ReasonEmbed: Enhanced Text Embeddings for Reasoning-Intensive Document Retrieval

Jianlyu Chen, Junwei Lan, Chaofan Li, Defu Lian, Zheng Liu


Abstract
In this paper, we introduce **ReasonEmbed**, a novel text embedding model developed for reasoning-intensive document retrieval. Our work includes three key technical contributions. First, we propose **ReMixer**, a new data synthesis method that overcomes the triviality problem prevalent in previous synthetic datasets, enabling large-scale production of 82K high-quality training samples. Second, we design **Redapter**, a self-adaptive learning algorithm that dynamically adjusts training each sample’s weight based on its reasoning intensity. This allows the model to effectively capture the complex semantic relationships between queries and documents. Third, we implement ReasonEmbed across multiple backbones of varying sizes, all of which achieve **superior performance** on reasoning-intensive retrieval tasks. Notably, our ReasonEmbed-Qwen3-8B model offers a record-high nDCG@10 score of 38.1 on the BRIGHT benchmark, which significantly outperforms existing text embedding models. We will fully open-source our created resource in ReasonEmbed to push forward the research advancement in this field.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.54
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1203–1221
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.54/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jianlyu Chen, Junwei Lan, Chaofan Li, Defu Lian, and Zheng Liu. 2026. ReasonEmbed: Enhanced Text Embeddings for Reasoning-Intensive Document Retrieval. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1203–1221, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ReasonEmbed: Enhanced Text Embeddings for Reasoning-Intensive Document Retrieval (Chen et al., ACL 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.54.pdf
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