and long-horizon planning of general-purpose robotic foundation policies.

Deep-learning survival models for electronic health record (EHR) data are hard to compare across papers because the upstream preprocessing step, which includes cohort definition, time discretisation, missingness handling, and censoring rules, is typically undocumented and inconsistent. A reported difference in concordance between two mortality models can therefore reflect any of these choices rather than a modelling contribution. We present SurvBench, an open-source preprocessing pipeline that converts raw PhysioNet exports into model-ready tensors for survival analysis. SurvBench covers four critical-care databases (MIMIC-IV, eICU, MC-MED, HiRID) and four input modalities: time-series vitals and laboratory values, static demographics, International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes, and radiology report embeddings. Every preprocessing decision is controlled through YAML configuration. Imputation, scaling, and feature filtering are fit on the training fold only. Missingness is recorded as a binary mask alongside each feature tensor. The pipeline handles single-risk endpoints (in-hospital and in-ICU mortality) and competing-risks endpoints (a three-way emergency-department admission pathway, with home discharge treated as administrative censoring). We also provide support for harmonised cross-dataset external validation between eICU and MIMIC-IV. SurvBench is publicly available at https://github.com/munibmesinovic/SurvBench, providing a robust platform that future deep-learning EHR survival work, especially nascent multi-modal approaches, can be measured against under matched preprocessing.

The use of relative representations for latent embeddings has shown potential in enabling latent space communication and zero-shot model stitching across a wide range of applications. Nevertheless, relative representations rely on a certain amount of parallel anchors to be given as input, which can be impractical to obtain in certain scenarios. To overcome this limitation, we propose an optimization-based method to discover new parallel anchors from a limited known set (seed). Our approach can be used to find semantic correspondence between different domains, align their relative spaces, and achieve competitive results in several tasks.

In the large language model (LLM) revolution, embedding is a key component of various systems. For example, it is used to retrieve knowledge or memories for LLMs, to build content moderation filters, etc. As such cases span from English to other natural or programming languages, from retrieval to classification and beyond, it is desirable to build a unified embedding model rather than dedicated ones for each scenario. In this work, we make an initial step towards this goal, demonstrating that multiple languages (both natural and programming) pre-trained transformer decoders can embed universally when finetuned on limited English data. We provide a comprehensive practice with thorough evaluations. On English MTEB, our models achieve competitive performance on different embedding tasks by minimal training data. On other benchmarks, such as multilingual classification and code search, our models (without any supervision) perform comparably to, or even surpass heavily supervised baselines and/or APIs. These results provide evidence of a promising path towards building powerful unified embedders that can be applied across tasks and languages.

With hundreds of thousands of language models available on Huggingface today, efficiently evaluating and utilizing these models across various downstream, tasks has become increasingly critical. Many existing methods repeatedly learn task-specific representations of Large Language Models (LLMs), which leads to inefficiencies in both time and computational resources. To address this, we propose EmbedLLM, a framework designed to learn compact vector representations, of LLMs that facilitate downstream applications involving many models, such as model routing. We introduce an encoder-decoder approach for learning such embeddings, along with a systematic framework to evaluate their effectiveness. Empirical results show that EmbedLLM outperforms prior methods in model routing both in accuracy and latency. Additionally, we demonstrate that our method can forecast a model's performance on multiple benchmarks, without incurring additional inference cost. Extensive probing experiments validate that the learned embeddings capture key model characteristics, e.g. whether the model is specialized for coding tasks, even without being explicitly trained on them. We open source our dataset, code and embedder to facilitate further research and application.

Embedding words in high-dimensional vector spaces has proven valuable in many natural language applications. In this work, we investigate whether similarly-trained embeddings of integers can capture concepts that are useful for mathematical applications. We probe the integer embeddings for mathematical knowledge, apply them to a set of numerical reasoning tasks, and show that by learning the representations from mathematical sequence data, we can substantially improve over number embeddings learned from English text corpora.

Vector embeddings have been tasked with an ever-increasing set of retrieval tasks over the years, with a nascent rise in using them for reasoning, instruction-following, coding, and more. These new benchmarks push embeddings to work for any query and any notion of relevance that could be given. While prior works have pointed out theoretical limitations of vector embeddings, there is a common assumption that these difficulties are exclusively due to unrealistic queries, and those that are not can be overcome with better training data and larger models. In this work, we demonstrate that we may encounter these theoretical limitations in realistic settings with extremely simple queries. We connect known results in learning theory, showing that the number of top-k subsets of documents capable of being returned as the result of some query is limited by the dimension of the embedding. We empirically show that this holds true even if we restrict to k=2, and directly optimize on the test set with free parameterized embeddings. We then create a realistic dataset called LIMIT that stress tests models based on these theoretical results, and observe that even state-of-the-art models fail on this dataset despite the simple nature of the task. Our work shows the limits of embedding models under the existing single vector paradigm and calls for future research to develop methods that can resolve this fundamental limitation.

Similarity between training examples is used to curate pretraining datasets for language models by many methods -- for diversification and to select examples similar to high-quality data. However, similarity is typically measured with off-the-shelf embedding models that are generic or trained for tasks such as retrieval. This paper introduces a framework to analyze the suitability of embedding models specifically for data curation in the language model pretraining setting. We quantify the correlation between similarity in the embedding space to similarity in pretraining loss between different training examples, and how diversifying in the embedding space affects pretraining quality. We analyze a variety of embedding models in our framework, with experiments using the Pile dataset for pretraining a 1.7B parameter decoder-only language model. We find that the embedding models we consider are all useful for pretraining data curation. Moreover, a simple approach of averaging per-token embeddings proves to be surprisingly competitive with more sophisticated embedding models -- likely because the latter are not designed specifically for pretraining data curation. Indeed, we believe our analysis and evaluation framework can serve as a foundation for the design of embedding models that specifically reason about similarity in pretraining datasets.

While static word embedding models are known to represent linguistic analogies as parallel lines in high-dimensional space, the underlying mechanism as to why they result in such geometric structures remains obscure. We find that an elementary contrastive-style method employed over distributional information performs competitively with popular word embedding models on analogy recovery tasks, while achieving dramatic speedups in training time. Further, we demonstrate that a contrastive loss is sufficient to create these parallel structures in word embeddings, and establish a precise relationship between the co-occurrence statistics and the geometric structure of the resulting word embeddings.

