Abstract
Transformer sentence encoders provide strong retrieval quality, but their inference cost becomes a bottleneck when embeddings must be produced on CPUs or refreshed frequently. We introduce StaRSE, a compact Russian static sentence encoder that removes Transformer inference at deployment time: token directions are stored as sign bits, token norms are stored separately, and sentences are encoded by mean pooling over norm-scaled sign directions. StaRSE is initialized from ruBERT-base, fine-tuned on Russian adjacent-sentence and task-shaped pairs, and post-trained with a contrastive stage that directly optimizes the sign-projected token table. On RuMTEB, StaRSE reaches a task mean of $51.16$, $7.98$ points above the strongest included static baseline. The packaged model occupies $11.3$ MiB and has a mean CPU latency of $0.08$ ms per sentence, compared with an estimated $55.7$ MiB 16-bit parameter footprint and $1.43$ ms mean CPU latency for the closest-quality contextual encoder. Ablations examine adjacent-sentence supervision, token norms, and direct sign-projected post-training.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14236
