One Embedder, Any Task: Instruction-Finetuned Text Embeddings

Authors: Hongjin Su, Weijia Shi, Jungo Kasai, Yizhong Wang, Yushi Hu, Mari Ostendorf, Wen-tau Yih, Noah A. Smith, Luke Zettlemoyer, Tao Yu

Accepted in ACL2023 Findings
License: CC BY 4.0

Results of the summarizing process for the arXiv paper: 2212.09741v3

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The paper introduces a new method called INSTRUCTOR for computing text embeddings based on task instructions. Unlike previous encoders that are specialized for specific tasks, INSTRUCTOR is a single embedder that can generate tailored text embeddings for different downstream tasks and domains without the need for further training. The authors first annotate instructions for 330 diverse tasks and train INSTRUCTOR using a multitask mixture with a contrastive loss. They evaluate the performance of INSTRUCTOR on 70 embedding evaluation tasks, most of which were unseen during training, including classification, information retrieval, semantic textual similarity, and text generation evaluation. Despite having significantly fewer parameters than the previous best model, INSTRUCTOR achieves state-of-the-art performance with an average improvement of 3.4% on the diverse datasets. The authors also demonstrate that INSTRUCTOR is robust to changes in instructions and that instruction finetuning helps mitigate the challenge of training a single model on diverse datasets. The paper concludes by highlighting the availability of their model code and data for researchers and practitioners to benefit from their embeddings or datasets for their specific tasks of interest.
AI-generated keywords: INSTRUCTOR Text Embeddings Multitask Mixture Contrastive Loss Evaluation Tasks

AI-generated Key Points

  • Introduces a new method called INSTRUCTOR for computing text embeddings based on task instructions
  • INSTRUCTOR is a single embedder that can generate tailored text embeddings for different downstream tasks and domains without further training
  • Annotated instructions for 330 diverse tasks and trained INSTRUCTOR using multitask mixture with a contrastive loss
  • Evaluated the performance of INSTRUCTOR on 70 embedding evaluation tasks, including classification, information retrieval, semantic textual similarity, and text generation evaluation
  • Achieved state-of-the-art performance with an average improvement of 3.4% on diverse datasets compared to previous best model
  • Demonstrated robustness to changes in instructions and highlighted the benefits of instruction finetuning
  • Model code and data are available for researchers and practitioners to use for their specific tasks
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Abstract: We introduce INSTRUCTOR, a new method for computing text embeddings given task instructions: every text input is embedded together with instructions explaining the use case (e.g., task and domain descriptions). Unlike encoders from prior work that are more specialized, INSTRUCTOR is a single embedder that can generate text embeddings tailored to different downstream tasks and domains, without any further training. We first annotate instructions for 330 diverse tasks and train INSTRUCTOR on this multitask mixture with a contrastive loss. We evaluate INSTRUCTOR on 70 embedding evaluation tasks (66 of which are unseen during training), ranging from classification and information retrieval to semantic textual similarity and text generation evaluation. INSTRUCTOR, while having an order of magnitude fewer parameters than the previous best model, achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an average improvement of 3.4% compared to the previous best results on the 70 diverse datasets. Our analysis suggests that INSTRUCTOR is robust to changes in instructions, and that instruction finetuning mitigates the challenge of training a single model on diverse datasets. Our model, code, and data are available at https://instructor-embedding.github.io.

Submitted to arXiv on 19 Dec. 2022

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