Linq-Embed-Mistral Technical Report

This report explores the enhancement of text retrieval performance using advanced data refinement techniques. We develop Linq-Embed-Mistral\footnote{\url{https://huggingface.co/Linq-AI-Research/Linq-Embed-Mistral}} by building on the E5-mistral and Mistral-7B-v0.1 models, focusing on sophisticated data crafting, data filtering, and negative mining methods, which are highly tailored to each task, applied to both existing benchmark dataset and highly tailored synthetic dataset generated via large language models (LLMs). Linq-Embed-Mistral excels in the MTEB benchmarks (as of May 29, 2024), achieving an average score of 68.2 across 56 datasets, and ranks 1st among all models for retrieval tasks on the MTEB leaderboard with a performance score of 60.2. This performance underscores its superior capability in enhancing search precision and reliability. Our contributions include advanced data refinement methods that significantly improve model performance on benchmark and synthetic datasets, techniques for homogeneous task ordering and mixed task fine-tuning to enhance model generalization and stability, and a streamlined evaluation process using 4-bit precision and a light retrieval evaluation set, which accelerates validation without sacrificing accuracy.