Update README.md

README.md

@@ -183,6 +183,22 @@ print(similarity)
 #        dtype=torch.bfloat16, grad_fn=<MmBackward0>)
 ```
 
+### Prompts
+
+The model supports custom instructions in the following format:
+
+```text
+Instruct: your_instruction
+Query:
+```
+
+In general, for retrieval and reranking tasks:
+
+- use the prompt for queries
+- do not prepend the prompt to documents/passages
+
+For symmetric tasks such as STS, clustering, and bitext mining, you can encode the documents either with or without prompts. The model is trained to support both scenarios.
+
 ## Intermediate Checkpoints
 
 To facilitate future research, we release intermediate checkpoints in the `intermediate_checkpoints` branch.