Text embeddings represent human language to computers, enabling tasks like semantic search. Here, we introduce sparse and dense vectors in a non-technical way.
Precise Zero-Shot Dense Retrieval without Relevance Labels
While dense retrieval has been shown effective and efficient across tasks and languages, it remains difficult to create effective fully zero-shot dense retrieval systems when no relevance label is available. In this paper, we recognize the difficulty of zero-shot learning and encoding relevance. Instead, we propose to pivot through Hypothetical Document Embeddings~(HyDE). Given a query, HyDE first zero-shot instructs an instruction-following language model (e.g. InstructGPT) to generate a hypothetical document. The document captures relevance patterns but is unreal and may contain false details. Then, an unsupervised contrastively learned encoder~(e.g. Contriever) encodes the document into an embedding vector. This vector identifies a neighborhood in the corpus embedding space, where similar real documents are retrieved based on vector similarity. This second step ground the generated document to the actual corpus, with the encoder's dense bottleneck filtering out the incorrect details. Our experiments show that HyDE significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised dense retriever Contriever and shows strong performance comparable to fine-tuned retrievers, across various tasks (e.g. web search, QA, fact verification) and languages~(e.g. sw, ko, ja).
Google for Developers Blog - News about Web, Mobile, AI and Cloud
EmbeddingGemma 2 is a compact, open-source multimodal embedding model that maps text, code, images, video, and audio into a unified 768-dimensional space. Developers can use the sentence-transformers library to selectively load modular modality encoders—ranging from 270M to 740M parameters—to optimize memory usage. Additionally, Matryoshka Representation Learning enables dynamic dimension truncation down to 128d, significantly reducing vector database storage requirements while maintaining high retrieval performance.
Word embedding
In natural language processing, a word embedding is a representation of a word. The embedding is used in text analysis. Typically, the representation is a real-valued vector that encodes the meaning of the word in such a way that the words that are closer in the vector space are expected to be similar in meaning. Word embeddings can be obtained using language modeling and feature learning techniques, where words or phrases from the vocabulary are mapped to vectors of real numbers.
EmbeddingGemma: Powerful and Lightweight Text Representations
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.
Memorilla: Latent Semantic Memory for LLMs
Memory enables large language models (LLMs) to use information beyond their parameters, such as past user conversations, long documents, or an agent's earlier actions. For a frozen LLM, access to this accumulated knowledge is limited to what a memory system places in its context window. However, gathering and combining relevant information needed for each query while keeping the model's context short remains challenging for existing systems. Here we introduce Memorilla, a memory system that gathers information from an entire document collection into a fixed number of query-dependent 'memory tokens' for a frozen LLM. Memorilla encodes documents (such as user chats, book chapters) once into reusable embeddings, then learns to retrieve and place query-specific information in the LLM's input embedding space. Using only 16 memory tokens, Memorilla achieves the best performance against baselines including Mem0 and MemoRAG on five of eight benchmarks spanning personalization, long-document and knowledge-intensive question answering. Notably, on FactKG, it reaches 84.33% accuracy versus 80.43% with full-context inference, while using 108x fewer tokens to represent the source documents. Furthermore, Memorilla can facilitate continual learning in agentic systems where the document count (the agent's past turns) increases throughout the trajectory. In a TextWorld environment, we show that Memorilla reduces the agent's tendency to wander between rooms it has already explored, and improves its average success rate from 18.6% with full-history in-context learning to 24.2%. Overall, Memorilla aids frozen LLMs in accumulating and using knowledge effectively across long-context interactions and takes a step towards building continually learning AI systems.
Linkup - SPARSEUP: Linkup's Open-Source Sparse Embedding Model
Linkup Research releases SPARSEUP, an open-source sparse embedding model under 150M parameters. SOTA on BEIR-13, sub-millisecond retrieval, Apache 2.0 license.
Sparse Autoencoders for Hypothesis Generation
We describe HypotheSAEs, a general method to hypothesize interpretable relationships between text data (e.g., headlines) and a target variable (e.g., clicks). HypotheSAEs has three steps: (1) train a sparse autoencoder on text embeddings to produce interpretable features describing the data distribution, (2) select features that predict the target variable, and (3) generate a natural language interpretation of each feature (e.g., "mentions being surprised or shocked") using an LLM. Each interpretation serves as a hypothesis about what predicts the target variable. Compared to baselines, our method better identifies reference hypotheses on synthetic datasets (at least +0.06 in F1) and produces more predictive hypotheses on real datasets (~twice as many significant findings), despite requiring 1-2 orders of magnitude less compute than recent LLM-based methods. HypotheSAEs also produces novel discoveries on two well-studied tasks: explaining partisan differences in Congressional speeches and identifying drivers of engagement with online headlines.
Lexicon Embed
How do we embed, display, and render different Lexicons across the ATmosphere?
Documenting Large Webtext Corpora: A Case Study on the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus
Large language models have led to remarkable progress on many NLP tasks, and researchers are turning to ever-larger text corpora to train them. Some of the largest corpora available are made by scraping significant portions of the internet, and are frequently introduced with only minimal documentation. In this work we provide some of the first documentation for the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus (C4; Raffel et al., 2020), a dataset created by applying a set of filters to a single snapshot of Common Crawl. We begin by investigating where the data came from, and find a significant amount of text from unexpected sources like patents and US military websites. Then we explore the content of the text itself, and find machine-generated text (e.g., from machine translation systems) and evaluation examples from other benchmark NLP datasets. To understand the impact of the filters applied to create this dataset, we evaluate the text that was removed, and show that blocklist filtering disproportionately removes text from and about minority individuals. Finally, we conclude with some recommendations for how to created and document web-scale datasets from a scrape of the internet.
Archive - Deep (Learning) Focus
Full archive of all the posts from Deep (Learning) Focus.
Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer
Transfer learning, where a model is first pre-trained on a data-rich task before being fine-tuned on a downstream task, has emerged as a powerful technique in natural language processing (NLP). The effectiveness of transfer learning has given rise to a diversity of approaches, methodology, and practice. In this paper, we explore the landscape of transfer learning techniques for NLP by introducing a unified framework that converts all text-based language problems into a text-to-text format. Our systematic study compares pre-training objectives, architectures, unlabeled data sets, transfer approaches, and other factors on dozens of language understanding tasks. By combining the insights from our exploration with scale and our new “Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus”, we achieve state-of-the-art results on many benchmarks covering summarization, question answering, text classification, and more. To facilitate future work on transfer learning for NLP, we release our data set, pre-trained models, and code.
Google for Developers Blog - News about Web, Mobile, AI and Cloud
Discover EmbeddingGemma, Google's new on-device embedding model designed for efficient on-device AI, enabling features like RAG and semantic search.
Jekyll • Simple, blog-aware, static sites
Transform your plain text into static websites and blogs
Top2Vec: Distributed Representations of Topics
Topic modeling is used for discovering latent semantic structure, usually referred to as topics, in a large collection of documents. The most widely used methods are Latent Dirichlet Allocation and Probabilistic Latent…
