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Can Cross Encoders Produce Useful Sentence Embeddings?

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arxiv 2502.03552 v1 pith:4EYNAEYI submitted 2025-02-05 cs.CL cs.IR

classification cs.CLcs.IR
keywords encoderssentenceembeddingspairsusedcrossinferenceinformation
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Cross encoders (CEs) are trained with sentence pairs to detect relatedness. As CEs require sentence pairs at inference, the prevailing view is that they can only be used as re-rankers in information retrieval pipelines. Dual encoders (DEs) are instead used to embed sentences, where sentence pairs are encoded by two separate encoders with shared weights at training, and a loss function that ensures the pair's embeddings lie close in vector space if the sentences are related. DEs however, require much larger datasets to train, and are less accurate than CEs. We report a curious finding that embeddings from earlier layers of CEs can in fact be used within an information retrieval pipeline. We show how to exploit CEs to distill a lighter-weight DE, with a 5.15x speedup in inference time.

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Cited by 2 Pith papers

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

  1. Cross-Attention Calibrated Deduplication for Retrieval-Augmented Generation System

    cs.CL 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.5 of 10

    CACD deduplicates RAG chunks via cross-encoder scores, attention-entropy NIS, and majority vote, dropping ~9.75% of chunks on SQuAD faster than cosine filtering.

  2. 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.

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