English

Task-Conditional Flow Matching for Balanced Multilingual Text Embedding Adaptation

Computation and Language 2026-08-06 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Multilingual text embedding models are commonly adapted using a single training objective across diverse tasks, despite different tasks requiring fundamentally different optimization strategies. We introduce Task-Conditional Flow Matching (TCFM), a multilingual embedding adaptation framework that selectively applies Flow Matching to translation tasks while optimizing retrieval, classification, and pair-classification tasks with objectives better aligned to their learning dynamics. TCFM further combines teacher-guided representation preservation with a three-stage curriculum to enable stable adaptation. Evaluated on the Indic Massive Text Embedding Benchmark, TCFM establishes a new state-of-the-art, consistently improving embedding quality across a diverse set of multilingual tasks and generalizing across embedding model families. We will publicly release the codebase and datasets upon acceptance of the paper.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2608.05785,
  title  = {Task-Conditional Flow Matching for Balanced Multilingual Text Embedding Adaptation},
  author = {Tirth Bhatt and Naren Kumar S and Mayank Singh},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.05785},
  year   = {2026}
}