LEAF: Knowledge Distillation of Text Embedding Models with Teacher-Aligned Representations (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a new framework for text embedding models is available for free . asymmetrical architectures allow for flexible asymmetry, while asynchronous architectures require small batches . |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge distillation framework for text embedding models that is compatible with their teacher . they publish leaf-ir, a 23M parameters information retrieval oriented model that ranks no.1 on BEIR . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is compatible with teacher, enabling flexible asymmetric architectures . it sets a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) on BEIR, and achieves no.1 on the leaderboard . |
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