Llama-Embed-Nemotron-8B: A Universal Text Embedding Model for Multilingual and Cross-Lingual Tasks

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Main Authors: Babakhin, Yauhen, Osmulski, Radek, Ak, Ronay, Moreira, Gabriel, Xu, Mengyao, Schifferer, Benedikt, Liu, Bo, Oldridge, Even
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Babakhin, Yauhen
Osmulski, Radek
Ak, Ronay
Moreira, Gabriel
Xu, Mengyao
Schifferer, Benedikt
Liu, Bo
Oldridge, Even
author_facet Babakhin, Yauhen
Osmulski, Radek
Ak, Ronay
Moreira, Gabriel
Xu, Mengyao
Schifferer, Benedikt
Liu, Bo
Oldridge, Even
contents We introduce llama-embed-nemotron-8b, an open-weights text embedding model that achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Multilingual Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MMTEB) leaderboard as of October 21, 2025. While recent models show strong performance, their training data or methodologies are often not fully disclosed. We aim to address this by developing a fully open-source model, publicly releasing its weights and detailed ablation studies, and planning to share the curated training datasets. Our model demonstrates superior performance across all major embedding tasks -- including retrieval, classification and semantic textual similarity (STS) -- and excels in challenging multilingual scenarios, such as low-resource languages and cross-lingual setups. This state-of-the-art performance is driven by a novel data mix of 16.1 million query-document pairs, split between 7.7 million samples from public datasets and 8.4 million synthetically generated examples from various open-weight LLMs. One of our key contributions is a detailed ablation study analyzing core design choices, including a comparison of contrastive loss implementations, an evaluation of synthetic data generation (SDG) strategies, and the impact of model merging. The llama-embed-nemotron-8b is an instruction-aware model, supporting user-defined instructions to enhance performance for specific use-cases. This combination of top-tier performance, broad applicability, and user-driven flexibility enables it to serve as a universal text embedding solution.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_07025
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Llama-Embed-Nemotron-8B: A Universal Text Embedding Model for Multilingual and Cross-Lingual Tasks
Babakhin, Yauhen
Osmulski, Radek
Ak, Ronay
Moreira, Gabriel
Xu, Mengyao
Schifferer, Benedikt
Liu, Bo
Oldridge, Even
Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
We introduce llama-embed-nemotron-8b, an open-weights text embedding model that achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Multilingual Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MMTEB) leaderboard as of October 21, 2025. While recent models show strong performance, their training data or methodologies are often not fully disclosed. We aim to address this by developing a fully open-source model, publicly releasing its weights and detailed ablation studies, and planning to share the curated training datasets. Our model demonstrates superior performance across all major embedding tasks -- including retrieval, classification and semantic textual similarity (STS) -- and excels in challenging multilingual scenarios, such as low-resource languages and cross-lingual setups. This state-of-the-art performance is driven by a novel data mix of 16.1 million query-document pairs, split between 7.7 million samples from public datasets and 8.4 million synthetically generated examples from various open-weight LLMs. One of our key contributions is a detailed ablation study analyzing core design choices, including a comparison of contrastive loss implementations, an evaluation of synthetic data generation (SDG) strategies, and the impact of model merging. The llama-embed-nemotron-8b is an instruction-aware model, supporting user-defined instructions to enhance performance for specific use-cases. This combination of top-tier performance, broad applicability, and user-driven flexibility enables it to serve as a universal text embedding solution.
title Llama-Embed-Nemotron-8B: A Universal Text Embedding Model for Multilingual and Cross-Lingual Tasks
topic Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07025