Robustness Risk of Conversational Retrieval: Identifying and Mitigating Noise Sensitivity in Qwen3-Embedding Model

Researchers identified a critical robustness vulnerability in Qwen3-embedding models for conversational retrieval, where structured dialogue noise becomes disproportionately retrievable and contaminates search results. The problem remains invisible under standard benchmarks but is significantly more pronounced in Qwen3 than competing models, though lightweight query prompting effectively mitigates it.