Existing embedding models are inherently static: they encode text segments in isolation, ignoring their surrounding context and temporal order. This paper introduces EvoEmbedding, a novel embedding model that generates evolvable representations for retrieval. It is tailored for long-context scenarios, where information is dynamic, sequential, and requires continuous state tracking. Our design is simple: EvoEmbedding maintains a continuously updated latent memory as it sequentially processes inputs, and uses it alongside the raw content to jointly generate evolvable embeddings. Consequently, for the same query, our model adapts its representation to retrieve distinct targets based on the evolving context, going beyond static semantic search. To equip the model with this capability, we construct EvoTrain-180K, a diverse dataset for the joint optimization of latent memory and retrieval. Furthermore, we introduce a memory queue to prevent representation collapse during recurrent encoding, alongside segment-batching techniques that tackle significant length variance and accelerate training by 3.8times. Extensive experiments show that our model not only outperforms larger-scale specialists (e.g., Qwen3-Embedding-8B and KaLM-Embedding-Gemma3-12B) across a range of long-context retrieval benchmarks, but also generalizes well to downstream tasks (e.g., personalization) with contexts 10times longer than its training window. Notably, EvoEmbedding seamlessly integrates into agentic workflows to boost performance. For instance, a naive RAG pipeline equipped with our model surpasses dedicated agentic memory systems. Project Page: https://clare-nie.github.io/EvoEmbedding.

We introduce the first method for translating text embeddings from one vector space to another without any paired data, encoders, or predefined sets of matches. Our unsupervised approach translates any embedding to and from a universal latent representation (i.e., a universal semantic structure conjectured by the Platonic Representation Hypothesis). Our translations achieve high cosine similarity across model pairs with different architectures, parameter counts, and training datasets. The ability to translate unknown embeddings into a different space while preserving their geometry has serious implications for the security of vector databases. An adversary with access only to embedding vectors can extract sensitive information about the underlying documents, sufficient for classification and attribute inference.

We investigate compositional structures in data embeddings from pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs). Traditionally, compositionality has been associated with algebraic operations on embeddings of words from a pre-existing vocabulary. In contrast, we seek to approximate representations from an encoder as combinations of a smaller set of vectors in the embedding space. These vectors can be seen as "ideal words" for generating concepts directly within the embedding space of the model. We first present a framework for understanding compositional structures from a geometric perspective. We then explain what these compositional structures entail probabilistically in the case of VLM embeddings, providing intuitions for why they arise in practice. Finally, we empirically explore these structures in CLIP's embeddings and we evaluate their usefulness for solving different vision-language tasks such as classification, debiasing, and retrieval. Our results show that simple linear algebraic operations on embedding vectors can be used as compositional and interpretable methods for regulating the behavior of VLMs.

Learnable embedding vector is one of the most important applications in machine learning, and is widely used in various database-related domains. However, the high dimensionality of sparse data in recommendation tasks and the huge volume of corpus in retrieval-related tasks lead to a large memory consumption of the embedding table, which poses a great challenge to the training and deployment of models. Recent research has proposed various methods to compress the embeddings at the cost of a slight decrease in model quality or the introduction of other overheads. Nevertheless, the relative performance of these methods remains unclear. Existing experimental comparisons only cover a subset of these methods and focus on limited metrics. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive comparative analysis and experimental evaluation of embedding compression. We introduce a new taxonomy that categorizes these techniques based on their characteristics and methodologies, and further develop a modular benchmarking framework that integrates 14 representative methods. Under a uniform test environment, our benchmark fairly evaluates each approach, presents their strengths and weaknesses under different memory budgets, and recommends the best method based on the use case. In addition to providing useful guidelines, our study also uncovers the limitations of current methods and suggests potential directions for future research.

Temporal knowledge graphs represent temporal facts (s,p,o,tau) relating a subject s and an object o via a relation label p at time tau, where tau could be a time point or time interval. Temporal knowledge graphs may exhibit static temporal patterns at distinct points in time and dynamic temporal patterns between different timestamps. In order to learn a rich set of static and dynamic temporal patterns and apply them for inference, several embedding approaches have been suggested in the literature. However, as most of them resort to single underlying embedding spaces, their capability to model all kinds of temporal patterns was severely limited by having to adhere to the geometric property of their one embedding space. We lift this limitation by an embedding approach that maps temporal facts into a product space of several heterogeneous geometric subspaces with distinct geometric properties, i.e.\ Complex, Dual, and Split-complex spaces. In addition, we propose a temporal-geometric attention mechanism to integrate information from different geometric subspaces conveniently according to the captured relational and temporal information. Experimental results on standard temporal benchmark datasets favorably evaluate our approach against state-of-the-art models.

This work lists and describes the main recent strategies for building fixed-length, dense and distributed representations for words, based on the distributional hypothesis. These representations are now commonly called word embeddings and, in addition to encoding surprisingly good syntactic and semantic information, have been proven useful as extra features in many downstream NLP tasks.

Fine-grained and instance-level recognition methods are commonly trained and evaluated on specific domains, in a model per domain scenario. Such an approach, however, is impractical in real large-scale applications. In this work, we address the problem of universal image embedding, where a single universal model is trained and used in multiple domains. First, we leverage existing domain-specific datasets to carefully construct a new large-scale public benchmark for the evaluation of universal image embeddings, with 241k query images, 1.4M index images and 2.8M training images across 8 different domains and 349k classes. We define suitable metrics, training and evaluation protocols to foster future research in this area. Second, we provide a comprehensive experimental evaluation on the new dataset, demonstrating that existing approaches and simplistic extensions lead to worse performance than an assembly of models trained for each domain separately. Finally, we conducted a public research competition on this topic, leveraging industrial datasets, which attracted the participation of more than 1k teams worldwide. This exercise generated many interesting research ideas and findings which we present in detail. Project webpage: https://cmp.felk.cvut.cz/univ_emb/

Understanding the locus of semantic representation in large language models (LLMs) is crucial for interpretability and architectural innovation. The dominant paradigm posits that trainable input embeddings serve as foundational "meaning vectors." This paper challenges that view. We construct Transformer models where the embedding layer is entirely frozen, with vectors derived not from data, but from the visual structure of Unicode glyphs. These non-semantic, precomputed visual embeddings are fixed throughout training. Our method is compatible with any tokenizer, including a novel Unicode-centric tokenizer we introduce to ensure universal text coverage. Despite the absence of trainable, semantically initialized embeddings, our models converge, generate coherent text, and, critically, outperform architecturally identical models with trainable embeddings on the MMLU reasoning benchmark. We attribute this to "representational interference" in conventional models, where the embedding layer is burdened with learning both structural and semantic features. Our results indicate that high-level semantics are not inherent to input embeddings but are an emergent property of the Transformer's compositional architecture and data scale. This reframes the role of embeddings from meaning containers to structural primitives. We release all code and models to foster further research.

