In the large language model (LLM) revolution, embedding is a key component of various systems. For example, it is used to retrieve knowledge or memories for LLMs, to build content moderation filters, etc. As such cases span from English to other natural or programming languages, from retrieval to classification and beyond, it is desirable to build a unified embedding model rather than dedicated ones for each scenario. In this work, we make an initial step towards this goal, demonstrating that multiple languages (both natural and programming) pre-trained transformer decoders can embed universally when finetuned on limited English data. We provide a comprehensive practice with thorough evaluations. On English MTEB, our models achieve competitive performance on different embedding tasks by minimal training data. On other benchmarks, such as multilingual classification and code search, our models (without any supervision) perform comparably to, or even surpass heavily supervised baselines and/or APIs. These results provide evidence of a promising path towards building powerful unified embedders that can be applied across tasks and languages.

大语言模型（LLM）革命中，嵌入是各种系统的关键组成部分。在本文中，我们迈出了迈向构建强大统一的嵌入模型的第一步，证明了多种语言（自然语言和编程语言）的预训练变换器解码器在有限英文数据微调后能够实现普遍嵌入。我们对各任务进行了全面实践和彻底评估，结果表明这是一条有希望的道路，可以应用于不同任务和语言。

语言模型是通用嵌入器