Situated Embedding Models for Context-Aware Dense Retrieval
Junjie Wu HKUST, Jiangnan Li WeChat, Tencent Inc., Yuqing Li, Lemao Liu, Liyan Xu WeChat AI, Tencent, Jiwei Li Stanford University, Dit-Yan Yeung Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Jie Zhou 等 9 位作者
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over long documents typically involves splitting the text into smaller chunks, which serve as the basic units for retrieval. However, due to dependencies across the original document, contextual information is often essential for accurately interpreting each chunk. To address this, prior work has explored encoding longer context windows to produce embeddings for longer chunks, yet their gains in retrieval and downstream tasks remain limited. This is because (1) longer chunks strain the capacity of embedding models due to the increased amount of information they must encode, and (2) many real-world applications still require returning localized evidence due to constraints on model or human bandwidth. To this end, we propose an alternative approach to this challenge by representing short chunks in a way that is conditioned on a broader context window to enhance retrieval performance – i.e., situating a chunk’s meaning within its context. We further show that existing embedding models are not well-equipped to encode such situated context effectively, and thus introduce a new training paradigm and develop the first situated embedding model. To evaluate our method, we curate a book-plot retrieval dataset specifically designed to assess situated retrieval capabilities. On this benchmark, our 1B-parameter model substantially outperforms state-of-the-art embedding models, including several with up to 7B parameters.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表