Learning compatible representations enables the interchangeable use of semantic features as models are updated over time. This is particularly relevant in search and retrieval systems where it is crucial to avoid reprocessing of the gallery images with the updated model. While recent research has shown promising empirical evidence, there is still a lack of comprehensive theoretical understanding about learning compatible representations. In this paper, we demonstrate that the stationary representations learned by the d-Simplex fixed classifier optimally approximate compatibility representation according to the two inequality constraints of its formal definition. This not only establishes a solid foundation for future works in this line of research but also presents implications that can be exploited in practical learning scenarios. An exemplary application is the now-standard practice of downloading and fine-tuning new pre-trained models. Specifically, we show the strengths and critical issues of stationary representations in the case in which a model undergoing sequential fine-tuning is asynchronously replaced by downloading a better-performing model pre-trained elsewhere. Such a representation enables seamless delivery of retrieval service (i.e., no reprocessing of gallery images) and offers improved performance without operational disruptions during model replacement. Code available at: https://github.com/miccunifi/iamcl2r.

Instance embeddings are an efficient and versatile image representation that facilitates applications like recognition, verification, retrieval, and clustering. Many metric learning methods represent the input as a single point in the embedding space. Often the distance between points is used as a proxy for match confidence. However, this can fail to represent uncertainty arising when the input is ambiguous, e.g., due to occlusion or blurriness. This work addresses this issue and explicitly models the uncertainty by hedging the location of each input in the embedding space. We introduce the hedged instance embedding (HIB) in which embeddings are modeled as random variables and the model is trained under the variational information bottleneck principle. Empirical results on our new N-digit MNIST dataset show that our method leads to the desired behavior of hedging its bets across the embedding space upon encountering ambiguous inputs. This results in improved performance for image matching and classification tasks, more structure in the learned embedding space, and an ability to compute a per-exemplar uncertainty measure that is correlated with downstream performance.

Language grounding to vision is an active field of research aiming to enrich text-based representations of word meanings by leveraging perceptual knowledge from vision. Despite many attempts at language grounding, it is still unclear how to effectively inject visual knowledge into the word embeddings of a language in such a way that a proper balance of textual and visual knowledge is maintained. Some common concerns are the following. Is visual grounding beneficial for abstract words or is its contribution only limited to concrete words? What is the optimal way of bridging the gap between text and vision? How much do we gain by visually grounding textual embeddings? The present study addresses these questions by proposing a simple yet very effective grounding approach for pre-trained word embeddings. Our model aligns textual embeddings with vision while largely preserving the distributional statistics that characterize word use in text corpora. By applying a learned alignment, we are able to generate visually grounded embeddings for unseen words, including abstract words. A series of evaluations on word similarity benchmarks shows that visual grounding is beneficial not only for concrete words, but also for abstract words. We also show that our method for visual grounding offers advantages for contextualized embeddings, but only when these are trained on corpora of relatively modest size. Code and grounded embeddings for English are available at https://github.com/Hazel1994/Visually_Grounded_Word_Embeddings_2.

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.

Embeddings have become a pivotal means to represent complex, multi-faceted information about entities, concepts, and relationships in a condensed and useful format. Nevertheless, they often preclude direct interpretation. While downstream tasks make use of these compressed representations, meaningful interpretation usually requires visualization using dimensionality reduction or specialized machine learning interpretability methods. This paper addresses the challenge of making such embeddings more interpretable and broadly useful, by employing Large Language Models (LLMs) to directly interact with embeddings -- transforming abstract vectors into understandable narratives. By injecting embeddings into LLMs, we enable querying and exploration of complex embedding data. We demonstrate our approach on a variety of diverse tasks, including: enhancing concept activation vectors (CAVs), communicating novel embedded entities, and decoding user preferences in recommender systems. Our work couples the immense information potential of embeddings with the interpretative power of LLMs.

With the growing popularity of RAG, the capabilities of embedding models are gaining increasing attention. Embedding models are primarily trained through contrastive loss learning, with negative examples being a key component. Previous work has proposed various hard negative mining strategies, but these strategies are typically employed as preprocessing steps. In this paper, we propose the conan-embedding model, which maximizes the utilization of more and higher-quality negative examples. Specifically, since the model's ability to handle preprocessed negative examples evolves during training, we propose dynamic hard negative mining method to expose the model to more challenging negative examples throughout the training process. Secondly, contrastive learning requires as many negative examples as possible but is limited by GPU memory constraints. Therefore, we use a Cross-GPU balancing Loss to provide more negative examples for embedding training and balance the batch size across multiple tasks. Moreover, we also discovered that the prompt-response pairs from LLMs can be used for embedding training. Our approach effectively enhances the capabilities of embedding models, currently ranking first on the Chinese leaderboard of Massive text embedding benchmark

Text embeddings are useful features in many applications such as semantic search and computing text similarity. Previous work typically trains models customized for different use cases, varying in dataset choice, training objective and model architecture. In this work, we show that contrastive pre-training on unsupervised data at scale leads to high quality vector representations of text and code. The same unsupervised text embeddings that achieve new state-of-the-art results in linear-probe classification also display impressive semantic search capabilities and sometimes even perform competitively with fine-tuned models. On linear-probe classification accuracy averaging over 7 tasks, our best unsupervised model achieves a relative improvement of 4% and 1.8% over previous best unsupervised and supervised text embedding models respectively. The same text embeddings when evaluated on large-scale semantic search attains a relative improvement of 23.4%, 14.7%, and 10.6% over previous best unsupervised methods on MSMARCO, Natural Questions and TriviaQA benchmarks, respectively. Similarly to text embeddings, we train code embedding models on (text, code) pairs, obtaining a 20.8% relative improvement over prior best work on code search.

Relative representations are an established approach to zero-shot model stitching, consisting of a non-trainable transformation of the latent space of a deep neural network. Based on insights of topological and geometric nature, we propose two improvements to relative representations. First, we introduce a normalization procedure in the relative transformation, resulting in invariance to non-isotropic rescalings and permutations. The latter coincides with the symmetries in parameter space induced by common activation functions. Second, we propose to deploy topological densification when fine-tuning relative representations, a topological regularization loss encouraging clustering within classes. We provide an empirical investigation on a natural language task, where both the proposed variations yield improved performance on zero-shot model stitching.

