Papers › Sentence-T5: Scalable Sentence Encoders from Pre-trained Text-to-Text Models

Sentence-T5: Scalable Sentence Encoders from Pre-trained Text-to-Text Models

19 Aug 2021Findings (ACL) 2022 5arXiv:2108.08877archive 2025-07-28

Jianmo Ni, Gustavo Hernández Ábrego, Noah Constant, Ji Ma, Keith B. Hall, Daniel Cer, Yinfei Yang

We provide the first exploration of sentence embeddings from text-to-text transformers (T5). Sentence embeddings are broadly useful for language processing tasks. While T5 achieves impressive performance on language tasks cast as sequence-to-sequence mapping problems, it is unclear how to produce sentence embeddings from encoder-decoder models. We investigate three methods for extracting T5 sentence embeddings: two utilize only the T5 encoder and one uses the full T5 encoder-decoder model. To support our investigation, we establish a new sentence representation transfer benchmark, SentGLUE, which extends the SentEval toolkit to nine tasks from the GLUE benchmark. Our encoder-only models outperforms Sentence-BERT and SimCSE sentence embeddings on both SentEval and SentGLUE transfer tasks, including semantic textual similarity (STS). Scaling up T5 from millions to billions of parameters is found to produce consistent further improvements. Finally, our encoder-decoder method achieves a new state-of-the-art on STS when using sentence embeddings. Our models are released at https://tfhub.dev/google/collections/sentence-t5/1.

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google-research/t5x_retrieval mentioned on GitHubjaxApache-2.0 report

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Contrastive LearningDecoderSTSSemantic Textual SimilaritySentenceSentence Embeddings

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AdafactorAdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutGated Linear UnitInverse Square Root ScheduleLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSentencePieceSimCSESoftmaxT5Weight DecayWordPiece

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