Company
Date Published
Author
Cristian Catalin Tatu
Word count
4093
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

LLM embeddings are advanced numerical vector representations of text used by Large Language Models (LLMs) to process information, offering significant improvements over traditional word embeddings by being context-aware and dynamically adaptable. They rely on positional encoding techniques, such as Rotary Positional Encoding (RoPE), to understand word order and process long text sequences effectively. These embeddings have broad applications beyond LLMs, including semantic search, text similarity, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which combines LLMs with external knowledge bases for more accurate responses. The embedding layer in LLMs converts input tokens into high-dimensional vectors that are processed through transformer blocks, with sizes varying across models and impacting their capacity and computational requirements. Innovations like RoPE enhance LLMs' capabilities to handle longer texts with improved perplexity, compared to Absolute Positional Encoding, by maintaining consistent word relationships based on relative distances. The evolution of embeddings in Natural Language Processing (NLP) has transitioned from basic one-hot encoding to sophisticated contextual embeddings like BERT and GPT, which generate dynamic, context-aware embeddings for efficient processing. Various benchmarks and optimization strategies help select suitable LLM embedding models based on factors like model size, embedding dimensions, and context length, enabling their deployment in applications such as text similarity, semantic search, and RAG.