Representation learning has become an invaluable approach for learning from symbolic data such as text and graphs. However, while complex symbolic datasets often exhibit a latent hierarchical structure, state-of-the-art methods typically learn embeddings in Euclidean vector spaces, which do not account for this property. For this purpose, we introduce a new approach for learning hierarchical representations of symbolic data by embedding them into hyperbolic space -- or more precisely into an n-dimensional Poincar\'e ball. Due to the underlying hyperbolic geometry, this allows us to learn parsimonious representations of symbolic data by simultaneously capturing hierarchy and similarity. We introduce an efficient algorithm to learn the embeddings based on Riemannian optimization and show experimentally that Poincar\'e embeddings outperform Euclidean embeddings significantly on data with latent hierarchies, both in terms of representation capacity and in terms of generalization ability.

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are symbolically structured storages of facts. The KG embedding contains concise data used in NLP tasks requiring implicit information about the real world. Furthermore, the size of KGs that may be useful in actual NLP assignments is enormous, and creating embedding over it has memory cost issues. We represent KG as a 3rd-order binary tensor and move beyond the standard CP decomposition by using a data-specific generalized version of it. The generalization of the standard CP-ALS algorithm allows obtaining optimization gradients without a backpropagation mechanism. It reduces the memory needed in training while providing computational benefits. We propose a MEKER, a memory-efficient KG embedding model, which yields SOTA-comparable performance on link prediction tasks and KG-based Question Answering.

Transformer architectures rely on explicit position encodings in order to preserve a notion of word order. In this paper, we argue that existing work does not fully utilize position information. For example, the initial proposal of a sinusoid embedding is fixed and not learnable. In this paper, we first review absolute position embeddings and existing methods for relative position embeddings. We then propose new techniques that encourage increased interaction between query, key and relative position embeddings in the self-attention mechanism. Our most promising approach is a generalization of the absolute position embedding, improving results on SQuAD1.1 compared to previous position embeddings approaches. In addition, we address the inductive property of whether a position embedding can be robust enough to handle long sequences. We demonstrate empirically that our relative position embedding method is reasonably generalized and robust from the inductive perspective. Finally, we show that our proposed method can be adopted as a near drop-in replacement for improving the accuracy of large models with a small computational budget.

Conventional representation learning algorithms for knowledge graphs (KG) map each entity to a unique embedding vector. Such a shallow lookup results in a linear growth of memory consumption for storing the embedding matrix and incurs high computational costs when working with real-world KGs. Drawing parallels with subword tokenization commonly used in NLP, we explore the landscape of more parameter-efficient node embedding strategies with possibly sublinear memory requirements. To this end, we propose NodePiece, an anchor-based approach to learn a fixed-size entity vocabulary. In NodePiece, a vocabulary of subword/sub-entity units is constructed from anchor nodes in a graph with known relation types. Given such a fixed-size vocabulary, it is possible to bootstrap an encoding and embedding for any entity, including those unseen during training. Experiments show that NodePiece performs competitively in node classification, link prediction, and relation prediction tasks while retaining less than 10% of explicit nodes in a graph as anchors and often having 10x fewer parameters. To this end, we show that a NodePiece-enabled model outperforms existing shallow models on a large OGB WikiKG 2 graph having 70x fewer parameters.

Many real-world tasks require models to compare images along multiple similarity conditions (e.g. similarity in color, category or shape). Existing methods often reason about these complex similarity relationships by learning condition-aware embeddings. While such embeddings aid models in learning different notions of similarity, they also limit their capability to generalize to unseen categories since they require explicit labels at test time. To address this deficiency, we propose an approach that jointly learns representations for the different similarity conditions and their contributions as a latent variable without explicit supervision. Comprehensive experiments across three datasets, Polyvore-Outfits, Maryland-Polyvore and UT-Zappos50k, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach: our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, even those that are strongly supervised with pre-defined similarity conditions, on fill-in-the-blank, outfit compatibility prediction and triplet prediction tasks. Finally, we show that our model learns different visually-relevant semantic sub-spaces that allow it to generalize well to unseen categories.

Neural networks embed the geometric structure of a data manifold lying in a high-dimensional space into latent representations. Ideally, the distribution of the data points in the latent space should depend only on the task, the data, the loss, and other architecture-specific constraints. However, factors such as the random weights initialization, training hyperparameters, or other sources of randomness in the training phase may induce incoherent latent spaces that hinder any form of reuse. Nevertheless, we empirically observe that, under the same data and modeling choices, the angles between the encodings within distinct latent spaces do not change. In this work, we propose the latent similarity between each sample and a fixed set of anchors as an alternative data representation, demonstrating that it can enforce the desired invariances without any additional training. We show how neural architectures can leverage these relative representations to guarantee, in practice, invariance to latent isometries and rescalings, effectively enabling latent space communication: from zero-shot model stitching to latent space comparison between diverse settings. We extensively validate the generalization capability of our approach on different datasets, spanning various modalities (images, text, graphs), tasks (e.g., classification, reconstruction) and architectures (e.g., CNNs, GCNs, transformers).

We introduce EmbeddingGemma, a new lightweight, open text embedding model based on the Gemma 3 language model family. Our innovative training recipe strategically captures knowledge from larger models via encoder-decoder initialization and geometric embedding distillation. We improve model robustness and expressiveness with a spread-out regularizer, and ensure generalizability by merging checkpoints from varied, optimized mixtures. Evaluated on the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB) across multilingual, English, and code domains, EmbeddingGemma (300M) achieves state-of-the-art results. Notably, it outperforms prior top models, both proprietary and open, with fewer than 500M parameters, and provides performance comparable to models double its size, offering an exceptional performance-to-cost ratio. Remarkably, this lead persists when quantizing model weights or truncating embedding outputs. This makes EmbeddingGemma particularly well-suited for low-latency and high-throughput use cases such as on-device applications. We provide ablation studies exploring our key design choices. We release EmbeddingGemma to the community to promote further research.

Large Lanugage Models (LLMs) are gaining increasing popularity in a variety of use cases, from language understanding and writing to assistance in application development. One of the most important aspects for optimal funcionality of LLMs is embedding layers. Word embeddings are distributed representations of words in a continuous vector space. In the context of LLMs, words or tokens from the input text are transformed into high-dimensional vectors using unique algorithms specific to the model. Our research examines the embedding algorithms from leading companies in the industry, such as OpenAI, Google's PaLM, and BERT. Using medical data, we have analyzed similarity scores of each embedding layer, observing differences in performance among each algorithm. To enhance each model and provide an additional encoding layer, we also implemented Siamese Neural Networks. After observing changes in performance with the addition of the model, we measured the carbon footage per epoch of training. The carbon footprint associated with large language models (LLMs) is a significant concern, and should be taken into consideration when selecting algorithms for a variety of use cases. Overall, our research compared the accuracy different, leading embedding algorithms and their carbon footage, allowing for a holistic review of each embedding algorithm.

