Saidzoda-Kazakh-EmbeddingGemma-300M: How Far One Epoch of Generated Questions Takes a Small Kazakh Embedder

EmbeddingGemma-300M is a small open embedder, and used as released it finds the right passage first for 60.8% of the Kazakh Belebele retrieval questions. We present Saidzoda-Kazakh-EmbeddingGemma-300M, the same model fully fine-tuned for one epoch on 208,511 pairs: 166,263 Kazakh questions that our own language model wrote about source passages from encyclopedias, Wikipedia, news and books, each checked by a second model, plus English and Russian replay. On Kazakh Belebele, recall@1 rises from 60.8% to 78.0% and recall@10 from 76.3% to 91.4%. Our model scores above 161 of the 194 models with a published MTEB score on the same test, among them OpenAI text-embedding-3-large (47.1%). The other 33 score higher: the ten best are large multi-billion-parameter or closed models, reaching up to 92.2%, and at least 9 are open models of up to 0.6B parameters, the smallest with 339M. We also scored 6 Kazakh-specific embedders shared on Hugging Face with the same code in one run: our model (77.3% there) is ahead of 4 of them, including the two E5-base models of similar size (72.6% and 69.0%), and behind kaz-embedder (86.0%, three towers with 1,695M parameters in total) and a BGE-M3 fine-tune (81.0%); at recall@10 its interval overlaps those of its nearest neighbours on both sides. Our four-language model, trained with a capped share of the same Kazakh pairs, is 2.8 points lower at recall@1, with overlapping recall@10 intervals. The Kazakh model also scores higher than the released model on the Uzbek and Kyrgyz versions of Belebele, but our Tajik model, trained without any Turkic pairs, gains as much there, so these gains are not specific to Kazakh training. Our Kazakh Wikipedia test questions come from the same generator family as the training questions, so we rest the main claims on Belebele.