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Your Mixture-of-Experts LLM Is Secretly an Embedding Model For Free

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arxiv 2410.10814 v2 pith:KCW2L5XH submitted 2024-10-14 cs.CL cs.LG

classification cs.CLcs.LG
keywords embeddingllmsfinetuningtasksanalysisfurthermixture-of-expertsmodel
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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While large language models (LLMs) excel on generation tasks, their decoder-only architecture often limits their potential as embedding models if no further representation finetuning is applied. Does this contradict their claim of generalists? To answer the question, we take a closer look at Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) LLMs. Our study shows that the expert routers in MoE LLMs can serve as an off-the-shelf embedding model with promising performance on a diverse class of embedding-focused tasks, without requiring any finetuning. Moreover, our extensive analysis shows that the MoE routing weights (RW) is complementary to the hidden state (HS) of LLMs, a widely-used embedding. Compared to HS, we find that RW is more robust to the choice of prompts and focuses on high-level semantics. Motivated by the analysis, we propose MoEE combining RW and HS, which achieves better performance than using either separately. Our exploration of their combination and prompting strategy shed several novel insights, e.g., a weighted sum of RW and HS similarities outperforms the similarity on their concatenation. Our experiments are conducted on 6 embedding tasks with 20 datasets from the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB). The results demonstrate the significant improvement brought by MoEE to LLM-based embedding without further finetuning.

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Forward citations

Cited by 7 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. FreeRet: MLLMs as Training-Free Retrievers

    cs.CV 2025-09 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    FreeRet enables pretrained MLLMs to act as training-free retrievers via semantically grounded embeddings and reasoning-based reranking, outperforming models trained on millions of pairs on MMEB benchmarks.

  2. Breaking the MoE LLM Trilemma: Dynamic Expert Clustering with Structured Compression

    cs.CL 2025-09 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Dynamic expert clustering plus shared-base, low-rank residual compression and two-stage routing cuts MoE parameter count by about 80% with a modest quality cost on GLUE and WikiText-103.

  3. MoGU V2: Toward a Higher Pareto Frontier Between Model Usability and Security

    cs.CL 2025-09 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    MoGUv2 embeds small routers in the deeper layers of LLMs to dynamically blend a helpful variant and a refusal variant, improving safety against jailbreak and fine-tuning attacks while preserving usability.

  4. Position: Text Embeddings Should Capture Implicit Semantics, Not Just Surface Meaning

    cs.CL 2025-06 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    State-of-the-art text embeddings lag far behind on tasks requiring pragmatic inference, stance detection, and social meaning, relative to their strong performance on surface semantic benchmarks.

  5. Advancing Decoding Strategies: Enhancements in Locally Typical Sampling for LLMs

    cs.CL 2025-06 reject novelty 5.0 of 10

    ASTS extends locally typical sampling with semantic scoring and dynamic thresholds, reporting improved perplexity, MAUVE, and diversity on story and summarization tasks.

  6. GigaChat Family: Efficient Russian Language Modeling Through Mixture of Experts Architecture

    cs.CL 2025-06 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    A from-scratch Russian MoE LLM family is released with competitive benchmark scores, but key efficiency and novelty claims are not fully evidenced.

  7. ORI: O Routing Intelligence

    cs.CL 2025-02 reject novelty 3.0 of 10

    ORI routes queries by embedding cluster to the best model for the cluster's dominant benchmark, reporting modest gains that are not supported by its own routing rule or evaluation protocol.

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