# Contextual Embeddings Beyond the Gold Chunk

**Authors:** Sedigheh Eslami, Markus Krimmel, William Barber, Antoine Chaffin, Maximilian Schall, Jonas Golde, Louis Milliken, Ekaterina Glazkova, Denis Bykov, Bo Wang  
**Published:** 28 Oct 2026  
**Links:** [arXiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38854) · [PDF](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.38854) · [This page](https://omen-bit.github.io/ai-paper-daily/paper/2610.38854.html)

## Abstract

Contextual embeddings represent chunks of a document with respect to the document's global context. These models are typically trained and evaluated under the assumption that a relevant document contains only a single relevant chunk. In this work, we argue that in real-world use cases a retriever should not only find answers spread over several chunks but also surface the evidence needed to verify them. To address this, we introduce pplx-embed-v2-context, a family of contextual embedding models trained by distilling graded chunk-level relevance from a query-aware context compression model. This removes the need for gold-chunk labels and makes the training targets independent of the chunking. We utilize a vision-language backbone for training and release pplx-embed-v2-context in 9B and 0.6B sizes with compatible embedding spaces. On the evaluation side, we introduce two benchmarks that label both the chunks that answer a query and the evidence needed to verify the answer. Context-bench is a controlled diagnostic, and Q2D-Chunk is built from real-world search queries. To encourage further research, we also publish Q2D-Chunk as a public leaderboard. Our 9B model sets a new state of the art on both benchmarks and ConTEB. We find that the visual retrieval capabilities of our 9B model transfer from its vision-language base model and propose to extend chunking to image inputs. We demonstrate that our models achieve state-of-the-art performance among dense retrievers on visual ViDoRe-V3 and that performance improves with granular image chunking.

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