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Reducing the footprint of multi-vector retrieval with minimal per- formance impact via token pooling.arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.14683

7 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

7 Pith papers citing it
abstract

Over the last few years, multi-vector retrieval methods, spearheaded by ColBERT, have become an increasingly popular approach to Neural IR. By storing representations at the token level rather than at the document level, these methods have demonstrated very strong retrieval performance, especially in out-of-domain settings. However, the storage and memory requirements necessary to store the large number of associated vectors remain an important drawback, hindering practical adoption. In this paper, we introduce a simple clustering-based token pooling approach to aggressively reduce the number of vectors that need to be stored. This method can reduce the space & memory footprint of ColBERT indexes by 50% with virtually no retrieval performance degradation. This method also allows for further reductions, reducing the vector count by 66%-to-75% , with degradation remaining below 5% on a vast majority of datasets. Importantly, this approach requires no architectural change nor query-time processing, and can be used as a simple drop-in during indexation with any ColBERT-like model.

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2026 7

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representative citing papers

CMDR: Contextual Multimodal Document Retrieval

cs.IR · 2026-07-07 · conditional · novelty 6.0

A contextual multimodal document retrieval benchmark (CMDR-Bench) and embedding model (CMDR-Embed) that jointly encodes multiple document pages and splits them into page-level representations, trained with a context-aware contrastive objective, outperforming non-contextual baselines by 13–16 nDCG@5.

A Replicability Study of XTR

cs.IR · 2026-05-01 · accept · novelty 6.0

XTR training does not improve retrieval effectiveness over ColBERT but enhances IVF engine efficiency by flattening token scores to produce more discriminative centroids.

LEMUR: Learned Multi-Vector Retrieval

cs.IR · 2026-01-29 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

LEMUR accelerates multi-vector retrieval by learning a neural network approximation to MaxSim and reducing it to single-vector search in latent space.

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Showing 7 of 7 citing papers.