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Beyond Benchmarks: Evaluating Embedding Model Similarity for Retrieval Augmented Generation Systems

11 Jul 2024arXiv:2407.08275archive 2025-07-28

Laura Caspari, Kanishka Ghosh Dastidar, Saber Zerhoudi, Jelena Mitrovic, Michael Granitzer

The choice of embedding model is a crucial step in the design of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Given the sheer volume of available options, identifying clusters of similar models streamlines this model selection process. Relying solely on benchmark performance scores only allows for a weak assessment of model similarity. Thus, in this study, we evaluate the similarity of embedding models within the context of RAG systems. Our assessment is two-fold: We use Centered Kernel Alignment to compare embeddings on a pair-wise level. Additionally, as it is especially pertinent to RAG systems, we evaluate the similarity of retrieval results between these models using Jaccard and rank similarity. We compare different families of embedding models, including proprietary ones, across five datasets from the popular Benchmark Information Retrieval (BEIR). Through our experiments we identify clusters of models corresponding to model families, but interestingly, also some inter-family clusters. Furthermore, our analysis of top-k retrieval similarity reveals high-variance at low k values. We also identify possible open-source alternatives to proprietary models, with Mistral exhibiting the highest similarity to OpenAI models.

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Tasks

Information Retrieval Model Selection RAG Retrieval Retrieval-augmented Generation

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Adam Attention Attention Dropout BART BERT BPE Dense Connections Dropout Layer Normalization Linear Layer Linear Warmup With Linear Decay Multi-Head Attention RAG Residual Connection Softmax Weight Decay WordPiece

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