The disclosed embodiments provide a system for processing data. During operation, the system performs processing related to a first set of features for a first entity using a first series of embedding layers, wherein the processing includes applying each embedding layer in the first series of embedding layers to a concatenation of all outputs of one or more layers preceding the embedding layer. Next, the system obtains a first embedding as an output of a first final layer in the first series of embedding layers. The system then outputs the first embedding for use by a machine learning model.