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Retrieval & EmbeddingsHard· Cross-lingual Retrieval· Language Bias· Contrastive Loss

You shipped the multilingual encoder. Recall@100 barely...

The retrieval score is being dominated by a language-specific constant (the norm of the per-language mean) rather than semantic similarity. Because the model is trained with uniform in-batch negatives, matching the language of the query is an easy, ‘free’ way to minimize contrastive loss. Fine-tuning often exacerbates this by further rewarding the model for this shortcut. The fix requires language-matched negatives to remove the language signal as a discriminator.

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