EMNLP Findings2024
Scaling Sentence Embeddings with Large Language Models
Ting Jiang, Shaohan Huang, Zhongzhi Luan, Deqing Wang, Fuzhen Zhuang
Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently gained significant interest due to their impressive results in various natural language tasks. However, their application to sentence embeddings is still under active research. In this work, we introduce PromptEOL, a simple and efficient method designed to enhance LLM performance on sentence embeddings with a one-word limitation. We further integrate PromptEOL with in-context learning and alignment to leverage LLMs in two settings: without fine-tuning and with fine-tuning. Our extensive experiments show that PromptEOL enables LLMs to generate superior sentence embeddings without fine-tuning, outperforming contrastive learning methods. Additionally, with fine-tuning, a 2.7B parameter model using PromptEOL surpasses the performance of a 4.8B parameter model from previous methods. We also analyze how scaling model parameters, from 125 million to 66 billion, impacts sentence embedding performance. Our code and model is available at https:// github.com/kongds/scaling_sentemb.
Ask Lune
Ask anything. The answer quotes the paper.
Lune reads all of it and the papers around it, then shows you the passages behind every answer.
Lune answers from
the full paper · 47 top-tier papers that cite it · related work
Free to start. No credit card required.
Cited by top-tier papers47
- Division-of-Thoughts: Harnessing Hybrid Language Model Synergy for Efficient On-Device AgentsChenyang Shao, Xinyuan Hu, Yutang Lin, Fengli XuWWW 2025 · 31 citations
- Meaning Representations from Trajectories in Autoregressive ModelsTian Yu Liu, Matthew Trager, Alessandro Achille, Pramuditha Perera et al.ICLR 2024 · 22 citations
- AoE: Angle-optimized Embeddings for Semantic Textual SimilarityXianming Li, Jing LiACL 2024 · 22 citations
- CaReBench: A Fine-grained Benchmark for Video Captioning and RetrievalYifan Xu, Xinhao Li, Yichun Yang, Desen Meng et al.ICLR 2026 · 10 citations
- A Text is Worth Several Tokens: Text Embedding from LLMs Secretly Aligns Well with The Key TokensZhijie Nie, Richong Zhang, Zhanyu WuACL 2025 · 5 citations
Builds on11
- LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language ModelsEdward J. Hu, Yelong Shen, Phillip Wallis, Zeyuan Allen-Zhu et al.ICLR 2022 · 18,833 citations
- Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward ModelRafael Rafailov, Archit Sharma, Eric Mitchell, Christopher D. Manning et al.NeurIPS 2023 · 10,924 citations
- Measuring Massive Multitask Language UnderstandingDan Hendrycks, Collin Burns, Steven Basart, Andy Zou et al.ICLR 2021 · 7,905 citations
- QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMsTim Dettmers, Artidoro Pagnoni, Ari Holtzman, Luke ZettlemoyerNeurIPS 2023 · 5,863 citations
- TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human FalsehoodsStephanie Lin, Jacob Hilton, Owain EvansACL 2022 · 3,228 citations
Related papers
- Meta-Task Prompting Elicits Embeddings from Large Language ModelsYibin Lei, Di Wu, Tianyi Zhou, Tao Shen et al.ACL 2024 · 6 citations
- Contrastive Prompting Enhances Sentence Embeddings in LLMs through Inference-Time SteeringZifeng Cheng, Zhonghui Wang, Yuchen Fu, Zhiwei Jiang et al.ACL 2025
- Improved Universal Sentence Embeddings with Prompt-based Contrastive Learning and Energy-based LearningYuxin Jiang, Linhan Zhang, Wei WangEMNLP Findings 2022 · 32 citations
- SemPA: Improving Sentence Embeddings of Large Language Models through Semantic Preference AlignmentZiyang Chen, Zhenxuan Huang, Yile Wang, Weiqin Wang et al.ACL Findings 2026
- Token Prepending: A Training-Free Approach for Eliciting Better Sentence Embeddings from LLMsYuchen Fu, Zifeng Cheng, Zhiwei Jiang, Zhonghui Wang et al.ACL 2025
