Disentangled Contrastive Learning Enhances Zero-Shot Multilingual Dense Retrieval

_reachsumit · x · 2026-08-04

The Challenge: Multilingual dense retrieval struggles with robust transfer to low-resource languages lacking annotated data. Existing methods often entangle semantic and linguistic features, interfering with semantic relevance optimization.

The Solution: The paper proposes a Disentangled Contrastive Learning (DCL) method that separates multilingual sentence representations into semantic and linguistic subspaces.

Technical Details:

Results: By jointly optimizing with the retrieval objective, DCL reduces language-induced interference in semantic matching, facilitating stable zero-shot transfer from English supervision to multiple languages.

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