2025.acl-short.57@ACL

Total: 1

#1 Decoder-Only LLMs can be Masked Auto-Encoders [PDF3] [Copy] [Kimi2] [REL]

Authors: Dan Qiao, Yuan Gao, Zheming Yang, Di Yang, Ziheng Wu, Pengcheng Lu, Minghui Qiu, Juntao Li, Min Zhang

Modern NLP workflows (e.g., RAG systems) require different models for generation and embedding tasks, where bidirectional pre-trained encoders and decoder-only Large Language Models (LLMs) dominate respective tasks. Structural differences between models result in extra development costs and limit knowledge sharing between tasks. In this work, we present UniMAE, a novel unsupervised training method that transforms an Decoder-Only LLM into a Uni-Directional Masked Auto-Encoder. UniMAE compresses high-quality semantic information into the [EOS] embedding while preserving the generation capabilities of LLMs. Comprehensive evaluations across 56 MTEB datasets demonstrate that UniMAE can achieve state-of-the-art results under unsupervised settings with merely 100 training steps, establishing the first effective approach to unifying generation and representation learning in decoder-only architectures.

Subject: ACL.2025 - Short Papers