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Donate arxiv logo > cs > arXiv:2505.15045 [ ] Help | Advanced Search [All fields ] Search arXiv logo Cornell University Logo [ ] GO quick links * Login * Help Pages * About Computer Science > Computation and Language arXiv:2505.15045 (cs) [Submitted on 21 May 2025] Title:Diffusion vs. Autoregressive Language Models: A Text Embedding Perspective Authors:Siyue Zhang, Yilun Zhao, Liyuan Geng, Arman Cohan, Anh Tuan Luu, Chen Zhao View a PDF of the paper titled Diffusion vs. Autoregressive Language Models: A Text Embedding Perspective, by Siyue Zhang and 5 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Large language model (LLM)-based embedding models, benefiting from large scale pre-training and post-training, have begun to surpass BERT and T5-based models on general-purpose text embedding tasks such as document retrieval. However, a fundamental limitation of LLM embeddings lies in the unidirectional attention used during autoregressive pre-training, which misaligns with the bidirectional nature of text embedding tasks. To this end, We propose adopting diffusion language models for text embeddings, motivated by their inherent bidirectional architecture and recent success in matching or surpassing LLMs especially on reasoning tasks. We present the first systematic study of the diffusion language embedding model, which outperforms the LLM-based embedding model by 20% on long-document retrieval, 8% on reasoning-intensive retrieval, 2% on instruction-following retrieval, and achieve competitive performance on traditional text embedding benchmarks. Our analysis verifies that bidirectional attention is crucial for encoding global context in long and complex text. Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL) Cite as: arXiv:2505.15045 [cs.CL] (or arXiv:2505.15045v1 [cs.CL] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2505.15045 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Siyue Zhang [view email] [v1] Wed, 21 May 2025 02:59:14 UTC (238 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Diffusion vs. Autoregressive Language Models: A Text Embedding Perspective, by Siyue Zhang and 5 other authors * View PDF * HTML (experimental) * TeX Source * Other Formats license icon view license Current browse context: cs.CL < prev | next > new | recent | 2025-05 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations * NASA ADS * Google Scholar * Semantic Scholar a export BibTeX citation Loading... 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