We propose SCONE (Scalable, Contextualized, Offloaded, N-gram Embedding), a method for extending input embedding layers to enhance language model performance as layer size scales. To avoid increased decoding costs, SCONE retains the original vocabulary while introducing embeddings for a set of frequent n-grams. These embeddings provide contextualized representation for each input token and are learned with a separate model during training. During inference, they are precomputed and stored in off-accelerator memory with minimal impact on inference speed. SCONE enables two new scaling strategies: increasing the number of cached n-gram embeddings and scaling the model used to learn them, all while maintaining fixed inference-time FLOPS. We show that scaling both aspects allows SCONE to outperform a 1.9B parameter baseline across diverse corpora, while using only half the inference-time FLOPS.

Text embedding models enable semantic search, powering several NLP applications like Retrieval Augmented Generation by efficient information retrieval (IR). However, text embedding models are commonly studied in scenarios where the training data is static, thus limiting its applications to dynamic scenarios where new training data emerges over time. IR methods generally encode a huge corpus of documents to low-dimensional embeddings and store them in a database index. During retrieval, a semantic search over the corpus is performed and the document whose embedding is most similar to the query embedding is returned. When updating an embedding model with new training data, using the already indexed corpus is suboptimal due to the non-compatibility issue, since the model which was used to obtain the embeddings of the corpus has changed. While re-indexing of old corpus documents using the updated model enables compatibility, it requires much higher computation and time. Thus, it is critical to study how the already indexed corpus can still be effectively used without the need of re-indexing. In this work, we establish a continual learning benchmark with large-scale datasets and continually train dense retrieval embedding models on query-document pairs from new datasets in each task and observe forgetting on old tasks due to significant drift of embeddings. We employ embedding distillation on both query and document embeddings to maintain stability and propose a novel query drift compensation method during retrieval to project new model query embeddings to the old embedding space. This enables compatibility with previously indexed corpus embeddings extracted using the old model and thus reduces the forgetting. We show that the proposed method significantly improves performance without any re-indexing. Code is available at https://github.com/dipamgoswami/QDC.

Recent empirical works have successfully used unlabeled data to learn feature representations that are broadly useful in downstream classification tasks. Several of these methods are reminiscent of the well-known word2vec embedding algorithm: leveraging availability of pairs of semantically "similar" data points and "negative samples," the learner forces the inner product of representations of similar pairs with each other to be higher on average than with negative samples. The current paper uses the term contrastive learning for such algorithms and presents a theoretical framework for analyzing them by introducing latent classes and hypothesizing that semantically similar points are sampled from the same latent class. This framework allows us to show provable guarantees on the performance of the learned representations on the average classification task that is comprised of a subset of the same set of latent classes. Our generalization bound also shows that learned representations can reduce (labeled) sample complexity on downstream tasks. We conduct controlled experiments in both the text and image domains to support the theory.

While LLMs are powerful embedding backbones, their application in training-free settings faces two structural challenges: causal attention restricts early tokens from accessing subsequent context, and the next-token prediction objective biases representations toward generation rather than semantic compression. To address these limitations, we propose KV-Embedding, a framework that activates the latent representation power of frozen LLMs. Our method leverages the observation that the key-value (KV) states of the final token at each layer encode a compressed view of the sequence. By re-routing these states as a prepended prefix, we enable all tokens to access sequence-level context within a single forward pass. To ensure model-agnostic applicability, we introduce an automated layer selection strategy based on intrinsic dimensionality. Evaluations on MTEB across Qwen, Mistral, and Llama backbones show that KV-Embedding outperforms existing training-free baselines by up to 10%, while maintaining robust performance on sequences up to 4,096 tokens. These results demonstrate that internal state manipulation offers an efficient alternative to input modification, and we hope this work encourages further exploration of LLM internals for representation learning.

Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance through ever-increasing parameter counts, but scaling incurs steep computational costs. To better understand LLM scaling, we study representational differences between LLMs and their smaller counterparts, with the goal of replicating the representational qualities of larger models in the smaller models. We observe a geometric phenomenon which we term embedding condensation, where token embeddings collapse into a narrow cone-like subspace in some language models. Through systematic analyses across multiple Transformer families, we show that small models such as GPT2 and Qwen3-0.6B exhibit severe condensation, whereas the larger models such as GPT2-xl and Qwen3-32B are more resistant to this phenomenon. Additional observations show that embedding condensation is not reliably mitigated by knowledge distillation from larger models. To fight against it, we formulate a dispersion loss that explicitly encourages embedding dispersion during training. Experiments demonstrate that it mitigates condensation, recovers dispersion patterns seen in larger models, and yields performance gains across 10 benchmarks. We believe this work offers a principled path toward improving smaller Transformers without additional parameters.

Transformer-based pre-trained language models are vocabulary-dependent, mapping by default each token to its corresponding embedding. This one-to-one mapping results into embedding matrices that occupy a lot of memory (i.e. millions of parameters) and grow linearly with the size of the vocabulary. Previous work on on-device transformers dynamically generate token embeddings on-the-fly without embedding matrices using locality-sensitive hashing over morphological information. These embeddings are subsequently fed into transformer layers for text classification. However, these methods are not pre-trained. Inspired by this line of work, we propose HashFormers, a new family of vocabulary-independent pre-trained transformers that support an unlimited vocabulary (i.e. all possible tokens in a corpus) given a substantially smaller fixed-sized embedding matrix. We achieve this by first introducing computationally cheap hashing functions that bucket together individual tokens to embeddings. We also propose three variants that do not require an embedding matrix at all, further reducing the memory requirements. We empirically demonstrate that HashFormers are more memory efficient compared to standard pre-trained transformers while achieving comparable predictive performance when fine-tuned on multiple text classification tasks. For example, our most efficient HashFormer variant has a negligible performance degradation (0.4\% on GLUE) using only 99.1K parameters for representing the embeddings compared to 12.3-38M parameters of state-of-the-art models.

