LLM-based dense retrievers generalize better when instruction-tuned but pay a specialization tax when optimized for reasoning; they resist typos and corpus poisoning better than encoder-only baselines yet remain vulnerable to semantic perturbations, with larger models and certain embedding geometry,
Anisotropy Is Inherent to Self-Attention in Transformers
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Activation steering is cast as constrained optimization that minimizes collateral damage by weighting perturbations according to the empirical second-moment matrix of activations instead of assuming isotropy.
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On the Robustness of LLM-Based Dense Retrievers: A Systematic Analysis of Generalizability and Stability
LLM-based dense retrievers generalize better when instruction-tuned but pay a specialization tax when optimized for reasoning; they resist typos and corpus poisoning better than encoder-only baselines yet remain vulnerable to semantic perturbations, with larger models and certain embedding geometry,
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Minimizing Collateral Damage in Activation Steering
Activation steering is cast as constrained optimization that minimizes collateral damage by weighting perturbations according to the empirical second-moment matrix of activations instead of assuming isotropy.
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