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EmbedDistill: A Geometric Knowledge Distillation for Information Retrieval

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arxiv 2301.12005 v2 pith:ZGNGGPEP submitted 2023-01-27 cs.LG

EmbedDistill: A Geometric Knowledge Distillation for Information Retrieval

classification cs.LG
keywords modelsteacherdistillationapproachstudentanalysisasymmetricdata
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Large neural models (such as Transformers) achieve state-of-the-art performance for information retrieval (IR). In this paper, we aim to improve distillation methods that pave the way for the resource-efficient deployment of such models in practice. Inspired by our theoretical analysis of the teacher-student generalization gap for IR models, we propose a novel distillation approach that leverages the relative geometry among queries and documents learned by the large teacher model. Unlike existing teacher score-based distillation methods, our proposed approach employs embedding matching tasks to provide a stronger signal to align the representations of the teacher and student models. In addition, it utilizes query generation to explore the data manifold to reduce the discrepancies between the student and the teacher where training data is sparse. Furthermore, our analysis also motivates novel asymmetric architectures for student models which realizes better embedding alignment without increasing online inference cost. On standard benchmarks like MSMARCO, we show that our approach successfully distills from both dual-encoder (DE) and cross-encoder (CE) teacher models to 1/10th size asymmetric students that can retain 95-97% of the teacher performance.

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. DenseOn with the LateOn: Fully Open Dense and Late-Interaction Models for Multilingual, Long-Context, and Code Search

    cs.CL 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.0

    Openly trained late-interaction retrieval models transfer to unseen languages and scripts far better than dense models under identical translate-train data.

  2. DenseOn with the LateOn: Fully Open Dense and Late-Interaction Models for Multilingual, Long-Context, and Code Search

    cs.CL 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    With matched open data and backbones, ColBERT-style late interaction turns English translate-train into multilingual generalization, while dense retrieval stays mostly inside the translated languages.

  3. EmbeddingGemma: Powerful and Lightweight Text Representations

    cs.CL 2025-09 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    A 300M-parameter open embedding model sets new SOTA on MTEB for its size class and matches models twice as large while staying effective when compressed.

  4. Score-Only Distillation for Compact Dense Retrieval

    cs.IR 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.0

    Score-only distillation with a row-centered all-pairs PairMSE objective lets 0.6B bi-encoders recover up to 50% of the base-to-teacher retrieval gap under matched protocols.

  5. Beyond Hard Negatives: The Importance of Score Distribution in Knowledge Distillation for Dense Retrieval

    cs.IR 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Stratified sampling preserving teacher score distribution outperforms hard-negative mining as a robust baseline for knowledge distillation in dense retrieval.

  6. jina-embeddings-v5-text: Task-Targeted Embedding Distillation

    cs.CL 2026-02 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    A distillation-plus-task-contrastive training regimen yields compact embedding models that match or exceed state-of-the-art performance for their size while supporting 32k-token contexts and quantization.