Inspired by the success of generative pretraining in natural language, we ask whether the same principles can yield strong self-supervised visual learners. Instead of training models to output features for downstream use, we train them to generate embeddings to perform predictive tasks directly. This work explores such a shift from learning representations to learning models. Specifically, models learn to predict future patch embeddings conditioned on past ones, using causal masking and stop gradient, which we refer to as Next-Embedding Predictive Autoregression (NEPA). We demonstrate that a simple Transformer pretrained on ImageNet-1k with next embedding prediction as its sole learning objective is effective - no pixel reconstruction, discrete tokens, contrastive loss, or task-specific heads. This formulation retains architectural simplicity and scalability, without requiring additional design complexity. NEPA achieves strong results across tasks, attaining 83.8% and 85.3% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K with ViT-B and ViT-L backbones after fine-tuning, and transferring effectively to semantic segmentation on ADE20K. We believe generative pretraining from embeddings provides a simple, scalable, and potentially modality-agnostic alternative to visual self-supervised learning.

In this study, we introduce FEET, a standardized protocol designed to guide the development and benchmarking of foundation models. While numerous benchmark datasets exist for evaluating these models, we propose a structured evaluation protocol across three distinct scenarios to gain a comprehensive understanding of their practical performance. We define three primary use cases: frozen embeddings, few-shot embeddings, and fully fine-tuned embeddings. Each scenario is detailed and illustrated through two case studies: one in sentiment analysis and another in the medical domain, demonstrating how these evaluations provide a thorough assessment of foundation models' effectiveness in research applications. We recommend this protocol as a standard for future research aimed at advancing representation learning models.

Large language models exhibit impressive zero-shot capabilities across a wide range of downstream tasks. However, they struggle to function as off-the-shelf embedding models, leading to suboptimal performance on massive text embedding benchmarks. In this paper, we identify a potential cause underlying this deficiency. Our motivation stems from an unexpected observation: text embeddings tend to align with frequent but uninformative tokens when projected onto the vocabulary space. We argue that this excessive expression of high-frequency tokens suppresses the model's ability to capture nuanced semantics. To address this, we introduce EmbedFilter, a simple linear transformation designed to refine text embeddings derived from LLMs directly. Specifically, we uncover that the unembedding matrix within LLMs encodes a latent space that is actively writing these frequent tokens into embedding space. By filtering out this subspace, EmbedFilter suppress the influence of high-frequency tokens, thereby enhancing semantic representations. As a compelling byproduct, this enables an inherent dimensionality reduction, lowering index storage and speedup retrieval while fully preserving the refined embedding quality. Our experiments across multiple LLM backbones demonstrate that LLMs equipped with EmbedFilter achieve superior zero-shot downstream performance even with significantly reduced embedding dimensions. We hope our findings provide deeper insights into the mechanisms of LLM-based representations and inspire more principled designs to improve text embeddings training. Our code is available at https://github.com/CentreChen/EmbFilter.

We present FIND, a generalized interface for aligning foundation models' embeddings. As shown in teaser figure, a lightweight transformer interface without tuning any foundation model weights is enough for a unified image (segmentation) and dataset-level (retrieval) understanding. The proposed interface has the following favorable attributes: (1) Generalizable. It applies to various tasks spanning retrieval, segmentation, etc., under the same architecture and weights. (2) Prototypable. Different tasks are able to be implemented through prototyping attention masks and embedding types. (3) Extendable. The proposed interface is adaptive to new tasks, and new models. (4) Interleavable. With the benefit of multi-task multi-modal training, the proposed interface creates an interleaved shared embedding space. In light of the interleaved embedding space, we introduce the FIND-Bench, which introduces new training and evaluation annotations to the COCO dataset for interleave segmentation and retrieval. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on FIND-Bench and competitive performance on standard retrieval and segmentation settings. The training, evaluation, and demo code as well as the dataset have been released at https://github.com/UX-Decoder/FIND.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) project visual tokens into the embedding space of language models, yet the internal structuring and processing of visual semantics remain poorly understood. In this work, we introduce a two-fold analytical framework featuring a novel probing tool, EmbedLens, to conduct a fine-grained analysis. We uncover a pronounced semantic sparsity at the input level: visual tokens consistently partition into sink, dead, and alive categories. Remarkably, only the alive tokens, comprising approx60% of the total input, carry image-specific meaning. Furthermore, using a targeted patch-compression benchmark, we demonstrate that these alive tokens already encode rich, fine-grained cues (e.g., objects, colors, and OCR) prior to entering the LLM. Internal visual computations (such as visual attention and feed-forward networks) are redundant for most standard tasks. For the small subset of highly vision-centric tasks that actually benefit from internal processing, we reveal that alive tokens naturally align with intermediate LLM layers rather than the initial embedding space, indicating that shallow-layer processing is unnecessary and that direct mid-layer injection is both sufficient. Ultimately, our findings provide a unified mechanistic view of visual token processing, paving the way for more efficient and interpretable MLLM architectures through selective token pruning, minimized visual computation, and mid-layer injection. The code is released at: https://github.com/EIT-NLP/EmbedLens.

To discover the weaknesses of LLMs, researchers often embed prompts into a vector space and cluster them to extract insightful patterns. However, vector embeddings primarily capture topical similarity. As a result, prompts that share a topic but differ in specificity, and consequently in difficulty, are often represented similarly, making fine-grained weakness analysis difficult. To address this limitation, we propose PROMPT2BOX, which embeds prompts into a box embedding space using a trained encoder. The encoder, trained on existing and synthesized datasets, outputs box embeddings that capture not only semantic similarity but also specificity relations between prompts (e.g., "writing an adventure story" is more specific than "writing a story"). We further develop a novel dimension reduction technique for box embeddings to facilitate dataset visualization and comparison. Our experiments demonstrate that box embeddings consistently capture prompt specificity better than vector baselines. On the downstream task of creating hierarchical clustering trees for 17 LLMs from the UltraFeedback dataset, PROMPT2BOX can identify 8.9\% more LLM weaknesses than vector baselines and achieves an approximately 33\% stronger correlation between hierarchical depth and instruction specificity.

Information retrieval involves selecting artifacts from a corpus that are most relevant to a given search query. The flavor of retrieval typically used in classical applications can be termed as homogeneous and relaxed, where queries and corpus elements are both natural language (NL) utterances (homogeneous) and the goal is to pick most relevant elements from the corpus in the Top-K, where K is large, such as 10, 25, 50 or even 100 (relaxed). Recently, retrieval is being used extensively in preparing prompts for large language models (LLMs) to enable LLMs to perform targeted tasks. These new applications of retrieval are often heterogeneous and strict -- the queries and the corpus contain different kinds of entities, such as NL and code, and there is a need for improving retrieval at Top-K for small values of K, such as K=1 or 3 or 5. Current dense retrieval techniques based on pretrained embeddings provide a general-purpose and powerful approach for retrieval, but they are oblivious to task-specific notions of similarity of heterogeneous artifacts. We introduce Adapted Dense Retrieval, a mechanism to transform embeddings to enable improved task-specific, heterogeneous and strict retrieval. Adapted Dense Retrieval works by learning a low-rank residual adaptation of the pretrained black-box embedding. We empirically validate our approach by showing improvements over the state-of-the-art general-purpose embeddings-based baseline.

