Yalda-Embedding: Open Development of a Competitive Persian Retrieval Model

arXiv:2610.32933v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite advances in multilingual text representations, effective dense retrieval for Persian remains constrained by the limited availability of language-specific training resources and compact embedding models. We present Yalda Embedding, a 595.8-million-parameter Persian retrieval model adapted from Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B using more than one million query-document pairs. On eight Persian retrieval tasks from FaMTEB, the model achieves the highest macro-average among the evaluated 0.6B models, scoring 0.5488 and outperforming Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B and F2LLM-v2-0.6B on every task. It also approaches Qwen3-Embedding-4B, winning on four tasks, tying on one, and trailing by 0.0075 in macro-average. An incremental ablation study examines contrastive batch size, optimization stabilization, and relational knowledge distillation from F2LLM-v2-8B. Under the one-epoch training setup, contrastive fine-tuning alone yields a modest mean improvement over initialization and regressions on two tasks. The final distilled configuration improves all eight tasks over the non-distilled model, raising the mean from 0.4813 to 0.5488 without increasing inference-time model size. These gains include hard-negative evaluation tasks despite training without explicitly mined or supplied hard negatives. We release model weights, training and evaluation code, the pairwise dataset, and its teacher-embedded counterpart, enabling inspection of data composition and training procedures, independent evaluation, and reuse without repeating expensive teacher inference.