QZhou-Embedding-Zh

Introduction

We are pleased to announce the release of our new model, ​QZhou-Embedding-Zh​​​, which excels in a variety of Chinese-language tasks including retrieval, ranking, semantic similarity, and semantic understanding. Built upon the architecture and parameters of the ​​Qwen3-8B​​ base model, QZhou-Embedding-Zh was developed using the data construction and training methodology of ​​QZhou-Embedding, and also incorporated MRL embedding inference​​. Leveraging the powerful Chinese language capabilities of Qwen3-8B, QZhou-Embedding-Zh achieves significant improvements across multiple tasks on the CMTEB benchmark—including retrieval, STS, clustering, Pair Classification, and reranking, with notable gains in both overall and task-type average scores.

Key Enhancements and Optimizations​

To build a more powerful and outstanding model, we have adopted proven approaches from QZhou-Embedding and further introduced the following optimizations:

1. ​​Based on Qwen3 Model​​: In our practice with QZhou-Embedding, the Qwen3 base model did not show significant advantages over Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct in the first stage (Retrieval). However, notable improvements were observed in Chinese-language tasks, likely due to Qwen3’s stronger Chinese capabilities. We upgraded the base model to Qwen3-8B while retaining the original model architecture, using a ​​last_token pooling​​ strategy.

2. ​​Support for MRL​​: MRL (Multi-Representation Learning) is highly demanded in practical applications, especially under high-concurrency and low-latency scenarios. Addressing the lack of MRL support in QZhou-Embedding, QZhou-Embedding-Zh now incorporates this feature with the following dimension options: "128, 256, 512, 768, 1024, 1280, 1536, 1792". The default output dimension is set to ​​1792​​.

3. ​Token Prepending​​: Originally proposed by Fu et al(ACL 2025, Volume 1: Long Papers, 3168–3181), this technique addresses the limitations of the unidirectional attention mechanism in decoder-only models. By prepending each layer’s decoded sentence embedding to the beginning of the sentence in the next layer’s input, allowing earlier tokens to attend to the complete sentence information under the causal attention mechanism, ​Token Prepending​ significantly improving performance in STS tasks and classification tasks. We retained the Stage-1 training strategy unchanged and integrated ​​Token Prepending during Stage-2 training​​, using the PromptEOL template construction method described in their paper. Experimental results demonstrate that Token Prepending is not only a training-free enhancement but also further improves performance when fine-tuned with supervised datasets.

CMTEB Results

These are the ranking results on the CMTEB leaderboard (as of October 1st)：

​Token Prepending

Introduction

​Token Prepending is a simple yet effective technique proposed by Fu et al., the core idea is prepending each layer’s decoded sentence embedding to the beginning of the sentence in the next layer’s input, allowing earlier tokens to attend to the complete sentence information under the causal attention mechanism. TP technique is a plug-and-play technique neither introduces new parameters nor alters the existing ones, allowing it to be seamlessly integrated with various prompt-based sentence embedding methods and autoregressive LLMs. The architecture described in the original paper is as follows:

Our Adaptations and Optimizations​

According to the conclusions presented in the original paper, TP technique is completely training-free and requires no extra learnable parameters, serving as a plug-and-play technique to improve the various prompt-based methods. Since QZhou-Embedding-Zh is built upon the Qwen3 base model—retaining its unidirectional attention mechanism and employing last_token pooling—it is ideally suited for the application of the TP technique. To further explore its potential, we conducted training utilizing the TP technique, building upon the Stage 1 retrieval base model through the following procedure:

1. We modified the model forward script by applying the TP specifically from layer-1 to layer-7(index), namely prepending the last embeddings to the input before processing through these layers；
2. For the input template design, we have integrated the PromptEOL template on top of the instruction-based input, using as a placeholder—corresponding to the \ token in the original paper—to facilitate subsequent TP operations. The full template structure is designed as follows:

"This sentence: “Instruct: [instruction]\nQuery: [user_input]” means in one word: “

3. Stage 2 training was conducted using the updated model architecture and input structure.

Results

We maintained the Stage 1 training strategy unchanged, keeping all data, processing logic, and MRL configurations consistent across stages. The only modification was applied during Stage 2, where we compared the original instruction-based embedding training(used in QZhou-Embedding) against the Token Prepend-based training approach. The performance comparison on the CMTEB benchmark is shown below: The results clearly show that even when applying TP starting from Stage 2, it still leads to measurable performance improvements — demonstrating the effectiveness and broad applicability of this technique.

MRL Performance Comparison

We have evaluated the CMTEB performance across all MRL output dimensions, with detailed results as follows:

As the comparison results clearly demonstrate, using lower-dimensional outputs can impact overall performance to some extent. For instance, the 128-dimensional output shows an average score decrease of approximately 1% compared to the default configuration, and a similar gap is observed with 256 dimensions. However, once the dimensionality exceeds 512, no significant performance degradation is observed. In fact, certain subtasks even achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) results under specific dimensiona