Machine learning models often learn latent embedding representations that capture the domain semantics of their training data. These embedding representations are valuable for interpreting trained models, building new models, and analyzing new datasets. However, interpreting and using embeddings can be challenging due to their opaqueness, high dimensionality, and the large size of modern datasets. To tackle these challenges, we present WizMap, an interactive visualization tool to help researchers and practitioners easily explore large embeddings. With a novel multi-resolution embedding summarization method and a familiar map-like interaction design, WizMap enables users to navigate and interpret embedding spaces with ease. Leveraging modern web technologies such as WebGL and Web Workers, WizMap scales to millions of embedding points directly in users' web browsers and computational notebooks without the need for dedicated backend servers. WizMap is open-source and available at the following public demo link: https://poloclub.github.io/wizmap.

Network embedding has been intensively studied in the literature and widely used in various applications, such as link prediction and node classification. While previous work focus on the design of new algorithms or are tailored for various problem settings, the discussion of initialization strategies in the learning process is often missed. In this work, we address this important issue of initialization for network embedding that could dramatically improve the performance of the algorithms on both effectiveness and efficiency. Specifically, we first exploit the graph partition technique that divides the graph into several disjoint subsets, and then construct an abstract graph based on the partitions. We obtain the initialization of the embedding for each node in the graph by computing the network embedding on the abstract graph, which is much smaller than the input graph, and then propagating the embedding among the nodes in the input graph. With extensive experiments on various datasets, we demonstrate that our initialization technique significantly improves the performance of the state-of-the-art algorithms on the evaluations of link prediction and node classification by up to 7.76% and 8.74% respectively. Besides, we show that the technique of initialization reduces the running time of the state-of-the-arts by at least 20%.

Semantic word embeddings represent the meaning of a word via a vector, and are created by diverse methods. Many use nonlinear operations on co-occurrence statistics, and have hand-tuned hyperparameters and reweighting methods. This paper proposes a new generative model, a dynamic version of the log-linear topic model of~mnih2007three. The methodological novelty is to use the prior to compute closed form expressions for word statistics. This provides a theoretical justification for nonlinear models like PMI, word2vec, and GloVe, as well as some hyperparameter choices. It also helps explain why low-dimensional semantic embeddings contain linear algebraic structure that allows solution of word analogies, as shown by~mikolov2013efficient and many subsequent papers. Experimental support is provided for the generative model assumptions, the most important of which is that latent word vectors are fairly uniformly dispersed in space.

We investigate novel random graph embeddings that can be computed in expected polynomial time and that are able to distinguish all non-isomorphic graphs in expectation. Previous graph embeddings have limited expressiveness and either cannot distinguish all graphs or cannot be computed efficiently for every graph. To be able to approximate arbitrary functions on graphs, we are interested in efficient alternatives that become arbitrarily expressive with increasing resources. Our approach is based on Lov\'asz' characterisation of graph isomorphism through an infinite dimensional vector of homomorphism counts. Our empirical evaluation shows competitive results on several benchmark graph learning tasks.

Learning high-quality feature embeddings efficiently and effectively is critical for the performance of web-scale machine learning systems. A typical model ingests hundreds of features with vocabularies on the order of millions to billions of tokens. The standard approach is to represent each feature value as a d-dimensional embedding, introducing hundreds of billions of parameters for extremely high-cardinality features. This bottleneck has led to substantial progress in alternative embedding algorithms. Many of these methods, however, make the assumption that each feature uses an independent embedding table. This work introduces a simple yet highly effective framework, Feature Multiplexing, where one single representation space is used across many different categorical features. Our theoretical and empirical analysis reveals that multiplexed embeddings can be decomposed into components from each constituent feature, allowing models to distinguish between features. We show that multiplexed representations lead to Pareto-optimal parameter-accuracy tradeoffs for three public benchmark datasets. Further, we propose a highly practical approach called Unified Embedding with three major benefits: simplified feature configuration, strong adaptation to dynamic data distributions, and compatibility with modern hardware. Unified embedding gives significant improvements in offline and online metrics compared to highly competitive baselines across five web-scale search, ads, and recommender systems, where it serves billions of users across the world in industry-leading products.

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing by achieving state-of-the-art performance across various tasks. Recently, their effectiveness as embedding models has gained attention, marking a paradigm shift from traditional encoder-only models like ELMo and BERT to decoder-only, large-scale LLMs such as GPT, LLaMA, and Mistral. This survey provides an in-depth overview of this transition, beginning with foundational techniques before the LLM era, followed by LLM-based embedding models through two main strategies to derive embeddings from LLMs. 1) Direct prompting: We mainly discuss the prompt designs and the underlying rationale for deriving competitive embeddings. 2) Data-centric tuning: We cover extensive aspects that affect tuning an embedding model, including model architecture, training objectives, data constructions, etc. Upon the above, we also cover advanced methods, such as handling longer texts, and multilingual and cross-modal data. Furthermore, we discuss factors affecting choices of embedding models, such as performance/efficiency comparisons, dense vs sparse embeddings, pooling strategies, and scaling law. Lastly, the survey highlights the limitations and challenges in adapting LLMs for embeddings, including cross-task embedding quality, trade-offs between efficiency and accuracy, low-resource, long-context, data bias, robustness, etc. This survey serves as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners by synthesizing current advancements, highlighting key challenges, and offering a comprehensive framework for future work aimed at enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of LLMs as embedding models.

Hyperbolic embeddings offer excellent quality with few dimensions when embedding hierarchical data structures like synonym or type hierarchies. Given a tree, we give a combinatorial construction that embeds the tree in hyperbolic space with arbitrarily low distortion without using optimization. On WordNet, our combinatorial embedding obtains a mean-average-precision of 0.989 with only two dimensions, while Nickel et al.'s recent construction obtains 0.87 using 200 dimensions. We provide upper and lower bounds that allow us to characterize the precision-dimensionality tradeoff inherent in any hyperbolic embedding. To embed general metric spaces, we propose a hyperbolic generalization of multidimensional scaling (h-MDS). We show how to perform exact recovery of hyperbolic points from distances, provide a perturbation analysis, and give a recovery result that allows us to reduce dimensionality. The h-MDS approach offers consistently low distortion even with few dimensions across several datasets. Finally, we extract lessons from the algorithms and theory above to design a PyTorch-based implementation that can handle incomplete information and is scalable.

