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arxiv 2409.04701 v3 pith:K44LOKHU submitted 2024-09-07 cs.CL cs.IR

Late Chunking: Contextual Chunk Embeddings Using Long-Context Embedding Models

classification cs.CL cs.IR
keywords chunkingembeddingembeddingslatemodelstextchunkcontextual
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Many use cases require retrieving smaller portions of text, and dense vector-based retrieval systems often perform better with shorter text segments, as the semantics are less likely to be over-compressed in the embeddings. Consequently, practitioners often split text documents into smaller chunks and encode them separately. However, chunk embeddings created in this way can lose contextual information from surrounding chunks, resulting in sub-optimal representations. In this paper, we introduce a novel method called late chunking, which leverages long context embedding models to first embed all tokens of the long text, with chunking applied after the transformer model and just before mean pooling - hence the term late in its naming. The resulting chunk embeddings capture the full contextual information, leading to superior results across various retrieval tasks. The method is generic enough to be applied to a wide range of long-context embedding models and works without additional training. To further increase the effectiveness of late chunking, we propose a dedicated fine-tuning approach for embedding models.

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Forward citations

Cited by 13 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Lost in a Single Vector: Improving Long-Document Retrieval with Chunk Evidence Aggregation

    cs.CL 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    DICE aggregates independently encoded document chunks into a single vector to reduce evidence dilution in long-document dense retrieval, reporting gains on LongEmbed especially beyond 4k tokens.

  2. IdioLink: Retrieving Meaning Beyond Words Across Idiomatic and Literal Expressions

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    IdioLink introduces a benchmark dataset and evaluation showing that strong embedding models struggle to retrieve equivalent meanings across idiomatic and literal forms, relying on shallow cues instead.

  3. Visual Late Chunking: An Empirical Study of Contextual Chunking for Efficient Visual Document Retrieval

    cs.CV 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    ColChunk adaptively chunks visual document patches into contextual multi-vectors via clustering, cutting storage by over 90% while raising average nDCG@5 by 9 points.

  4. SPIRE: Structure-Preserving Interpretable Retrieval of Evidence

    cs.IR 2026-02 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    SPIRE presents a tree-structured retrieval method using subdocuments, paths, and dual contextualization that produces higher-quality and more diverse citations than passage-based baselines on HTML QA benchmarks.

  5. CMDR: Contextual Multimodal Document Retrieval

    cs.IR 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    A contextual multimodal document retrieval benchmark (CMDR-Bench) and embedding model (CMDR-Embed) that jointly encodes multiple document pages and splits them into page-level representations, trained with a context-a...

  6. Should We Still Pretrain Encoders with Masked Language Modeling?

    cs.CL 2025-07 accept novelty 6.0

    Controlled ablations of 38 models find MLM superior to CLM on representation benchmarks while CLM offers better data efficiency and stability; a biphasic CLM-then-MLM schedule is optimal under fixed compute and improv...

  7. Improving Long-Context Retrieval with Multi-Prefix Embedding

    cs.IR 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Multi-Prefix Embedding extracts per-chunk embeddings from a single forward pass over EOS-separated document chunks and matches via MaxSim while training only on document-level labels.

  8. EASE-TTT: Evidence-Aligned Selective Test-Time Training for Long-Context Question Answering

    cs.CL 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    EASE-TTT creates a soft attention target from evidence chunks to guide query-side test-time adaptation, yielding higher macro-average scores than full-context, retrieval-only, and standard qTTT baselines on six LongBe...

  9. Chunking Methods on Retrieval-Augmented Generation - Effectiveness Evaluation Against Computational Cost and Limitations

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Empirical study claiming to be the first broad comparison of chunking methods in RAG, highlighting effectiveness, cost, and generalization limitations across scenarios.

  10. Efficient RAG with Intent-Aware Retrieval and Semantics-Preserving Chunking

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    InSemRAG combines dynamic intent-aware hybrid retrieval and semantics-preserving chunk repair in an iterative loop, yielding 2.65 F1 gain on HotPotQA and 1.5 accuracy gain on FEVER with 4.32x lower latency than Multi-...

  11. Reducing Redundancy in Retrieval-Augmented Generation through Chunk Filtering

    cs.CL 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    Entity-based chunk filtering reduces RAG vector index size by 25-36% with retrieval quality near baseline levels.

  12. Evaluating Chunking Strategies for Retrieval-Augmented Generation on Academic Texts

    cs.IR 2026-07 unverdicted novelty 3.0

    Cluster-based semantic chunking does not outperform fixed-size or recursive chunking for RAG on academic theses, and RAGAs faithfulness shows limited reliability in this setup.

  13. Qwen Goes Brrr: Off-the-Shelf RAG for Ukrainian Multi-Domain Document Understanding

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 3.0

    A RAG pipeline with contextual PDF chunking, question-and-answer-aware retrieval and reranking using Qwen3 models reaches 0.96 accuracy on a Ukrainian multi-domain document QA shared task.