English

LEALLA: Learning Lightweight Language-agnostic Sentence Embeddings with Knowledge Distillation

Computation and Language 2023-12-27 v2

Abstract

Large-scale language-agnostic sentence embedding models such as LaBSE (Feng et al., 2022) obtain state-of-the-art performance for parallel sentence alignment. However, these large-scale models can suffer from inference speed and computation overhead. This study systematically explores learning language-agnostic sentence embeddings with lightweight models. We demonstrate that a thin-deep encoder can construct robust low-dimensional sentence embeddings for 109 languages. With our proposed distillation methods, we achieve further improvements by incorporating knowledge from a teacher model. Empirical results on Tatoeba, United Nations, and BUCC show the effectiveness of our lightweight models. We release our lightweight language-agnostic sentence embedding models LEALLA on TensorFlow Hub.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2302.08387,
  title  = {LEALLA: Learning Lightweight Language-agnostic Sentence Embeddings with Knowledge Distillation},
  author = {Zhuoyuan Mao and Tetsuji Nakagawa},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.08387},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

EACL 2023 main conference; LEALLA models: https://www.kaggle.com/models/google/lealla (modified url in v2 of this paper)

R2 v1 2026-06-28T08:41:59.151Z