Learning to Look at the Other Side: A Semantic Probing Study of Word Embeddings in LLMs with Enabled Bidirectional Attention
Zhaoxin Feng, Jianfei Ma, Emmanuele Chersoni, Xiaojing Zhao, Xiaoyi Bao
Published: 2025/10/2
Abstract
Autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance in language understanding and generation. However, their application in text embedding tasks has been relatively slow, along with the analysis of their semantic representation in probing tasks, due to the constraints of the unidirectional attention mechanism. This paper aims to explore whether such constraints can be overcome by enabling bidirectional attention in LLMs. We tested different variants of the Llama architecture through additional training steps, progressively enabling bidirectional attention and unsupervised/supervised contrastive learning.