In recent years supervised representation learning has provided state of the art or close to the state of the art results in semantic analysis tasks including ranking and information retrieval. The core idea is to learn how to embed items into a latent space such that they optimize a supervised objective in that latent space. The dimensions of the latent space have no clear semantics, and this reduces the interpretability of the system. For example, in personalization models, it is hard to explain why a particular item is ranked high for a given user profile. We propose a novel model of representation learning called Supervised Explicit Semantic Analysis (SESA) that is trained in a supervised fashion to embed items to a set of dimensions with explicit semantics. The model learns to compare two objects by representing them in this explicit space, where each dimension corresponds to a concept from a knowledge base. This work extends Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA) with a supervised model for ranking problems. We apply this model to the task of Job-Profile relevance in LinkedIn in which a set of skills defines our explicit dimensions of the space. Every profile and job are encoded to this set of skills their similarity is calculated in this space. We use RNNs to embed text input into this space. In addition to interpretability, our model makes use of the web-scale collaborative skills data that is provided by users for each LinkedIn profile. Our model provides state of the art result while it remains interpretable.

Universal multimodal embedding models have achieved great success in capturing semantic relevance between queries and candidates. However, current methods either condense queries and candidates into a single vector, potentially limiting the expressiveness for fine-grained information, or produce too many vectors that are prohibitively expensive for multi-vector retrieval. In this work, we introduce MetaEmbed, a new framework for multimodal retrieval that rethinks how multimodal embeddings are constructed and interacted with at scale. During training, a fixed number of learnable Meta Tokens are appended to the input sequence. At test-time, their last-layer contextualized representations serve as compact yet expressive multi-vector embeddings. Through the proposed Matryoshka Multi-Vector Retrieval training, MetaEmbed learns to organize information by granularity across multiple vectors. As a result, we enable test-time scaling in multimodal retrieval, where users can balance retrieval quality against efficiency demands by selecting the number of tokens used for indexing and retrieval interactions. Extensive evaluations on the Massive Multimodal Embedding Benchmark (MMEB) and the Visual Document Retrieval Benchmark (ViDoRe) confirm that MetaEmbed achieves state-of-the-art retrieval performance while scaling robustly to models with 32B parameters.

We introduce llama-embed-nemotron-8b, an open-weights text embedding model that achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Multilingual Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MMTEB) leaderboard as of October 21, 2025. While recent models show strong performance, their training data or methodologies are often not fully disclosed. We aim to address this by developing a fully open-source model, publicly releasing its weights and detailed ablation studies, and planning to share the curated training datasets. Our model demonstrates superior performance across all major embedding tasks -- including retrieval, classification and semantic textual similarity (STS) -- and excels in challenging multilingual scenarios, such as low-resource languages and cross-lingual setups. This state-of-the-art performance is driven by a novel data mix of 16.1 million query-document pairs, split between 7.7 million samples from public datasets and 8.4 million synthetically generated examples from various open-weight LLMs. One of our key contributions is a detailed ablation study analyzing core design choices, including a comparison of contrastive loss implementations, an evaluation of synthetic data generation (SDG) strategies, and the impact of model merging. The llama-embed-nemotron-8b is an instruction-aware model, supporting user-defined instructions to enhance performance for specific use-cases. This combination of top-tier performance, broad applicability, and user-driven flexibility enables it to serve as a universal text embedding solution.

Relative positional embeddings (RPE) have received considerable attention since RPEs effectively model the relative distance among tokens and enable length extrapolation. We propose KERPLE, a framework that generalizes relative position embedding for extrapolation by kernelizing positional differences. We achieve this goal using conditionally positive definite (CPD) kernels, a class of functions known for generalizing distance metrics. To maintain the inner product interpretation of self-attention, we show that a CPD kernel can be transformed into a PD kernel by adding a constant offset. This offset is implicitly absorbed in the Softmax normalization during self-attention. The diversity of CPD kernels allows us to derive various RPEs that enable length extrapolation in a principled way. Experiments demonstrate that the logarithmic variant achieves excellent extrapolation performance on three large language modeling datasets. Our implementation and pretrained checkpoints are released at https://github.com/chijames/KERPLE.git.

Foundation models have established unified representations for natural language processing, yet this paradigm remains largely unexplored for tabular data. Existing methods face fundamental limitations: LLM-based approaches lack retrieval-compatible vector outputs, whereas text embedding models often fail to capture tabular structure and numerical semantics. To bridge this gap, we first introduce the Tabular Embedding Benchmark (TabBench), a comprehensive suite designed to evaluate the tabular understanding capability of embedding models. We then propose TabEmbed, the first generalist embedding model that unifies tabular classification and retrieval within a shared embedding space. By reformulating diverse tabular tasks as semantic matching problems, TabEmbed leverages large-scale contrastive learning with positive-aware hard negative mining to discern fine-grained structural and numerical nuances. Experimental results on TabBench demonstrate that TabEmbed significantly outperforms state-of-the-art text embedding models, establishing a new baseline for universal tabular representation learning. Code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/qiangminjie27/TabEmbed and https://huggingface.co/datasets/qiangminjie27/TabBench.

Visual embedding models excel at zero-shot tasks like visual retrieval and classification. However, these models cannot be used for tasks that contain ambiguity or require user instruction. These tasks necessitate a multimodal embedding model, which outputs embeddings that combine visual and natural language input. Existing CLIP-based approaches embed images and text independently, and fuse the result. We find that this results in weak interactions between modalities, and poor user control over the representation. We introduce ABC, an open-source multimodal embedding model that uses a vision-language model backbone to deeply integrate image features with natural language instructions. ABC achieves bestfor-size performance on MSCOCO image-to-text retrieval and is the top performing model on classification and VQA tasks in the Massive Multimodal Embedding Benchmark. With a strongly unified vision-language representation, ABC can use natural language to solve subtle and potentially ambiguous visual retrieval problems. To evaluate this capability, we design CtrlBench, a benchmark that requires interleaving textual instructions with image content for correct retrieval. ABC advances the state of multimodal embeddings by offering high-quality representations and flexible natural language control. Our model and datasets are available at our project page.