sbert-pooling-ablation-mean-best
IN premise — summaries/2026/08/24/reimers-2019-sentence-bert-s5-evaluation-senteval.md
Created 2026-08-25T02:58:29+00:00
Pooling ablation on STSb with NLI classification: MEAN (80.78) > CLS (79.80) > MAX (79.07).
Summary
When combining token-level NLI predictions into a single sentence-level score, simple averaging of all tokens works better than relying on a dedicated classification token or taking the maximum value. This matters for system design because it tells you the safest default pooling strategy is mean, and it slightly undercuts the common assumption that a [CLS] token is the best single summary of a sequence.