When Does Mixing Help? Analyzing Query Embedding Interpolation in Multilingual Dense Retrieval

arXiv:2606.13537v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While mixed-language querying is ubiquitous in multilingual communities, the sensitivity of dense retrievers to such queries remains poorly understood. We present a ratio-controlled study on mMARCO that systematically evaluates retrieval performance by varying the mixing proportion of parallel query translations via embedding-level mixing -- constructing mixed queries as an interpolation of monolingual embeddings. Experiments with BGE-M3 demonstrate that an optimal mixing ratio outperforms the best monolingual endpoint in 88/105 cases. We uncover

Source: arXiv cs.CL — read the full report at the original publisher.

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