PTEB: Towards Robust Text Embedding Evaluation via Stochastic Paraphrasing at Evaluation Time with LLMs

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Abstract

Current sentence embedding evaluations typically rely on static test beds like the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB). While invaluable, repeated tuning on a fixed suite can inflate reported scores and obscure real-world robustness. We introduce the Paraphrasing Text Embedding Benchmark (PTEB), a dynamic protocol that stochastically generates meaning-preserving paraphrases at evaluation time and aggregates results across multiple runs. Using a cost-efficient LLM-based method grounded in gold ratings and human validation, we show that LLMs generate token-diverse but semantically preserving paraphrases. Across 7 MTEB tasks, we validate our hypothesis that the performance of sentence encoders is sensitive to changes in token space even when semantics remain fixed. We also observe that smaller models are not disproportionately affected relative to larger ones. Our results are statistically robust over multiple runs spanning 20 datasets and 25 languages. More generally, we aim to propose a new evaluation paradigm in NLP that relies less on static, pre-defined benchmarks but shifts towards dynamic, stochastic evaluation leveraging eval-time compute. We make the code to run PTEB publicly available.