Lend Me Your Eyes: Instruction-Aware Text Embeddings via Attention Relay
Text embedding models trained with contrastive learning learn to follow task instructions from instruction-paired data, while instruction-tuned LLMs already know how to follow them. We show that this instruction-following ability can carry over from an LLM to a Transformer-based embedder without any training. We propose Attention Relay, which passes the attention weights an LLM produces to the embedder's own attention. Across six instruction-tuned LLMs from the Qwen3, Llama 3.1 and OLMo 3 families and ten widely used embedding models that differ in tokenizer, size and pooling type, Attention Relay makes nearly every combination instruction-aware. Experiments that break the method down int...
| Authors | Yiyuan Luo, Vaggos Chatziafratis |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 4 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 4 October 2026 |
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